In the American south, there is a common biblical expression called “eat the meat, and leave the bones”. The meaning of this expression can be summarised as this, always retain the ability of discernment, but do not allow the perception of discernment to prevent you from benefiting from good truths, experiences, and relationships.
Discernment is a powerful tool. When wielded righteously, discernment has the ability to protect one from devastating consequences. When we meet someone who runs a business that has a history of defrauding customers, discernment tells us that the individual in question may not make a quality friend. When we are purchasing an important item from Amazon, discernment cautions us from buying certain items that have a bounty of negative reviews. However, despite these benefits, discernment can also prevent us from pursuing opportunities that could prove beneficial for our lives.
Let’s use our Amazon example again. Let’s say that you are looking for an item, and come across something that you really like. You go to the reviews and see that the majority of the product’s customers have like the item. However, as you scroll, you come across a negative review. The negative reviewer leaves a scathing statement that is accompanied with pictures. Despite all of the positive reviews, you decide that you do not want to risk buying the item and move on to a different selection. In this case, you feel righteous in your decision to move to a different product and from the outside reality supports your decision. However, when taking a deeper looking at your decision process, it becomes evident that discernment may have just robbed you of getting access to a product that would have satisfied your needs.
This example can also be applied to the individual process of manifesting the life we desire. Our natural human tendency to practice strict discernment, leads us to cheating ourselves out of valuable opportunity. In this instance, discernment transitions to deprecating doubt. This transition is the doom to any chance of pivoting one’s life to change and reinvention.
You want to lose 50 pounds through a low carb diet, but you come across a news article that says that a significant number of people that attempt low carbs diets fail. So, in the guise of discernment, you decide that maybe a diet change isn’t for you and continue the eating patterns that have led to you to needing to lose 50 pounds.
After accruing thousands of dollars in savings, you genuinely muse over the idea of starting a business. However, you read a business book that tells you that the majority of people in your age range that start a business fail. So, you decide that maybe your savings are best utilized elsewhere and leave the dream of starting your own business behind.
In all of these instances, it is understandable why choosing the path of least resistance makes the most strategic sense. The process of discernment, rightly, tells us to logically weigh all variables when making a decision. In fact, this is what makes discernment powerful in the first place. It forces us to slow down and logically process our next steps, leaving more room for us to avoid unnecessarily disadvantageous scenarios.
However, this is why using discernment alone is not enough to ensure that we are making the best decisions for our lives. In combination with discernment, we must also be willing to practice intelligent risk taking.
Intelligent risk taking is the process of learning the risks of a new endeavor or experience (discernment), why also taking full stock of the benefits of said endeavor. Think of this as a form of cost/benefit analysis. With this process of thinking, when your benefit analysis outweighs or breaks even with your risk analysis, it is almost always beneficial to take the risk. As a result, intelligent risk taking, allows us to mitigate the overly cautious thinking trap that discernment can place us in.
So, here are some articles to get you started with balancing discernment and intelligent risk taking:
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