Mitigating Risk and Learning From Your Mistakes

It’s important to be smart with this bullishness – not blind to the dangers!

Mitigating Risks

There’s one more thing you’re going to do while using the fear setting technique and that is to think about how you can avoid the risks altogether. This is an even better method than teaching yourself not to fear the worst case scenarios because now you’re removing those worst case scenarios off of the table altogether!

• • Losing your job and never being able to achieve the same level of success again – This is a scary prospect so a good solution is to think about how you can make this project look like a great win on your CV. You could also speak with your current employer about the prospect of potentially coming back. You’ll often find they’re happy to help out and to offer you a place when you get back!

• • Being unable to pay off the loan, going bankrupt, losing your home and being unable to take our future mortgages – Okay then, how about you don’t take out a conventional loan at all? Other options include getting a loan from family and friends, or even crowdfunding (which means raising money from the general public via sites like Kickstarter). You could find an investor alternatively, or a business partner who has money to pour into it.

• • Letting your family down, forcing them to live with less, perhaps driving your partner away – Remove this risk by using the above strategy and by discussing with your partner ways you can live on one salary. Another option might be to work a part time job, or how about earning some income online? You could even create more revenue models for this existing business, by selling your cupcakes online too, or by doing events.

• • Ending up homeless and destitute. Again, the above strategies will ensure this isn’t a risk.

• • Being seen as a failure in front of everyone if it doesn’t work out – If you’re that worried, you don’t have to tell everyone. Or how about opening this more as a side project or hobby and explaining you’re not in it to make money.

• • Being seen as reckless by everyone even if it does work out – If you’re worried this is reckless then you could create a multi-stage plan to launch your business. Before opening up the store, you could start out by doing events or selling at fairs. This is something you could do at the weekends and then you could gradually reduce the amount of time you’re working in the office.

• • Realizing that you don’t actually like working here and that it is not as rewarding as you thought it would be – The above solution will address this problem too. By going through this process, you now have a much safer and more resilient business model and hopefully you’re less afraid to take the leap.

And once again, I hope this has demonstrated to you that you don’t have to wait. You don’t have to wait to earn enough money to finally have the time to quit your job and launch your cupcake shop – in fact, using that method
will ensure it never happens. You have the means to make it happen right now, with crowdfunding, by making a smaller business first and bootsrapping, or how about using PayPal?

This same logic can be applied to any number of different situations and goals too. For example, many people will stay stuck in a job they don’t like and they’ll tell people that they can’t leave because their family is relying on
their income. This is sounding very much like they intend to leave their job and then look for a new one. In which case, yeah that would be pretty reckless!

But instead, the much, much smarter option would be to find the job you want to do in the evenings after work and only leave it when you’re happy with that job. Oh and this  is also how you set up your own online business – work a few hours in the evenings, earn some money that way and then quit your job when you’re reliably making enough to live off of!

Recognize the Power of Your Choices

The thing to recognize is that every tiny choice you make is really a decision. You might think that you’re trapped and without the ability to make choices. You may feel as though your life has b

een thrust on you and that you have just been a hapless victim.

But as I said before: you chose to be here. And if you felt as though you never got the choice, then chances are that it was your inaction that kept you here.That’s still a choice though – choosing to do nothing is still a choice! And with this in mind, it becomes incredibly important to think hard about your choices going forward and to be able to look back at those decisions you made in order to know how to change things for the better.

What decisions have worked for you and which haven’t? The first place is probably to start with that decision to take no action.The decision to let fear and social pressure push you into a job that you don’t enjoy. How did that decision turn out for you? Now let’s extrapolate that for a mome

nt and imagine that you continue making that same decision for many more years to come.

How will your life look if you keep on making the same decisions? In this case the reality is probably much scarier than any of the possible futures we looked at when fear setting. If you continue with your inaction, then you’re going to end up working the same job probably for the rest of your life. Your lack of physical activity in the evenings (owing to your lack of movement during the day), will lead to your body gradually deteriorating as you gain weight and collect aches and pains.

You’ll never live your dreams of running a business, being a rock star or whatever else it was you wanted to achieve. And you’ll continue to be completely unrewarded in what you do. Every day will continue to be one slog after another and one day you’ll wake up and be 80. That is the price of the decision to do nothing. Look at this decision, weight it up and then decide if you can continue to live that way.

Hopefully, this will help you to recognize the importance of all those decisions. And that also includes the decision you make to not work on your business tonight, to not workout tonight…

Kaizen

This might sound like a lot and it might sound daunting but that’s why it can pay to keep in mind the principle of Kaizen. Kaizen means making small, incremental changes that all add up into something big and profound. So that is one mistake you should look back on and learn from. What others are there? Well, perhaps you can remember examples of when you tried to make changes in your life in the past and it didn’t work out. What caused those
failures?