Risk becomes easier to evaluate once ego is removed from the calculation.

Ego makes risk unreadable. It inflates the danger of looking bad and shrinks the danger of staying still, because only one of those threatens your standing. Take ego out and the calculation becomes far more ordinary: what could this cost, what could it gain, could I recover from the worst version.

Run a decision through those three questions with your reputation deliberately excluded. Then add it back and see how much the picture changed. That difference is the size of the distortion you have been working with. It does not mean ignoring how things look, only knowing when that is what is really driving you.