All about adventure and risk
This is the second of three articles about comfort and risk, safety and learning, fear and adventure. Last time I talked about the Comfort Zone, and how many people mistake it for a wholly positive place, how a great deal of our culture is based on the mistaken belief that we should all try to stay in our comfort zones. Today I’m going to talk about the risk zone - what it is, what it brings you, why people tend to avoid it and how to incorporate it into a life of potential, possibilities and creativity. To repeat something that I say a lot: you are capable of more than you know. Wherever you are, whatever choices you’ve made and however your life feels right now, you are capable of taking steps into greater freedom, happiness, vitality and possibility. The key is to flip your fear of risk into excitement about adventure. It’s the same sensation, the same physiology, just a different response. Let me explain…
What is the risk zone?
If the comfort zone is the known, then the risk zone is the unfamiliar. Remember that these are not physical places, these are areas of your life. Risk is the unknown, the new. It’s places, ideas, words, choices or experiences that we haven’t visited before, and in which we feel, in some way, incapable or unready.
Everyone has their own comfort zones and risk zones. A teacher of mine likes to talk about a time he was working with a team of executives from the City of London. They scoffed at his explanation of comfort and risk. They said “we make million-pound decisions every day, we’re under massive pressure, we LIVE in the risk zone!”. They heard “risk” and assumed it must be about big gestures and aggressive behaviour. But we can imagine that if we’d asked those boisterous men to sit facing one another, making deep eye contact, and share their most tender feelings with one another...perhaps they’d find a new meaning to the idea of risk. Risk, for some people, is being silent, being vulnerable, being open to gentle contact from another human being. For some people, that’s the most terrifying thing in the world.
So there is no standard of risk apart from your own experience. If it gets your heart pounding, if there are butterflies in your stomach, if a part of you longs to run away and if you run the risk of mistakes and making a fool of yourself...then that’s risk. Your risks are not the same as anyone else’s. So this process requires that you be really honest with yourself about what is safe and what isn’t, for you.
Why would I ever do this to myself?
We do it for the results that we want. We do it to achieve our life goals.
Many people will advise you not to take risks. We live in a culture that totally misunderstands risk, labelling it as a negative thing. We forget that as babies we risked falling so that we could walk, and we risked making mistakes when we tried to speak. Even at a very young age we were setting goals and taking the necessary risks to achieve them. And now we walk and we run, we speak effortlessly...and yet we often advise people not to take risks.
We take risks, with all the fear, the uncertainty and the likelihood of making mistakes in front of other people, because that’s where all learning happens. There has to be a first time for everything, and the first few times we do something we’re often going to be nervous, self-conscious or clumsy.
The focus of highly successful people is on the result they want. Deciding on the steps to get there is a second consideration. We don’t make ourselves uncomfortable in order to be uncomfortable, we focus on a goal for our lives and we accept that there will be fear, and possibly failures, along the way. If you want to learn a new skill, find new friends, earn more money, find a new partner or improve your health, those are the goals. Then we strategise and work out what steps will get us there...and we accept the risks along the way.
If we avoid risk in our lives, we avoid learning, changing or growing. So long as we remain comfortable and surrounded by familiar things, we cannot learn because there is nothing new to learn. So in order to change or grow, we need to step into and through discomfort and unfamiliarity.
And rather than wait for a specific thing that you realise you need to learn, life invites you to be constantly, gently growing and stretching. There will be times in your life when you’ll need to take big leaps because you have specific targets - but you’ll do much better at these times if you’re already used to taking risks. If we’re able to loosen up our ties on security and familiarity, if we’re able to remember that we’re not going to die just because we’re doing things that aren’t part of our known world, then we awaken our courage (literally: heart-fire), our passion, our sense of strength and knowledge that we can achieve anything. With each step into risk we say “yes” to life, and we return to the comfort zone a little more awake and alive, and much more ready to take on the next challenge.
Life as an adventure
So we can see that living with a positive attitude to risk, where taking chances and pushing out of the comfort zone is a normal and regular thing, is going to be part of a very healthy, very positive life.
All highly successful people develop this attitude to risk-taking.
Some Native Americans once said to one my teachers: “you have to learn to love the battle”. These are warrior people, who are comfortable with that language. They meant: you cannot spent your life just enjoying the good stuff and enduring the bad stuff. When I say to my clients “are you ready to begin living your life as an adventure?”, I'm saying the same thing. Don’t wait for life to come to you: rush to meet life. Sit up and pay attention. Don’t avoid the hard stuff, but rise to meet it. Unlock your courage and trust yourself to handle the challenges.
Look for opportunities to step outside of your comfort zone every day. The steps don’t always have be big or showy, they just have to be real for you.
Fear vs excitement
We know how fear feels. Butterflies, trembling, upset tummy, a longing for it to be over, maybe thinking about how bad it might be when it comes.
But think about how excitement feels. When you were last really excited, didn’t you get butterflies, trembling, a longing for it to happen, imagining how good it can be?
How different are these two things, really?
We have the power to change our experience of fear into an experience of excitement. Try it the next time you’re doing something scary. Feel the fear, notice what your body is doing, and then see if you can choose to experience it as excitement rather than fear. It might take a little practice but fairly quickly you’ll be able to go into frightening situations and sidestep paralysis or avoidance. And that makes risk-taking much more possible.
So if it has all these benefits, why do people avoid risk?
Let’s look at some of the reasons why we all avoid taking risks from time to time…
Other people may not understand People form a certain picture of us. Connections between humans are precious things and often held as high priorities, and we react badly when an important connection is threatened. Sometimes people interpret changes in our behaviour - taking a risk, trying something new, talking in a new way - to perhaps foreshadow a weakening of connection. Sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re not. But that’s something to be aware of if people start cautioning you against a new adventure. Equally, taking risks in our lives can highlight the fears of others. The deeper we sit in the comfort zone and the longer we go without leaving it, the greater the fear of change and risk becomes. If somebody nearby takes bold steps into the unknown, people can react aggressively, when really they are acting out of fear or losing their own safety. Again, this can be useful to bear in mind when you start trying new things.
What will happen to me if I change? We are what we do. The choices we make, the words we use, the way we hold ourselves and breathe, the places we go and the level of risk and adventure in our lives are all core parts of our sense of self. “Oh no, I’m just not that kind of person” is a phrase that people use to say “I feel safe and secure because I operate in a small, fixed web of places, people and experiences. If I leave this, I don’t know what could happen, and I can’t bear that sense of not-knowing”. The part of ourselves that gets really cosy and really familiar can literally believe that death is on the line if we make new choices. This pattern is easily changed. Embrace your heart-fire and begin to take small risks. When you return to comfort, do so consciously and reflect on what you’ve just done. Did you die? Were you injured? Did you learn anything new? Now try again. And again. And again. Stretch further. Show yourself that you can.
It’s embarrassing For some people, this is a biggie. You’re going to make mistakes if you don’t know what you’re doing...and sometimes these are going to be public, and people might notice. That’s a real danger of taking risks and trying new things, and it’s almost unavoidable. But really, what’s so precious about your dignity? There are times when we are ladies and gentlemen of poise and decorum...and there are times when we’re covered in mud, or crying, or shaking, or uncertain. The practice here is to release our sense of self-importance and force ourselves to respond to mocking, laughter and embarrassment with our own laughter. I’m a ridiculous person. You’re a ridiculous person. We’re all ridiculous. And there is power and embracing essence of the fool.
We cease to be the perfection we imagine ourselves to be You are not perfect. You might hold ideas of yourself that are perfectly something: perfectly capable, perfectly useless, perfectly heroic, perfectly cowardly, perfectly beautiful, perfectly ugly. Taking steps into the unknown will tend to starkly expose any “perfectly’s” that you’re hanging on to, and for some people that can be unbearable. But for those people, adventures into the unknown take on even more important role: that of unlearning the lessons that have caused this stifling bond with perfection. Even if your first steps are hard, or tiny...now is the time to begin.
The return
Just as we shouldn't live in the comfort zone, so we can’t live in the risk zone. We set a goal, we accept the risks it brings, we step out into the unknown and we try to remain as alert and humble as possible as we learn and grow. But then we must return to the known, to comfort, to the things that we known nurture and nourish us. Returning consciously is just as important as risking consciously: it brackets the risk and it makes the learning and growing more likely to stick.
Where to start?
Where does your comfort zone meet your risk zone? What new risks have you been avoiding? Where can you begin, today, to live a life where you embrace risk, draw it into yourself, and use its presence to light your heart-fire?
Your risk zone is yours alone: it will be unique and others might not even recognise it as risk at all. You will know it’s real when your body responds. You will be given an opportunity to transform fear into excitement. And when you return to the comfort zone, you will bring new learning and wisdom with you, so reflect on it, allow the lessons to change you, and then plan your next foray out into the new.
When risk becomes panic
Next time, I’ll talk about the panic zone. In this place beyond risk, there’s a chance that we learn a great deal, very quickly...but it’s also possible to learn nothing at all and be seriously burnt by the process. When does risk become panic, when do we find that we’ve reached too far too quickly, and how can we know the difference?