Safety First

"Safety First" was Mom's constant reminder to my girls (and to me growing up).  Her rules were consistent with this reminder (e.g. no backyard tackle football).  I've been working on a Visage Spotlight (my eighth time in the hopper) and part of the presentation is on risk.  More importantly how do you measure your individual risk?

"Risk issues are emotional.  They are contentious. Disagreement is often deep and fierce. This is not surprising, given how we perceive and respond to risk is, at its core, about nothing less than survival"  (Risk- A practical guide for deciding what's really safe and what's really dangerous in the World around you, by David Ropeik and George Gray). 

So how YOU perceive risk and decisions are in the context of your own life.  Even with probabilities across events and populations with various consequences and outcome (costs and benefits), the risk statistics  can't answer the question  - YOUR risk is specific to YOU.

Judgments about risk are based both on the facts and on how we feel about those facts using the head, heart, cortex  and gut. "We are Affective"  (How Risky is It, Really by David Ropeik). 

My preliminary conclusion"

If you are not risking something .......

                                                              you are not living.