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By Brian Duff  The most significant contributing factor to creating a solid prepping plan is mindset. Having a proper mindset is the initial requirement to overcome any challenge. Admitting that you need to be better prepared is the first step towards proper prepping plans. Since you’re reading this, it’s probably safe to assume you’ve admitted your needs, or are almost there.
Identify Your Risks Now that you have your mindset taken care of, you’ll want to identify your risks. Your risks may include child safety, home security, a large-scale long duration event that shakes society as we know it, or anything in between. Regardless of what you determine your risks to be, your next step should be ranking them by likelihood. In other words, evaluate your risks from the viewpoint of which is most likely to occur. Once you have the likelihood of risks ranked, you will need to rate them by their impact, should they happen. By identifying, ranking and rating your risks, you will be able to deal with them logically and efficiently. Plan Your Preparedness Once you’ve synthesized your risks, you can begin planning your courses of action to achieve your risk-related goals. Ultimately, your goal should be to completely eliminate risk, or at the very least minimize it as much as possible. If for example, you live in a flood plain, you may not be able to stop a flood. However, should you elevate your home, you may be able to minimize the impact of a flood. When planning to minimize or eliminate a risk, you should do so utilizing the backwards planning method. In this method, you will start at the ultimate goal of eliminating or minimizing risk. With that goal in mind, you will identify everything possible to achieve that goal. In the example of a house on the flood plain, you may include elevating the home, installing a dike system, or creating a plan to evacuate or move valuables to a higher location, or evacuate them. Regardless of the course of action, all should lead to improved preparedness by working to minimize the risk. Decide Upon a Course of Action With your risk mitigation plan in place, you can then evaluate which are the most achievable and effective actions possible. A chief consideration will be to decide which are most time and resource efficient. After all, there are only so many hours in the day and so many dollars in the bank account to achieve your goals with. Determining which courses of action are achievable and effective is not a complex matter. For example, you may not have the resources to raise your home or to install a dike system around it. While those actions may be unattainable, you can plan for the moving and for the evacuation of your family and its heirlooms. How Do You Eat the Prepping Plan Elephant? I know, all of this can be intimidating. How do you plan for and address all of your risks? That’s simple: do the best you can and take it one bite at a time. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will your preps be completed in a day. Have patience, formulate the plan, and work the plan. Let’s assume that your course of action is to become self-sustaining for one month. That is, you and your family will be set to survive without any outside resources for 30 days. To achieve that goal, determine your two greatest concerns: having a month’s supply of food and water. Should you take the time to buy and store a months’ worth of food with no consideration for water? No, because you need both water and food to survive. So what should you do? The answer is to build your preps in tandem with one another. Rather than holding back on other preps until one is completed, take small bites out of them both simultaneously. This will provide you with an increasing, but constantly improving, level of preparedness. Improve Your Confidence By successfully completing your smaller, more immediate goals, you will find that you attain regular wins. These more frequent wins will build your confidence and reinforce that you are moving in the right preparedness direction. Additionally, they will allow you to become prepared more quickly to deal with the more likely short-term scenarios, should they occur. Therefore, while you are creating a prepping plan for a 30-day event, you may find yourself ready should a seven-day event happen. In my opinion, that’s pretty awesome and makes you a lot more prepared than most people. Lastly, never forget, you’re just one prep away… If you have any other information, suggestions, or thoughts about planning, please leave a comment below. Stay safe, secure and prepared.
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