Successful Risk-Taking

Leadership Coaching: Risk. What stops us taking risks? It’s our brain. Is this always useful? No! Yes, it keeps us safe, but it also arrests our development. I have clients that have brains that enable them to decide to do one thing late at night and by the next morning, they have managed to rationalise themselves right out of it again. The Outcome = Zero. All that energy expended for no action and no learning and no new information.

You see, if you internalise this whole process then you can pick and choose the evidence that you wish to us. Given the brain has a natural negative bias then that means you’ll be biased towards gathering evidence that does not support action. That means you can go a whole loop without having to do anything whatsoever. Then nothing whatsoever changes, at all …

How do you overcome this? The solution is to externalise it. If you felt enthused when you first had the idea then there will be something in it. That means that it’s worth exploring in order to find what that gold nugget that the idea contains is.

Leadership Coaching: Risk

To externalise it, involves talking to another human being about the thing that’s jumped into your mind. It means pinging words and ideas around with someone you respect. It means putting it on paper, talking, going to places and doing proper research out in the world. It does NOT mean turning on the computer where you are researching deeper and deeper into the ether. That’s a sure-fire way of losing a whole afternoon and eventually deciding it wasn’t what you wanted to do anyway. Do you have a whole afternoon to lose? To no avail? No, I thought not. 

So quit spending the time going in ever-decreasing loops around the neural pathways inside your own brain. The risk you are anticipating is unlikely to end in disaster, Park your idea so that you can either go to sleep or get on with the practical things that need to be done in your workday. Then, take a risk. risk putting that thought or idea out there in the world and see where it goes. 

You can find Rebecca here at the Daemon Career Coach