The better, more subtle interpretation is that failure is a manifestation of learning and exploration. If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it. And, for leaders especially, this strategy - trying to avoid failure by out-thinking it - dooms you to fail. As Andrew puts it, “Moving things forward allows the team you are leading to feel like, ‘Oh, I’m on a boat that is actually going towards land.’ As opposed to having a leader who says, ‘I’m still not sure. I’m going to look at the map a little bit more, and we’re just going to float here, and all of you stop rowing until I figure this out.’ And then weeks go by, and morale plummets, and failure becomes self-fulfilling. People begin to treat the captain with doubt and trepidation. Even if their doubts aren’t fully justified, you’ve become what they see you as because of your inability to move.

We are saddled with what psychologists call prepared fears. These include fears of dangerous animals, loud noises, and sudden movements. To this list of prepared fears add that of being expelled by the tribe. University of Virginia professor James “Jim” Detert and I consider being rejected by a group as a survival-based prepared fear. The risk of coming up short in the eyes of an authority such as one’s boss triggers a prepared fear in the brain related to being expelled from the tribe, a reality that might long ago have resulted in death from exposure or starvation. But today when we’re afraid to speak up about failure, our colleagues lose valuable opportunities to learn vicariously. Also, we miss out on opportunities to avoid preventable failures. Meanwhile, distracted by irrational prepared fears, we miss signals of longer-term peril that require slower thinking but constitute true threats to survival, such as the impact of climate change on food supplies and sea levels. Fast, automatic low road processing feeds the confirmation bias, encourages complacency, and hides failure’s useful lessons. Slow high road processing happens when we stop to question the automatic to wonder what is happening and what it might mean. Most important, it happens when we stop to ask ourselves, How might I have contributed to the failure?

Getting into the habit of recoding the risk level in many of our activities, along with the stakes we incur in carrying them out, is a vital, life-enhancing capability. By cultivating this habit, we lighten the emotional load. We have more than enough situations in our lives where vigilance is essential; when it’s not, we can proceed in a more playful and lighthearted way—even when we’re doing things that are important to us (cooking, writing an essay, learning a new language). In consistent contexts with low stakes (folding the laundry, going for a run), a casual, business-as-usual approach is fine. Pausing to consider (or, more typically, reconsider) the stakes allows us to titrate vigilance, mitigating its emotional and cognitive tax.

Experts in almost any field take context into account habitually. The rest of us have to remind ourselves to do it. To practice situation awareness is to appreciate where you are right now, so you can adopt the right mindset for the context and the stakes. Perhaps you can think of a time at work when you tormented yourself with anxiety about whether you would succeed in a role or a project. I know I can. It happened many times while I was writing this book! Situation awareness allows you to take stock of where you are and proceed appropriately, sometimes to reduce unhelpful anxiety and other times to lower risk. It’s about developing the habit to pause and check—both for in-the-moment reactions and when planning some project or event—by asking yourself two essential questions: Where am I on the context spectrum? And what’s at stake?

There’s no substitute for practicing with the real thing, yet sandboxes can remove the downside of the mistakes you inevitably make when practicing. At the intelligence agency, we’d always practice and rehearse before an operation in an environment in which it was safe to fail. We treated the practice as if it were the operation itself; we’d do all the things we planned on doing during the operation and tried to predict and respond to all the things that could conceivably happen. If something didn’t go as planned, we would adapt. And sometimes we’d fail. Failing in that sandbox, though, provided a learning opportunity with few real-world consequences, whereas failing in a real operation could cost people their lives.