There is not a single situation in your life that will not be significantly improved by more discernment and more stillness.
This is a daily invitation to grant yourself permission to drop all your other nagging ‘Musts’ and ‘Shoulds’ about self-improvement, personal development and living a virtuous life. Just choose this one thing and sit with it today.
Just Be Like This Today: “Today I am Discerning.”
Danger Exists, and it is something we want to be aware of. Injury is real, and it is something we want to avoid. Loss is a reality of Life and Violation is an unfortunate reality of our culture of perpetual competition.
We all know that we fall prey to logical fallacy and cognitive bias. The real challenge is that we don’t know when we’re doing it, and we have no automatic process of bringing our discernment or our critical thinking back online when we most need it.
In communication and engagement with each other, tone can be misread, Context is easily missed and lost, and we are all trying to be as present as possible, while multi-tasking. We are all making these kinds of mistakes all the time.
Everyone makes mistakes. That’s not the concern. The problem is how much bandwidth of energy and attention we waste, how many cycles we burn caught up in ‘story’, overreacting and creating avoidable drama for ourselves, which then takes more bandwidth, and more energy and attention to process and resolve.
Fear is not Danger. We want to avoid danger, but treating Fear like Danger is just about the heart of all our avoidable stress, anger and anxiety. How do we ever grow and expand if we cannot face our fears? And how do we do that if we cannot tell the difference? Similarly, Pain is not Injury. We want to avoid injury, but pain is the cost of growth. Discomfort is not Loss or Violation. Being unable to tell them apart, is what makes it so hard for us to face discomfort, and discomfort is where our real growth and transformation happens.
SO WHAT IS HAPPENING?
How is it that we can get this so wrong? The short answer is Distortion!
Our nervous systems are good at picking up signals and passing them on, leaving the neural pathways and brain pathways to work out what to do with those signals. Every signal, like a radio signal has Energy and Message, and a Timing component. Distortion means that we can pick up the Energy of a signal and misread the Message. This is what we call ‘Emergency’. Or we can misread the Timing. This is what we call ‘Urgency’.
This is why stillness matters so much. When we aren’t still, we aren’t clear, and our nervous systems pick up the energy, without really understanding the message of the moment, or we get confused about the sense of urgency that would be appropriate.
GAME CHANGER
Danger is a spectrum. The same goes for Injury and Loss.
“The nature of Adventure is Risk” and risk is the name for the possibility of Danger, Injury or Loss you are prepared to face, in order to expand or some other meaningful return.
We have to choose even a little danger, a little risk of injury or loss if we ever hope to grow and overcome our current limits. Our current limits are not our permanent limitations. And if we are truly living a growth mindset, we need to make sure our discernment is dialled in, otherwise, we either invite too much risk—or not enough. This is a Goldilocks type of thing and to thread the needle, we need better discernment.
BENEFITS OF IMPROVED DISCERNMENT
Discernment developed in one area expands the consciousness in all areas. This means that the more discernment we have, the more appreciation we can have for life, the quicker we can learn new things and integrate them and the better we will be at problem-solving, leadership and conflict resolution.