As a species we are hard wired to do threat assessment in our day to day lives. We do many forms of threat assessment without recognizing it as such. You do it when you are changing lanes, or commenting on your wife’s outfit or even when you take that first sip of hot coffee. How dangerous is this thing I am about to do?
There is something that we need to be good at threat assessment. I am going to call it Danger Awareness. If you are not aware of some impending danger then you will have no way to correctly assess your threat level. One example of not having danger awareness is when you are in a car and you don’t check your blind spot before merging or changing lanes. I am going to refer to it this way when I discuss danger awareness on the Internet. When you change lanes and a car is in your blind spot it can end very badly, the same is true when you use the Internet without being aware of what is waiting for you.
To really be able to do a true threat assessment you must be aware of all of the dangers (or as many as humanly possible as there are more than enough to keep us all busy for many life times) and then build a plan to help you avoid the dangers that you are aware of and even some you may not be.
