Using Peer Pressure To Prepare For Real Life Disaster Scenarios—Should You Do It?
While peer pressure is often associated with having a negative impact, it can be helpful when training—especially for real life disaster scenarios. As long as clear expectations have been set within your group and this added stressors is meant to support and encourage one another, this could be the missing element for building your confidence with the skill sets to follow.
Stress Induced Training is used to assist trainees in a variety of areas with developing techniques to maintain adequate performance in very stressful situations, where multiple demands, time pressure, and other external stressors such as peer pressure may degrade performance. Along with the training of specific cognitive and physiological control strategies, stress exposure training also emphasizes the benefits of being desensitized to stressful situations by gradual exposure to increasing levels of external stressors.
Whether you join a training group or get your own group of friends together, here are three reasons why more is merrier when training for a real life scenario.
Physiological Changes
When you know you’re being watched and evaluated, the pressure to perform can get to your head. This has the power to induce physiological changes such as anxiety and heart rate fluctuations that would occur during a real life disaster scenario. This can be a highly beneficial training tactic that allows you to mentally and physically prepare yourself from an instinctual level.
Peer Pressure Can Turn Into Peer Support
Given you are around individuals who are looking to encourage one another throughout this experience, this can be a great opportunity to learn from others who want to help you improve your skill level and confidence if you’re stuck within a task.
Accountability
Accountability is crucial in any training environment because it takes consistency for people to reach their skill set goals. We have a natural inclination to revert into bad habits and complacency. If we don’t work accountability into our goal setting program, it's all too easy to fail ourselves without realizing it. On the other hand, if we do work accountability into our routine, then achieving goals can become a habit and ultimately a lifestyle.
Most of us don’t realize the dumb mistakes we would actually make when we run through different scenarios in our minds. But when you’re actually faced with a dangerous scenario with your blood pumping, your hands shaking, your mind racing, and an infinite number of unexpected factors coming into play, a single mistake can make the difference between life and death. In training, we can simulate these scenarios and force all these potential problems to the surface so that when a real life scenario comes, we’ve already fleshed out the mistakes in training, discussed and analyzed them, and rehearsed more appropriate responses.
It's a lot better to feel the sting of an embarrassing mistake in training than the gut wrenching realization you just made the wrong choice in a situation that might end your life.
