# 597       Innovative Leader                        Volume 13, Number 3                 March 2004

Right Risk:  Lessons From the Edge
by Bill Treasurer

Bill Treasurer, founder of Giant Leap Consulting (www.right-risk.com), is author of Right Risk: 10 Powerful Principles for Taking Giant Leaps with Your Life (Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, 2003)

Fear is relative. 

I learned that lesson on top of New York’s Empire State Building when I was seven years old.  While my dad and brother peered over the guardrail to gawk at the miniature metropolis below, I stood there, frozen and ashamed, with my back plastered against the concrete wall.  I was amazed and envious.  “Why is it so easy for them,” I wondered, “but so hard for me?”

You see, I’m afraid of heights—a fear that wouldn’t be all that unusual if it weren’t for the fact that I’m a former professional high diver.  Yep.  For seven life-changing years, I traveled throughout North America and Europe with the U.S. High Diving Team, taking some 1,500 death-defying leaps into waters a hundred feet below. 

More than likely, most of the risks you’re confronted with are solutions to your own internal dilemmas, too.  Risk is something you want and don’t want, all at the same time.  It tempts you with its rewards, yet repels you with its uncertainties.

Take high diving, for instance.  It’s been called a testament to man’s indulgent pursuit of the insignificant.  After all, what did my own high-flying feats prove? That I could withstand two and a half seconds of plummeting hell? So what? The answer lies in my confrontation with my limitations and fears.  For me, taking a high dive was more than an act of bravado or a flight of fancy.  It was an act of liberation.

Like it or not, taking risks is an inevitable and inescapable part of life.  Whether you’re grappling with getting married, starting a business, making a high-stakes investment, or taking some other life or career leap of consequence, you’ll ultimately confront your own personal high dive. 

Taking and Avoiding Risks

When it comes to risk-taking, it’s tempting to sort people into two simplistic, sweeping categories—those who do and those who don’t.  This absolutist mindset presupposes that if you take risks in one part of your life, you’ll take them in all other parts of your life. 

Poke this assumption, however, and it falls apart.  For instance, my late grandmother spoke her mind, asserting the boldest of opinions, but never mustered up the courage to learn how to drive.  Meanwhile, a buddy of mine—a tough-minded cop—“runs-and-guns” on the streets of Newark, but can barely tell his wife he loves her because it makes him feel all squishy inside. 

The reality is, we’re all risk-takers and risk-avoiders.  We simply take or avoid risks in different domains, for different reasons.  And while the experience of struggling with a risk decision is universal, the process of deciding which risks to take and which to avoid is highly personal.  We’re left to answer for ourselves a basic, yet profound, risk-discerning question: Is this the right risk for me?

A risk that is right for you may seem absurdly dangerous to others, making it difficult to win their support.  When I left a secure, high-paying consulting job to start my own business, my father was astounded.  “Are you crazy?” he screamed.  “Why in the hell would you throw away such a good thing?”

Yet every risk can be split in two—the risk of action and the risk of inaction.  If a risk is right, the real harm comes in letting the opportunity pass by.  Though my dad begged to differ, it was far more dangerous for me to stay in a comfortable yet unchallenging position than to strike out on my own.

Risking Right

If a risk is right for you, don’t let reason get in the way of passion.  A “right risk” isn’t a function of safety or security.  It’s a function of compatibility.  A risk that’s right for you may be a folly for someone else.  And a risk that’s right for someone else may be entirely wrong for you. 

So, how do you know if a risk is right for you? And, if it is right, how do you find the wisdom and the courage to go for it when it’s so much easier not to? With the right-risk model, I offer 10 fundamental, guiding principles—a strong platform for risking right:  

4 Find your golden silence. 

Hush the external and internal noise to hear your intuitive, innermost voice.  Disconnect from your technological tethers.  Seek solitude and silence in big and small ways—from retreating to a quiet, sacred place once a year to turning off the radio on your commute to work. 

4 Defy inertia.

Give up the “static quo” of your comfort zone.  Do something.  Break a risk down into smaller, safer steps.  Hire a coach.  Or create a little desperation with a sink-or-swim approach.  Make risk the vehicle that moves you from where you are to where you want to be.

4 Write your risk scripts.    

Put an end to the negative self-talk.  Whether it’s “I am not good enough,”

“I am unlovable,” or some other outdated line, revise your old, limiting scripts with a new, personal mantra.  Then “walk the talk” by seeking out risks that affirm your future, not your past.

4 Turn on the pressure.   

Push yourself a little—or a lot.  And ask family, friends, and colleagues to nudge you, too.  Create the kind of “purposeful anxiety” that gives you little choice but to take the risk.

4 Put yourself on the line.  

Play it “un-safe.”  Be willing to sacrifice your image and your security to do what you believe is right.  Make taking the risk more important than playing it safe.  And put some skin in the game with a personal investment.   

4 Make fear work for you.    

Work your fear.  Let it sharpen your focus.  Arouse your spirit.  And fuel your ability to take and even enjoy the risk.  Find the right balance of fear—more than too little and less than too much—and transform your fear into action.

4 Have the courage to be courageous.   

Exercise your courage, not your cowardice, by acting in the face of fear.  Know that courage is full of fear—knee-knocking, teeth-chattering fear—but insists you take the risk anyway. 

4 Be perfectly imperfect.  

Accept the trial and the error.  Embrace the messiness and the mistakes.  And surrender to the loss of control that goes with the risk-taking territory. 

4 Trespass continuously. 

Be willing to disappoint or even disobey others.  Say “yes” to yourself, even when it means saying “no” to those who matter most to you.  Make personal fidelity more important than pleasing others.  And misbehave.  It’s worth the risk.        

4 Expose yourself.       

Get personal by revealing yourself to others.  Be honest.  Be vulnerable.  Be comfortable with the uncomfortable.  Take the risk of sharing your true feelings to build deep, enduring relationships.