A high diver does not simply climb up and hurl himself off a 100-foot ladder without a great deal of preparation. Likewise, when facing a giant leap in your own life, there are steps you can take to prepare for risk.
The 4 Principles to Prepare for Risk
Find your golden Silence
True, risk-taking involves action. But before you can act you need to know what to act on. The reason silence is so important to risk-taking—and in particular Right Risk-taking is that it helps make your risks more deliberate, intentional, and directed. Silence, extended to the point of mental stillness, has a leveling effect on your perspective, sharpening your powers of discernment. Through silence you become more attuned to your most deeply held beliefs and values, helping you perceive what risks are most compatible with your inner constitution and thus which are truly worth taking. Through silence you can more accurately answer your Right Risk question, Is this the Right Risk for me? Hence, the first principle of Right Risk is to find your golden silence.
Defy Inertia
Through risk-taking, we move beyond the comfort of our current condition and overcome inertia. Sometimes this movement is taken through physical action, such as leaving the safety of the ground to scale the face of El Capitan. Other times the movement entails more of a cerebral shift, converting to a new political or religious belief system, for example. Whether physical or intellectual, risk is a vehicle that moves us from where we are to where we want to be, and you simply can’t get from here to there without movement.
As a general rule, the greater the distance between your current reality (here) and the destination to which the risk will carry you (there), the more substantial the risk. The hard truth is, that the bigger the gap between here and there, the more energy, discomfort, and sacrifice will be required to overcome inertia and take the risk. Risk-taking is hard work.
Write Your Risk Scripts
As part of getting ready for a risk, it is important to keep your scripts from limiting your progress. Though a complete scriptural rewrite may not be possible without extensive soul-searching, working with my coachees has taught me that it is possible to influence them. One way to do this is to pick a personal mantra. In readying for our risk, the benefit of a personal mantra is that it helps boost our courage, allowing us to take risks we might otherwise avoid.
For a personal mantra to be effective, it has to be exquisitely simple, certainly no more than a sentence long. Also, your mantra should compensate for whatever risk-limiting scripts you are operating under at a specific moment in time.
Turn on the Risk Pressure
The fourth principle in readying for your risk is that you need the pressure to nudge yourself from your current situation—your risk platform. Our lives have many points of risk pressure that act on us by forming an acute dissatisfaction with our current circumstances. Often our dissatisfaction intensifies until it grabs us by the throat and screams, “Take the risk and jump, you fool!” We reach this leaping point when the risk of changing outweighs the risk of staying the same.
For example, when faced with a career transition, the risk decision often boils down to a choice between a known unhappiness and an unknown possibility of happiness. We become increasingly dissatisfied with our current job until it becomes nearly impossible to get out of bed and face another day at the office. We may call in sick to avoid the risk decision, but the decision won’t let us go. The more we allow ourselves to live in a state of dissatisfaction, the more we feel as if we are living a lie, and the pressure builds. Although many of us have a tremendous capacity for tolerating misery, eventually, we will reach our high-dive moment and decide the risk of changing outweighs the risk of staying in a suffocating situation.
The Preparation
As you prepare to take your own giant leap, remember that the principles of Right Risk are your guideposts. Finding your golden silence will grant you clarity and perspective, helping you discern the risks that truly align with your values. Defying inertia is essential—embrace the movement required to shift from your current state to your desired destination. Crafting effective risk scripts and personal mantras will bolster your courage and navigate you through the uncertainties. Finally, embrace the risk pressure that propels you toward action, recognizing that true growth often comes from the discomfort of change.
Next time you face the uncertainty of risk, how will you prepare for risk?
Interested in learning more about how to approach risk? Check out these related posts:
This post is based on an excerpt from Right Risk: 10 Powerful Principles for Taking Giant Leaps with Your Life.
Image by WOKANDAPIX from Pixabay
