Weekly Lessons Learned
This is a weekly blog post in which I will share my thoughts on some of the lessons learned over the past week. For this weeks post, I would like to talk about what it means to take risks.
Taking risks can be scary. It requires that you set aside your safety net and make a move without knowing what the outcome will be. The rewards are well worth it though, because taking risks is one of the best ways to feel empowered and control your life while creating something new and exciting! This article will explore how taking risks leads to greater success in life by talking about how children take them as part of their daily routine when they're just learning how to walk.
Children learn to walk by taking what is called a fall tumble. They start off with a single step, then do an all out push off by kicking one leg backwards. They fall and roll on the ground, sometimes with their arms up in front of them. Then they get up and try again until they're able to walk all the way without falling once.
Children take many falls while they're learning how to walk, but are unlikely to stay down if one or two of them happen during a session. They get back up, brush themselves off and start again, taking a few more steps each time. Even if they fall down many times during a single session of walking, the child will not get discouraged and give up. Instead they'll try to walk again until they learn it all and master the skill.
Our brains are hard-wired to take risks like this since they are necessary for our survival as humans. When I was in my early childhood years, I used to play at an abandoned construction site near my home with other neighborhood children. While there, I would sometimes jump from the top of a platform that was about 10 feet high. I was always a little hesitant to do it since falling from that height would hurt me pretty badly. Still, I took the risk anyway and learned to enjoy what it felt like to jump off those platforms and fall back down.
This is how children learn many things in life, by taking risks and learning from them. As they grow older they become less likely to take risks because they're taught that they need to be more careful with themselves and also because their parents won't let them do risky activities anymore. This is a trade-off that has to happen for children to grow up and become more independent.
As adults, we can still learn lessons from children about how to take risks. Even though we don't necessarily have to jump off 10 foot platforms to learn how it feels, it is important to find a way to test our limits and try things out in life. Normally this wouldn't be easy since many of us don't like taking risks, but there are ways you can trick yourself into doing so. Here are a few examples I've thought of that might help you:
• Always ask the people around you if they think you're able to do something before trying it out on your own. If they say yes, then you're obviously not taking a risk since you're acting on advice from others. If they say no, then you wouldn't be able to do it anyway so it's not really wasting your time to try!
• If you think about something that is related to an important part of your life, but has always been just out of reach for some reason, don't hesitate. What is the worst that could happen? You learn something new and take an important step towards fulfilling a goal.
• If you're about to do something that makes you nervous, but you don't want to make it worse by trying to push your way through it, challenge yourself. Tell yourself that in order to get through this particular challenge, you'll have to prepare and know that you can do it. If you didn't prepare, then realize what happens when someone takes a risk and doesn't prepare. It's not the end of the world if things don't work out like they should, so what is the worst thing that could happen if things go wrong? Are you doomed or are there ways to fix it so that nothing is too big of a deal in the future?
These examples are just a few I've thought of. There are hundreds of others out there! The important thing is finding one that resonates with you. The takeaway here is that learning good habits can be achieved by taking risks and by testing our limits. By doing this, we'll know how much we can handle and will discover what feels safe for us in the long run.
Here's to taking risks with your life!
Sincerely,
Chris Reidy
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Conclusion
As you can see, there are a lot of misconceptions about risk taking in our lives. It's not something that is considered good or bad in its own right. Instead, it's important to know what the risks are that we're taking and why. We shouldn't always assume that just because an activity is risky, we should do it. But if there isn't much downside, then why not?
In order to decide on which risks we should take and which ones we shouldn't, it's important to evaluate what happens when things don't work out the way they should.
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Weekly Lessons Learned