5:30am thoughts on risk

[marsden_online]

It's understood that children need and should be allowed to take to take risks. This is the time parents can make sure those risks are relatively free of lasting consequences. This is when we learn, safely, about risk and reward/success or failure.

Most people when talking about children taking risks automatically think of climbs and swings. But this is also the time that kids are first taking social risks. The payoffs might be different, but I think far more internalised, and just as important to developing a healthy long term understanding of risk in general than the physical ones.

This is important to me because growing up in relative isolation the opportunities to take those social risks didn't come along very often and when they did I was so far behind the development curve that they were pretty much doomed to failure. By the time I was thrust into a fully social environment I was still poorly-prepared to interact with my own age group, but the outcomes of failure were past inconsequential.

As a result I lack a positive risk-reward association, not in social circumstances, not in physical circumstances, not in business circumstances. This is if not crippling, at least hobbling when it comes to getting ahead in life.

This has been pretty much reinforced whenever I have deliberately tried to break it by taking risks. Whether I am really a poor judge of likely outcomes or just unlucky it's hard to say.

Without the gut feel for risk I approach uncertain situations from a very analytical angle. I analyse, I weigh, I plan, I contingency plan (I Garibaldi, for those who get the reference) ... I doubt and usually the opportunity passes. I do not make opportunities for myself - in truth I do not understand how. I react, but I don't progress.

Problem identified, but I am at a loss what to do about it.

"..and the best you can hope for is to die in your sleep."

Comments

i feel ur pain

[flufmeister.livejournal.com]

after soul searching recently about why so much of the stuff i plan or try fails I came realised a lot of it is to do with plain old self esteem and self confidence issues- and it made me think that both of those are from childhood. so is the solution to redo the self esteem and confidence now as a adult and try to overlay the old fears and doubts? or do we try and teach children about self esteem, how what people do and say affect each other etc.
this is just to say i think i know what ur going through.

[bigdee.livejournal.com]

I'm reminded of that aspect of my own upbringing. I didn't get a whole lot of social interaction or guidance, then I went off to uni and truly fell in the deep end. Cue many mistakes and subsequent efforts to learn from them. I still haven't got it right in a lot of respects.

[badasstronaut.livejournal.com]

That realisation sounds like quite a significant discovery itself, and I suppose it's the sort of thing the American style self-improvement sorts go to therapy to find out.

If it was me who'd just found that out about myself I guess I'd start planning to up the risk levels in tiny tiny steps.

[marsden-online.livejournal.com]

Oh it's something I've realised for quite a long time, but something I've repeatedly failed in my attempts to remedy (see 5th paragraph). I'm not sure how else to try structuring deliberate risk levels :(

But thanks for the comment :)