Taking risks creates confidence and the more confidence we are the more risk we take. Would you agree? Most things we do have risks, some just have simple fixes so the degree is quite small. I was listening to a podcast today and the woman being interviewed talked about how she got to where she was. Like most, anything but a straightforward path. But she stated, “risk creates confidence.” I sat there letting that sink in a minutes. All the ways we’re taught not to take risks, even though some of the most successful people have taken some of the biggest risks.
As young kids, so many of us are kept in a comfort zone. We stay away from sick people, our parents protect us from things and people who might cause harm. We go to school to learn and ultimately get an education. After that, maybe you continue education toward a degree in higher education. Maybe you go to a trade school, or assume a role in a family business to one day take over. We’re told to do something you’ll be able to make a good life with. Who wouldn’t want to teach their kids that? But the underlying message here, and maybe the ultimate goal is get yourself comfortable. Where in any lesson plan is teaching kids failure isn’t the end?
How do we teach ourselves and maybe our kids confidence? Start taking small risks. I’ve found that taking big risks to start has a good chance of crashing. Why is that bad? Can we as adults not be resilient enough to push our ego’s aside and get back up? Kids do it all the time. They stumble, fall, literally get pushed over and they get right back up and try harder. Depending on what we learn after falling, maybe it doesn’t take us a long to succeed the next time. All that time spent in school teaches us how to do things because we have to learn from somewhere. Everything has a teacher or coach who has confidence in teaching because they’ve done it enough times. Confidence comes from taking a risk and doing something you might not know how. Maybe we fail at a part of it, but that also means we did something write and just need to correct and adjust a little.
Ever gotten a new job you had to learn some things for or moved careers? We don’t always know everything about it, but we take a risk anyway and learn. Do we always get it right the first time, probably not. The more we polish the skill, the more confidence we gain that we can get it right. Soon, we’re pretty good at what we do. We built confidence.
Know any famous people who have taken huge risks and been rewarded. There are tons. People who dropped out of school or quit their high paying job. They took a risk to do something, figured it out, and got rewarded.
So why are we somehow taught to follow the straight path? Maybe the straight path isn’t what we want to do. Maybe we need to step off the path and risk what could be in the woods or the tall path and trust that we’ll figure it out. The more we step off the beaten path and figure it out, the more confidence we build that we can do it. Confidence can be developed from a lot of different places. The straight and narrow comes with roadblocks, and curveballs that force risk sometimes. When you decide to take a risk and figure it out, you’ll build the confidence that you can and will figure it out.