How To Confidently Take Risks In Life

None of us get to decide if we should take risks in life or not. All of us will have to, more regularly than we think. Even driving to work is a risk. Even if we lock ourselves away from the outside world for fear of something going wrong, we are still vulnerable to a very small percentage within our homes. You can never change the fact that you will experience risk at some point in life.

However, you can change how you face risk, and how you prepare for it. You can try to avoid unnecessary risk. Or sometimes, you may accept risk as a natural part of trying to gain something you find more valuable. For example, many launch businesses using a bank loan, and if said business starts to fail, that could mean very real financial implications on their part.

This is why confidently taking risks in life is so important to consider. With the following advice, you’ll be sure to know how to do so, in a courageous and intelligent manner:

Get Out Of Your Comfort Zone

In life, it is essentially important to get out of your comfort zone. If you fail to do this, you will often find yourself never learning, never growing, and never making mistakes. This last option can seem quite a positive thing, but actually, mistakes can be important for our character development, and they can help us grow even further. Additionally, no great memories were ever experienced when in a comfort zone. You likely cannot remember one day after another spent sat playing video games on your sofa. It’s important for you to understand and internalize this, because it can help you feel motivated to get out there and try.

People often misinterpret what ‘getting out of your comfort zone’ means. They may think that they need to skydive or start a business to make the most of this. Not so. For someone, it might be getting back into work after recovering from an injury. For someone else, it might mean heading to their doctor to speak about their depressive symptoms. You cannot grade 

Manage The Risk And Reward

Of course, taking a risk for the sake of it is never worthwhile. We all know that betting our life savings on one spin of the roulette wheel, red or black, could help us become a degree more affluent, but it could also open us up to losing everything. Most rational people understand that this is not a risk worth taking. 

Managing the risk and reward of your undertaking is important then, especially if you’re to partake in something some may consider a little more dangerous. If you’re going to take up mountain climbing, ensure you have the best equipment and guides to hand. If you wish to restore and ride a motorcycle, ensure you have the best safety gear and motorcycle insurance to hand. 

Confidently taking risks in life is a part of living well, but there’s no reason why you cannot apply harm reduction, abide by the best thinking, and stay as safe as possible while doing so. A man named Cristopher McCandless, immortalized by the book and movie ‘Into The Wild,’ decided to leave civilization to live in nature and let his spirit free. This is a romantic situation for anyone to consider, particularly those who feel tired of modern society. However, it was unfortunate that McCandless practiced had very few survival skills, and unfortunately ate toxic berries that caused him to lose weight and pass away in the wilderness. While most of his journey was a true inspiration, it’s not hard to see just how a little practical preparedness, the willingness to stay practical and safe and the means in which to regulate his free spirit would have likely stopped his untimely demise.

The particulars of this situation are likely not something you will ever repeat, but it’s still important to take this lesson and understand what happens when rampant risk-taking is considered. It’s always important to manage the risks and reward, to plan ahead, and from there you can stay confident. 

Allow Momentum To Build

Absolutely no one finds a benefit in throwing themselves to the deep end and forgetting all caution. If you’re not used to taking risks and getting out there, achieving the most daredevil approach possible is hardly going to help. If you feel vulnerable, in dating for example, the solution is not to ‘hit on’ as many people as possible. It’s in talking to someone in person, perhaps going for a walk. It’s in creating an online dating profile. It’s in simply talking to someone and relating to them.

Allow momentum to build. No one climbs Mount Everest as their first hiking experience. They hike up smaller hills, take up climbing at their local rock wall, or get in shape. Then, as they increase in ability, they increase the challenge. Becoming too forceful will only lead you back to feeling vulnerable, and it can sometimes even lead you to danger. This is not an ideal outcome. The little victories are often the platform from which you can build your self-confidence.

Growing From Vulnerability

It’s important to consider how we confidently take risks if we feel as though we’re ‘not that kind of person,’ or if we have avoided conflict through most of our lives. Ultimately, you are afraid of being vulnerable. You withdraw from the world because you are afraid that if you show everyone who you really are and what you’re actually interested in you will be rejected. To avoid rejection you basically remove yourself from society or display a facade you think is at least somewhat acceptable. To overcome this fear you have to understand that the isolation you’re causing yourself is far worse than the risk of your authentic self being rejected. (You can see something similar take place in the world of sales: where salesman is afraid to push his prospect, when in reality he’s killing his chances of getting a sale with a follow up later). 

Once you grasp what is happening you will take action; you will make changes. They don’t have to be big changes – in fact they shouldn’t be big. Big changes will conflict with your self-image too much and make you abandon the process. Instead, make small changes and do them consistently. Consistently doing small things right, and keeping promises you make to yourself will build up your confidence. The increased confidence will allow you to make other changes and take risks you might not have made before. And from there it snowballs.

Finding Your Purpose

Often, it’s worthwhile to find your purpose to the extent that you can. We all have a few basic drives within us, such as the desire to ‘reproduce,’ (to put it in the bluntest terms), the desire to survive, the desire for good nutrition and good company. Finding your purpose is also a need, and we can search our whole lives for it.

However, when you do try and focus on that which you love, you realize that risk taking is a little more possible than you had thought. Someone hoping to submit their art to a competition might feel the risk of being shown up or exposed for the work they aren’t fully confident in, but the process of doing that will be aided by your purpose of enjoying and developing your craft. This can provide a great testing bed to improve your approach.

With this advice, we hope you can confidently take those risks in life that are bound to come sooner or later, and that you do not feel so scared addressing them directly.

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