Choosing the Wrong Risks and Playing it Safe
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Author: Nicky J. Davies |
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Categories: Business Fast Track
Everything in life involves risks.
Driving or being a passenger, involves risks. Crossing the road involves risk. Even eating food involves risks.
But when you want to make a big change, go for a big leap in business growth, make a bigger impact in the world, this suddenly feels much riskier than your routine habitual behaviours. And I’m not talking about going out there and doing something completely reckless.
Actually, all you are doing is taking a different chance.
But don’t confuse different with bigger!
The novel, unfamiliar risks may make you feel more vulnerable, more exposed to trouble. But that’s just a feeling, not a fact.
If you pay attention to your feelings rather than the facts, every day you are inhibiting yourself. Instead of risking something new, you are prone to live with the old familiar risks that you have been accepting for so long, you’re probably completely oblivious to them.
Such an unwillingness to accept another set of risks means you find yourself trapped by habits and behaviours, presuming that you are playing it safe when you are merely avoiding the unfamiliar.
Instead of reaching for what you most want, you probably find yourself thinking ‘I might not be able to reach it’ so you guarantee you won’t get it by holding back and even avoid attempting it.
There seems to be some naïve psychological safety we have in not trying. As if that insulates us from the discomfort, pain or embarrassment of falling short in our efforts.
It’s easy to come up with excuses for this behaviour; it’s just not the right time, I’ve other obligations. I’ve done it too!
Just remember that excuses are the enemy. Excuses are doubts double crossing you, acting like your friend, your protector, all the while disempowering you and cautioning you to respect your limits.
It’s your potential that deserves respect. Not your self-doubts.
Give yourself a chance to prove what you can do.
Risk believing in yourself instead of running the risk of wasting your potential and all the excellent opportunities that present themselves to you.
The surest way to lose is to not try.
If you really want to minimise the risk of not reaching your desires, trying is your only acceptable option. You essentially must go for it!
It’s not a choice of whether you will take a risk, it’s a choice of which risk you will accept.
When you choose a different set of risks and go for it, you immediately discover that your personal limits are determined primarily by what you are willing to attempt.
Your limits are set by your decisions of whether you choose to push or not to push. And your limits change when you require them to change. So, you can excuse yourself from pushing but excuses don’t prove anything at all about your true performance limits as a person.
Looking back over your life, which do you regret more – risks that you have taken or risks you have avoided?
The risks we have avoided usually do us more damage than those we have taken.
A risk not taken usually grows and tricks us out of taking it.
Self-doubts that go unchallenged grow stronger. Challenge them and you grow stronger. Where’s the logic in not trying because you might not succeed? In not trying, you guarantee failure.
Book a call with me and let’s talk about how I can help you breakthrough the ‘Playing it Safe Trap’ and bring a Quantum Leap to your business and life.
Click this link to book a call: https://meetme.so/NickyDavies
Nicky works with business owners looking for business growth that brings a Quantum Leap rather than incremental improvement. A strategy that challenges your status quo. It’s based on her 16yrs of experience of working with large corporations around leadership development and culture change.
Click this link to book a call: https://meetme.so/NickyDavies