While heartbreak is the early step on the path to equanimity, fear is the stumbling block leading to the sin of inaction. Fearing the dark rides of the Coney Island of the mind, we choose not to act. Fearing Paris, we stay close to home. Fearing broken skis, failed businesses, and the scars that come from skinned knees, we stay small—listening more to our Loyal Soldier’s fear-filled and protective whispered warnings than to the quickening thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump of a heart that knows how it’s meant to be.

Chapter Six: Contexts and Consequences

“A key takeaway from the Electric Maze exercise is have fun experimenting when the stakes are low. Gaining experience with failures in a low-stakes environment helps to stave off perfectionism. You can learn to stop to consider whether the stakes are high. Just as we spontaneously underestimate uncertainty, we spontaneously overestimate what’s at stake. For most of us, appearing on national television would qualify as high stakes.

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?

Safeguard Strategy 1: Prevention

You can use the principles behind HALT as a safeguard for decision-making in general. If you have an important decision to make, ask yourself: “Am I hungry? Am I angry or otherwise emotional? Am I lonely or otherwise stressed by my circumstances, such as being in an unfamiliar environment or pressed for time? Am I tired, sleep-deprived, or physically fatigued?” If the answer is yes to any of these questions, avoid making the decision if you can. Wait for a more opportune time. Otherwise, your defaults will take over.

It’s easy to underestimate the role ease plays in decision-making. Since behaviour follows the path of least resistance, a surprisingly successful approach is to add friction where you find yourself doing things you don’t want to do.