What Does This Moment Require of Me?
When the Next Right Step Is Not Obvious
By Deborah Stallings, MA, SHRM-SCP
On Christmas Eve 1971, seventeen-year-old Juliane Koepcke boarded LANSA Flight 508 in Lima, Peru, with her mother. They were traveling to Pucallpa to meet her father, a zoologist working at a research station in the Amazon rainforest. During the flight, the aircraft encountered a violent thunderstorm, was struck by lightning, and broke apart in midair. Juliane, still strapped into a row of seats, fell approximately 3,000 meters into the rainforest below. There were 92 people aboard the plane. Juliane was the only survivor.
When she regained consciousness, she was injured and alone beneath a rainforest canopy so dense that rescue aircraft could not easily see her. She did not know where she was, how far she was from civilization, or whether anyone would find her. She certainly did not have a map showing her how to get home. What she did have was knowledge. Having grown up around the rainforest with parents who were zoologists, Juliane remembered something her father had taught her: if she ever became lost in the jungle and could find moving water, she should follow it downstream. A stream would eventually connect with larger waterways, and waterways could lead to people.
So she began following the water.
For days, Juliane moved through the rainforest while injured, hungry, exhausted, and increasingly affected by infection. She had little food and no way of knowing whether the direction she had chosen would actually lead to rescue. Yet she continued downstream. Eventually, she came upon a boat and a shelter used by local lumber workers. When the men returned, they cared for her and helped her reach safety. Nearly eleven days after surviving an unimaginable fall into the Amazon, Juliane Koepcke had found her way out.
There are many ways to tell her extraordinary story. It is certainly a story of survival and courage. Knowledge, endurance, extraordinary circumstances, help from others, and what I would describe as extraordinary grace all played a role. Yet there is another element of her story that stays with me. Juliane did not know the entire way out of the rainforest. She knew what to do next. There is a meaningful difference between the two.
Most of us will never face anything remotely comparable to surviving a plane crash in the Amazon. Still, we know something about standing in circumstances where the entire way forward is not visible. It may be a difficult relationship, a business decision with no guaranteed outcome, a leadership challenge without a clean answer, an opportunity we want but are afraid to accept, or a conversation in which speaking carries a cost and remaining silent carries one too. Sometimes we find ourselves navigating illness, loss, transition, disappointment, conflict, or a calling we did not anticipate. We want someone to hand us a complete map and assure us that if we follow it precisely, everything will work out.
Life does not always give us the map. Sometimes it gives us enough information to recognize the next wise step.
“We do not need certainty about the entire journey to make a wise decision about the next step.”
— Deborah Stallings
When There Is No Map
I have spent much of my professional life working with leaders and organizations as they navigate situations where there is no single obvious answer. I have also lived long enough to personally encounter more than a few of those moments. I sometimes wish discernment operated like a mathematical equation. We could insert the facts, calculate the risks, add our experience, subtract our fears, pray about it, and wait for the correct answer to appear. If only facts, risks, experience, fear, and prayer could be arranged into a formula that always produced the correct answer. Life is rarely that orderly.
We may have incomplete information. Several choices may be reasonable. People we respect may look at the same circumstances and reach different conclusions. What worked beautifully five years ago may be completely wrong for the situation we are facing today. Sometimes protecting one value creates tension with another, and sometimes every available choice carries a consequence we would rather avoid.
Those situations can be particularly uncomfortable because many of us have learned to associate competence with knowing. Leaders are supposed to know. Parents are supposed to know. Experts are supposed to know. Experienced professionals are supposed to know. People of faith may even believe they should somehow know. When the answer is not immediately clear, we may begin questioning something much larger than the decision itself. Perhaps I am not ready. Maybe I am not a strong leader. I should have figured this out by now. Everyone else seems more certain than I am. Maybe my uncertainty is evidence that I am making a mistake. That is a story worth questioning.
Uncertainty and incompetence are not the same thing. There are certainly occasions when we do not know what to do because we have not prepared, listened, researched, or done the work. There are other occasions when we do not know because the situation itself is genuinely complex. Wisdom requires us to learn the difference.
“The goal is not to become someone who always knows what to do. It is to become someone who knows how to discern what the moment requires.”
— Deborah Stallings
The Wisdom Between the Notes
The more I have thought about discernment, the less it feels to me like following a compass and the more it feels like making music.
A skilled musician does not play every note with the same intensity. A conductor does not ask every instrument to enter at the same moment or remain at the same volume throughout a composition. There are places where the strings carry the melody and others where they quietly support something else. There are crescendos, changes in tempo, pauses, and rests. There are moments of tremendous power and moments when restraint creates the beauty.
Even silence has a purpose in music. A rest does not mean that the musician has forgotten what to play. The silence belongs to the composition.
Leadership can be much the same. There are moments when our voices are needed and others when our questions are more valuable. There are situations that require decisive action and others where acting too quickly would create unnecessary harm. Sometimes wisdom asks us to speak clearly. Sometimes it asks us to listen long enough to understand something we could not have understood while talking. Sometimes persistence is exactly what the moment requires, while in another situation, humility calls for recognizing that continuing on the same course is no longer wise.
The challenge is that most of us develop preferred ways of responding to life, and over time, we can begin to mistake those preferences for wisdom. We tell ourselves that decisive leaders act quickly, courageous people speak up, compassionate people accommodate others, strong people persist, and thoughtful people take their time. Any of those responses can be appropriate, but none of them is universally wise.
A person who speaks frequently is not necessarily courageous, just as a person who waits is not necessarily thoughtful. Persistence helps us endure, but wisdom helps us recognize when it is time to do something differently. Yielding may demonstrate humility, or it may reflect fear. Acting quickly can be decisive leadership, or it can be an attempt to escape the discomfort of uncertainty.
This is why discernment requires more than looking at the behavior itself. We have to become curious about what is driving it.
Sometimes we continue because courage requires endurance. At other times, we continue because we are afraid to admit that something is no longer working. Sometimes we wait because meaningful information is still missing; at other times, we wait because we are afraid to make the decision. We may speak because truth needs a voice, or because our ego cannot tolerate not having the last word. We may remain silent because listening is wise, or because we are afraid of what might happen if we say what needs to be said.
The action may look similar from the outside. Discernment asks us to look deeper.
“Leadership is not knowing when to be the loudest voice in the room. It is knowing when the moment requires your voice, your silence, your questions, or your action.”
— Deborah Stallings
The Courage We May Already Have
When I think about courage, I often think about the Cowardly Lion in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The Lion is convinced that courage is something he does not possess. He joins Dorothy on her journey to the Emerald City because he believes the Wizard can give him what is missing.
What makes his story so interesting is that the Lion repeatedly acts courageously before he ever reaches Oz. He faces frightening situations, protects others, and keeps moving despite being afraid. Yet he remains convinced that because he experiences fear, he cannot possibly be courageous. When he finally asks the Wizard for what he believes he lacks, the Wizard tells him, “True courage is in facing danger when you are afraid.”
The Lion spends much of the journey searching outside himself for something his own behavior has already demonstrated. I wonder how often we do the same thing.
We may tell ourselves that we are not courageous enough, ready enough, confident enough, experienced enough, or equipped enough to handle what lies ahead. We may believe we cannot navigate conflict, make a difficult decision, start again, or survive another disappointment. Yet if we looked carefully at the evidence of our own lives, we might discover that we have already done difficult things.
Most of us have survived something we once wondered whether we could survive. We have had conversations we were afraid to have, learned skills we once believed were beyond us, rebuilt after disappointments, walked into rooms before we felt completely ready, apologized when our pride wanted to defend us, advocated for someone, changed direction, or made decisions without knowing exactly how everything would turn out.
Courage is not always something waiting for us somewhere in the future. Sometimes our own history has already provided evidence of it.
That is one reason remembering matters so much within the Question. Remember. Move.™ framework. Question the Story™ invites us to examine the narrative we have accepted. Remember Who You Are asks us to look at the evidence our lives have already produced. Move with Courage invites us to act on what we discover rather than continue living from a story that was never or is no longer true.
Courage Has Roots
History can also become distorted when we tell stories about courage without telling the story of preparation. Many people learned a simplified version of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott. The familiar version portrays a tired seamstress who boarded a bus after work on December 1, 1955, and spontaneously decided that she was simply too tired to surrender her seat. The fuller history tells us much more.
Long before that December evening, Rosa Parks had been deeply engaged in civil rights work. She became secretary of the Montgomery, Alabama, branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1943. Her work included voter registration efforts, youth engagement, and efforts to pursue justice for Black people who had experienced violence and discrimination. Only months before her arrest, she had attended a workshop at the Highlander Folk School, where participants studied desegregation, leadership, and social change. The Library of Congress describes Parks as “mentally prepared for the moment” when she refused to surrender her seat.
Her courage on that bus did not suddenly appear from nowhere. It had roots in years of experience, conviction, preparation, community, values, the injustice she had witnessed, and decisions she had already made about what she believed. Rosa Parks later expressed an idea that speaks directly to discernment: “Knowing what must be done does away with fear.”
I do not interpret that to mean that courageous people never feel afraid. Rather, clarity can become more powerful than fear. Sometimes, discernment does not show us which choice will be easiest or safest. It shows us which choice most closely aligns with our core values, beliefs, and what we believe to be the wisest or right thing to do in that moment.
Discernment Is Not Certainty
Discernment and certainty are not the same thing, and confusing the two can keep us waiting for a level of assurance that life cannot always provide. Certainty wants to know exactly what will happen. Discernment asks us to consider what we know, what we value, what experience has taught us, what wise counsel is available, what our faith informs, and what the circumstances require, and then make the wisest response available to us. Certainty demands prediction; discernment requires wisdom.
That distinction matters because our pursuit of certainty can quietly become another Ferris wheel. We research a little more, replay the conversation one more time, ask one more person, compare another option, and wait for the moment when every doubt finally disappears. Sometimes, further reflection is wise because meaningful information is missing. At other times, we already have enough information, but we are hoping additional analysis will eliminate the possibility of regret. No amount of discernment, however, can make every consequential decision risk-free.
Research on wisdom helps illuminate why. Psychologist Igor Grossmann and his colleagues have studied what researchers describe as wise reasoning in everyday life. Their work points to qualities such as intellectual humility, awareness of the limits of our knowledge, the ability to consider perspectives beyond our own, and sensitivity to changing circumstances. Their research also suggests that people do not demonstrate wisdom at exactly the same level in every situation. Context matters.
That is an important reminder for experienced leaders. We can know a great deal and still need another perspective. We can understand the facts and still be too close to a situation to see it clearly. We can have good intentions and still overlook something important. We may even be correct about the information in front of us and wrong about the meaning we have assigned to it.
Discernment, therefore, asks us to hold two things at the same time: enough confidence to use what we know and enough humility to acknowledge what we do not.
Why “Trust Your Gut” Is Not Enough
We often hear people advise us to trust our gut. There are times when intuition can be enormously valuable, but I believe that advice deserves more examination than we sometimes give it.
Psychologist and decision researcher Gary Klein spent years studying how experienced professionals make consequential decisions in demanding environments. His work with fireground commanders and others demonstrated that experienced people can sometimes recognize patterns almost immediately because they have encountered similar situations many times before. They may not consciously compare ten different alternatives; their accumulated experience allows them to recognize important cues and quickly identify a workable course of action.
There is an important word in that explanation: experienced. Our instincts can reflect wisdom accumulated over years, but they can also be influenced by assumptions, biases, fear, old wounds, familiarity, ego, or a strong desire for a particular outcome. Something may feel familiar not because it is the same situation, but because some element of it reminds us of something that happened before. That is why our first instinct deserves our attention without automatically deserving unquestioned authority.
Discernment allows us to pause long enough to ask what we are reacting to, what evidence supports our conclusion, what evidence complicates it, and whether someone else can see something we cannot. Sometimes one of the most useful questions is also one of the simplest: If I were advising someone I cared about who was facing these same circumstances, what would I want that person to consider?
When Wisdom Requires a Different Response
One of the ideas I find most compelling in research on psychological flexibility is that healthy functioning is not simply about becoming better at persisting. It also involves knowing when changing our behavior is more consistent with what matters.
Todd Kashdan and Jonathan Rottenberg have described psychological flexibility as an important part of well-being because it enables people to adapt to changing circumstances rather than rigidly repeating the same response regardless of context. Related research in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy similarly emphasizes the capacity to remain present and to persist or change behavior in ways that serve meaningful values.
That has powerful implications for the stories we tell ourselves about strength. “Never quit” sounds courageous until remaining becomes destructive. “Always speak your truth” sounds empowering until speaking becomes an excuse not to listen. “Stand your ground” sounds principled until new information reveals that the ground beneath our position has changed. “Be patient” sounds wise until patience permits something harmful to continue indefinitely. “Give people another chance” sounds compassionate until repeated chances remove accountability. Even “trust yourself” can become limiting if self-trust means refusing to seek wise counsel.
Maturity may require a different question: What does this moment require of the person I am becoming? That question leaves room for courage and humility, action and restraint, perseverance and change. It asks us to respond to the situation that actually exists rather than automatically repeating the response that has become most familiar to us.
A Time to Speak and a Time to Be Silent
Scripture has never suggested that every season of life requires the same response. In Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, it tells us that there is “a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.” Among those contrasts is “a time to be silent and a time to speak.”
I find that verse increasingly meaningful because both responses can be right. Speaking may be the courageous choice in one situation, while silence may reflect wisdom in another. The challenge is discerning the moment.
That kind of discernment requires more than asking God to bless the decision we have already made. Sometimes prayer confirms what we are sensing. Sometimes it unsettles us. Sometimes prayer slows us down enough to recognize something we were rushing past, and sometimes it strengthens us to do something we have delayed because we were afraid.
James 1:5 tells us that if any of us lacks wisdom, we should ask God, who gives generously. I am struck that the verse invites us to seek wisdom, not certainty. Faith does not require us to pretend that we know what we do not know. Sometimes faith is what allows us to acknowledge uncertainty honestly and still move responsibly.
What Does This Look Like in Leadership?
The same principles become even more important when our decisions affect other people.
Ronald Heifetz and his colleagues have distinguished between technical problems and adaptive challenges. Technical problems may be difficult, but established expertise, procedures, or knowledge can generally address them. Adaptive challenges are different. They require learning, experimentation, new behaviors, changes in assumptions, and the ability to adjust as reality unfolds.
This distinction matters because leaders are often rewarded for appearing to have answers. A complicated situation enters the room, everyone turns toward the leader, and an unspoken expectation emerges: What are we going to do? That pressure can make certainty performative, but leadership is not theater. Pretending complexity is simple does not make us more competent.
Sometimes the strongest answer a leader can give is, “I do not know yet. We need more information.” In another situation, the leader may need to say, “We do not have every answer, but we have enough information to make the decision.” Wisdom may require hearing from the people closest to the issue, questioning whether an old approach still fits a new reality, inviting expertise into the room, or creating enough space for disagreement before deciding.
Consider the leader preparing to end a team member’s employment. Does the moment require decisive action, or has the employee never received sufficiently clear expectations, feedback, or an opportunity to improve? Consider an executive contemplating a major investment. Does the organization need courage to act, or is enthusiasm causing meaningful risks to be overlooked? A manager facing a conflict between two highly capable employees may need to intervene, coach, clarify expectations, or give the two adults enough room to resolve the disagreement themselves.
The same question applies to the business owner carrying responsibilities that others are capable of handling. Is perseverance still the leadership requirement, or does the next stage of growth now require delegation? What about the person sitting in a meeting who recognizes a risk no one else has mentioned? Does wisdom require holding the thought for a few more minutes while others work through the issue, or is this precisely the moment that person’s voice is needed?
There is no universal answer, and that is precisely the point. Leadership maturity is not developing one response and becoming exceptionally skilled at using it everywhere. It is developing enough self-awareness, humility, courage, wisdom, and flexibility to respond to what is actually happening.
Our organizations need leaders capable of distinguishing urgency from panic, conviction from ego, patience from avoidance, perseverance from holding on too long, humility from self-erasure, courage from recklessness, collaboration from endless consensus seeking, and reflection from indecision. Those distinctions matter because leadership decisions rarely affect only the person making them. They shape teams, careers, lives, culture, trust, resources, performance, and sometimes the future of an organization.
Question. Remember. Move.™
When I genuinely do not know the next wise step, I return to three movements that have become central to my work: Question. Remember. Move.™
Question the Story™ asks me to become curious before I become certain. What do I actually know? What am I assuming? What am I afraid will happen? Am I responding to this moment, or has an earlier experience entered the room with me? Is the urgency coming from the circumstances, or am I creating urgency because uncertainty makes me uncomfortable? Am I still gathering information because I truly need it, or because I am hoping enough information will eventually guarantee the outcome? These questions create space between an event and the story we immediately form about it.
Remember Who You Are asks us to return to what is true. What do I value? What has experience taught me? What evidence does my life provide about my capacity to navigate difficult circumstances? What responsibilities and boundaries matter here? Who are the people whose wisdom I trust? What does my faith teach me? What do I understand today that an earlier version of me could not have understood? Remembering is not simply looking backward; it is recovering evidence. The Cowardly Lion did not suddenly become courageous when he reached Oz. He needed help recognizing what the journey itself had already revealed about him. Sometimes we need the same reminder.
Then comes Move with Courage. The question is no longer simply, “What should I do?” It becomes, “What does this moment require?”
The answer may be to speak, listen, wait, apologize, ask another question, seek counsel, establish a boundary, change course, make the decision, delegate, rest, begin again, walk away, or stay and do the work.
This is one of the distinctions I believe matters most: movement does not always mean going faster. Sometimes the courageous move is stillness. Sometimes movement means changing our position because we have learned something new. Sometimes it means finally acting after we have spent too long asking for certainty that is never going to arrive. Discernment is not an invitation to endless contemplation. Eventually, wisdom has to meet action.
Reflection
Reflection gives us enough space to hear something beyond our first reaction. If you are currently facing a decision, conversation, leadership challenge, relationship issue, or transition that feels unclear, resist the pressure to manufacture certainty simply so the discomfort will go away. Instead, consider what may be shaping your response and what the situation itself may be asking of you.
Ask yourself what you genuinely know and what you may be assuming. Consider what you fear might happen if you make the wrong decision and whether you are seeking wisdom or secretly hoping for a guarantee. Think about the experiences, values, faith, evidence, and wise counsel that should inform your decision. Ask whether your usual way of responding fits this particular situation or whether the moment is asking something different from you.
It may also help to step mentally outside the circumstances and consider what you would notice if you were advising someone else. What seems clearer from a little distance? What information still matters? What part of your thinking may be driven primarily by fear, urgency, pride, or an old story?
Finally, ask yourself one question that may be enough for today: What is the next wise step available to me, even if I cannot yet see the entire journey?
My Commitment
Discernment will not eliminate every difficult decision or guarantee that I will never make a mistake. It will not remove uncertainty from leadership, relationships, business, faith, or life. What can change is the way I enter those moments.
I can become more thoughtful without becoming paralyzed. I can remain courageous without becoming reckless. I can trust what experience has taught me while remaining open to perspectives I have not considered. I can admit that I do not know without interpreting uncertainty as inadequacy. I can seek information, prayer, wisdom, and counsel without demanding guarantees that no one can give me.
I can also remain willing to respond differently when the moment requires it. I can speak or listen, wait or act, pray or reflect, reconsider or stand firm. I can examine my instincts without automatically allowing them to make the decision for me, and I can make the wisest choice available without insisting that I know everything that comes next.
Courage does not always mean having the answer. Sometimes courage is taking the next responsible step while the rest of the journey is still unfolding.
What Does This Moment Require?
Juliane Koepcke did not wake beneath the Amazon canopy knowing exactly how she would get home. She found water, remembered what she had been taught, and followed what she knew. One stream led to another, the water grew larger, and eventually, there were signs of other human beings. Eventually, there was help. Eventually, there was a way home.
Her story is extraordinary, and it should never be reduced to a simple formula for navigating life’s ordinary challenges. Her survival involved factors she could control and many she could not. Knowledge mattered. Her choices mattered. Grace mattered. Other people mattered. Circumstances beyond her control mattered.
Perhaps that, too, is part of the lesson: we rarely navigate life with only one variable. Discernment asks us to become attentive to what is actually present.
Like music, life contains moments of movement and rest, volume and quiet, leadership and accompaniment. We will not always know the entire score, and we cannot always predict what will happen in the next measure. What we can do is learn to listen more carefully. We can question the story that says capable people should always know exactly what to do. We can remember the wisdom, experience, relationships, faith, courage, and evidence already present in our lives. Then, when the time comes, we can move with neither recklessness nor paralysis, but with the best discernment available to us.
The goal is not to become someone who always knows what to do. It is to become someone who knows how to discern what the moment requires.
Question the Story™.
Remember Who You Are.
Move with Courage.
Because the story that shaped you does not have to be the story that defines you.
About Deborah Stallings
Deborah Stallings, MA, SHRM-SCP, is a speaker, leadership advisor, executive coach, and CEO of HR Anew. She is the creator of Question the Story™ | Discover the Truth.™, a thought leadership platform that helps individuals and leaders examine the stories shaping how they see themselves, make decisions, lead, and move forward.
For more than 30 years, Deborah has helped leaders, teams, and organizations navigate complex workplace challenges, strengthen leadership effectiveness, develop talent, and build healthier workplace cultures. Her work brings together leadership, human behavior, workforce excellence, faith, and lived experience to help people grow in self-awareness, exercise greater discernment, and lead with purpose and courage.
She believes the story that shaped you does not have to be the story that defines you.
Connect with Deborah at CEO@hranew.com or visit www.HRAnew.com.
About HR Anew
HR Anew is a national WBENC-certified woman-owned professional services firm helping organizations strengthen leadership, talent, workplace culture, and organizational performance. Since 1999, HR Anew has collaborated with healthcare organizations, government agencies, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, businesses, and mission-driven employers to address complex people and workplace challenges.
Through fractional human resources leadership, executive and leadership coaching, leadership development, workplace investigations, talent solutions, and workforce training, HR Anew helps organizations develop stronger leaders, improve communication and accountability, navigate conflict, strengthen employee engagement, and create workplaces where people and organizations can thrive.
At the heart of our work is a simple belief: when people grow and thrive, organizations grow and scale.
Learn more at www.HRAnew.com.
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Grossmann, I., Gerlach, T. M., & Denissen, J. J. A. (2016). Wise reasoning in the face of everyday life challenges. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7(7), 611–622. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550616652206
Heifetz, R. A., Linsky, M., & Grashow, A. (2009). The practice of adaptive leadership: Tools and tactics for changing your organization and the world. Harvard Business Press.
Holy Bible, New International Version. (2011). Zondervan. (Original work published 1978)
Kashdan, T. B., & Rottenberg, J. (2010). Psychological flexibility as a fundamental aspect of health. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(7), 865–878. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2010.03.001
Klein, G. (1998). Sources of power: How people make decisions. MIT Press.
Koepcke, J. (1973, February). Nightmare in the jungle. Reader’s Digest, 100–104. https://archive.wingsofhope.ngo/nightmare-in-the-jungle/
Library of Congress. (n.d.). Rosa Parks: In her own words. https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/rosa-parks-in-her-own-words/
Parks, R., & Reed, G. J. (1994). Quiet strength: The faith, the hope, and the heart of a woman who changed a nation. Zondervan Publishing House.