What is your relationship with risk?

Understanding your relationship with risk is crucial to success.

Not enough of it, and we remain stagnant. Too much of it, and we're dead.

So how do we navigate the spaces in between? 

As we discussed earlier this week there will be times when you will have to call it. When things aren't working because the resistance is too much, and it is time to retreat.

The retreat can be temporary, to take time to adapt. Fill in gaps of knowledge with  education, speak to colleagues, work out a new plan and then try again.

Other times there will be obvious clues that we're being redirected to a new path. Each person has their own way of knowing. Sometimes we try everything we know how to do and we fail.

​It happens, we fail, we lose, we grieve, we assess and we move on to a new path. 

We have to have a love affair with calculated risk, the unknown, and the unsteady time when the momentum hasn't kicked in yet. It's important to keep moving in the dark with Faith. Then one wonderful day you will have built up enough of your desired outcome, until the work starts to pay off, and the experience we've gained starts to kick in. The snowball of success begins to gain momentum. 

Everyone is capable of their own form of greatness. With patience a particular brand of greatness unfolds and makes itself known. We can do wonderful things with time, focus, attention, patience, and flexibility to make the proper adaptations to our process until we unlock the key to what works.

​This requires risk. To learn, to fall down and get up again. The people who allow this process to unfold in their lives eventually win, and the ones that stay down, don't get to feel the charge of making it, and living life on their own terms. 

We have to put in our time to be the person that we can trust in and as we trust ourselves knowing that whatever risk occurs or challenge presents itself we can handle it. As this level of confidence builds others will respond favorably. 

Many want the results without the risk and without the work. There are no shortcuts or quick fixes for most things. I found that avoiding the baked in risk in activities make things worse not better. For example, in day trading, trading with the frame of mind that "I am scared to lose." Will cause errors that will cost more money than trading to gain, or just trading well making good strategy decisions from a plan and then executing that plan. It translates to other aspects of life as well. When we fear speaking to our crush, or leaving a conflict with a spouse too long to try to avoid a tough conversation. Avoiding pain tends to create more of it. ​

"He who does not risk, never gets to drink champagne," --Russian Proverb

The risk of time: 

Are you able to give years of your life to develop a skill, audience, following, a market for your product?

This is the risk that many are unwilling to make going for sometimes up to a decade when you think of artists trying to break into an industry and the "20 year overnight success". 

We hear "trust the process" a lot. Enough to want to puke. Yet the risk of time is what it takes to be great at anything.

Practice, repetition, adaptation, revision, precision. ​

The risk of paying up front: 

​"You've got to pay to play" is a common phrase.

Do you buy the best equipment you can afford, buy training and certifications, acquire proper licensing? You need to if you are going to get anywhere.

Of course, each endeavor is slightly different but the risk is the same. You may dump all of your money into this thing and what if it doesn't pay out? Now what?

We can't think about that. Only about what if it does? What if it is amazing and works out even BETTER than we had planned!!!! That has to be the mindset to be successful even if the external environment gives us no indication things will be ok. You have to see how far you can go, until you look up and see that you made it!

The payments will come in, but not until you fashion yourself into the person with the skills and capabilities that people will pay for (see risk of time above). 

The risk of trying something new: 

Can you allow yourself the time to suck? The experience of sucking at something takes courage, you must be pertinacious. To allow yourself to be absolutely HORRIBLE at the thing you want to do most in the world? It's not for the weak of heart.

Can you go through the time when people laugh at you, call you crazy, tell you that it's not going to happen for you? That say they have no idea what you are doing or why you are doing it and that you should probably quit?

​Are you able to show up every day and get kicked in the teeth and come back tomorrow for some more? In whatever form that comes to you. We have to suck until we get it. Whatever "it" is for you.

When people are young it may not be as bad because no one expects you to know anything. Yet, as you get older and get high ideals about yourself and "who you are" it can get a bit tougher.

One of my life mentors used to tell me "Nobodies can do anything". And that stuck with me. I try to remain a "nobody" in my mind. Allowing myself that fluidity and grace to discover something new. That ability to continue to try new things despite the frustrations and struggles that is the process of learning.

As people get older they get embedded and complacent. Less likely to start over and take risks. 
​
The risk of uncertainty:

​Going into the pitch black dark of uncertainty is something that many aren't willing to do. They want all accountability, responsibility, and the job of making things happen to be someone else's job.

Note, when it comes time to share the good stuff-- there they are. The story The Little Red Hen comes to mind. They want the uncertainty and the work to be someone else's, but the rewards to be shared. 

It doesn't work that way. I have spent so many of my younger years looking for a shortcut and there isn't one.

You just have to connect to the project, immerse yourself in it and get your reps in. 

I think of it like the "fog of war" they have in video games as you make progress you begin to see the next step. The only way to get through uncertainty is to "do the thing" and you get through it. It is the last thing people will want to hear. Yet, that's the answer.

"Nothing to it but to do it". It's simple. Doing it will probably take all of you and more. But in the end looking back you get to  experience some really amazing stuff that no one else will get to. 

It's true it may not work out. However, like Martin Luther King, Jr. said,

​“If you can't fly, then run. If you can't run, then walk. If you can't walk, then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving”

This is the path through the risk of uncertainty.

As you journal I invite you to write down the word risk and all of the thoughts that come up when you think of risk. All of the fears, then all of the possibilities when you face them, and what you will have on the other side of facing your feelings about risk. Maybe wright down what you were taught about risk as a child. Were you encouraged to take risks? When you reckon with your feelings about risk, you are well on your way on your path to success. ​