Discernment - The Third Competency

“The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.” ~ David Bohm

The third competency, discernment, has its roots in a specific Buddhist tradition that involves mindfulness and is oriented around four levels of awareness .  It is essentially a way of understanding how our perceptions of the events in life actually conspire and are structured to impact what it is that we’re trying to do. The four levels of awareness are:

• Non-distinction
• Distinction
• Evaluation
• Judgment

The base level is judgment. When I'm looking at understanding the competency of discernment, one way that I can look at life is through the filter, or the lens of judgment. This entails seeing things and reacting to my world as if there is either a right or a wrong, or a good and bad in play. It's pretty black and white. As the word judgment would imply there is a values assessment that is made that comes back to right, wrong, good, or bad. Judgment is always used as a way of validating an existing belief system. In the extreme this can be paralyzing as well as exclusionary as there is a polarizing dynamic inherent in judgment. Obviously judgment can be useful as a values clarification tool and as a guidance mechanism for behavior. And, it's important to understand that it’s a first level position.

The second level is evaluation. Evaluation is a little different from judgment in the sense that it's about orienting my world and life views so that I look for value. It's not that I'm looking with the intent of determining whether something is consistent with my beliefs and is therefore good, bad, right, or wrong. Rather, I'm looking for the value in the event. The way I'm defining value is; in what ways can what I'm viewing be utilized? I'm looking for how it can be of value, how it can be useful and of service to something that, ideally, I've identified as being meaningful for me to participate in. The second question that accompanies evaluation is focused on my intended response to an event. Is what I'm about to do generative?  The question is about not whether it’s good or bad, right or wrong but rather is it adding value or taking value away from what it is that I'm trying to have happen – both for myself and for others. There’s a quality to evaluation that is very different from judgment, it's got a much wider spectrum to it that is far more enabling.

Then we move to the third level which is distinction. Distinction is the process of suspending both judgment and evaluation and just observing and noticing life’s events and contents without assigning meaning to them. It's literally an observational state that puts me in the position of actually being a neutral observer. Being in such a neutral position so as to notice distinctions without judgment or evaluation is a practice that expands my overall awareness. The value in this is that an increase in awareness increases my choice making capacity. I am now in a position that, from a resource and capacity standpoint (there are more choices) and from a competency standpoint, literally frees me up to potentially make different kinds of choices than I’ve made before.

The last level is non-distinction. I’ll link this back to the Buddhist conversation around enlightenment. Non-distinction is where I'm approaching all things with a sense of unity and oneness, I and it are not separate. So we don't generally go into a lot of conversation about this with our clients as attaining this level is often a lifetime’s (maybe more) pursuit. And, it is an extremely exalted level of viewing the way the world is structured.

When working with our clients from a competency building standpoint our focus is on the areas of evaluation and distinction. By developing the practice of learning how to evaluate effectively and being able to move into an observational orientation that allows for noticing distinctions that  they haven't been previously aware they are better positioned to have access to resources that weren't noticed before. Starting over becomes a process of developing those underutilized resources. This is about intentionality and mindfulness.

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