Risky Business

Don’t Be Afraid of What Can Go Wrong

Aicila: [00:00:00] Recently noticed that the personal development world has decided asking what can go wrong is a mindset problem. The better question, the positive question is what could go right? I'd like to respectfully disagree with that entire premise. Vegas didn't build a neon empire and pessimism it built one on our very human, very powerful desire to focus on what can go right on our possibilities. And that hope is real.

It's also incomplete. Today I wanna talk about why asking what could go wrong might be one of the more underrated moves in your business and why avoiding that question isn't optimism, it's avoidance, dressed up in positive thinking.

Risk is unavoidable as is the desire to avoid it. And mostly when we talk about risk, we're really talking about is outcomes we don't like. And the desire to avoid those, that's where things get sticky. Avoidance doesn't make the risk or the bad outcomes disappear.

It makes you less prepared when they show up. Because they [00:01:00] do.

I recently saw a meme that said, when I was young and naive, I used to hope bad things wouldn't happen, and now I hope when they do, they're funny. The question is not whether something will go wrong. The question is when it does, do you have enough self-trust to handle it? That self-trust doesn't come from positive thinking. It comes from preparation, from having looked the risk in the eye and decided to move anyway.

Here's what I wanna bring in the energy equation, because I think what people often call fear of risk can be a momentum energy problem.

Momentum energy is what gets you started and what carries you through to completion. When it's low, everything feels like it requires more effort than it's worth. You stall, you second guess. You wait for the right time and it's never gonna come.

And a thing that depletes momentum, energy faster than almost anything. Those unresolved what ifs. The risks and decisions that you haven't looked at directly. Avoidance is expensive. It costs more energy to circle a risk than to assess it. I see this with founders constantly. Someone will spend 6, 8, 10 [00:02:00] months not launching something, not because they don't believe in it, but because they haven't named what they're actually afraid of.

They're circling. And that circling is exhausting. It drains momentum without producing any forward motion. The moment that they actually name the risk, write it down, say it out loud, look at it directly. Something shifts, not because that risk disappears, but because now

it's a problem with edges, and problems with edges can be planned for. So think about what risk are you currently circling instead of naming? And what is it costing you to keep not deciding.

Asking what can go wrong isn't pessimism. It's preparation. It's basic risk management. And risk management is an essential tool in the solopreneur toolkit.

Here's a simple version, identify the most likely outcomes and the ones with the biggest impact and focus your preparation there. You don't have to solve for every scenario, just the ones we're solving for. And then you leap with your eyes open. It's so much easier to jump when you map the landing [00:03:00] name. Our risk, you've been avoiding looking at directly what is the most likely outcome.

If it happens, you can go for the positive one too, and the things that would be problematic or challenging, and how would you handle them. How would you mitigate them? Here's something that I think is really important to bring to the table.

You really have to, you really have to think about the cost of not making the decision or taking the risk. It's easy to think about what happens if we leap and it doesn't work out. It's pretty natural fantasy, if you will. It's rare that we sit and think about what happens if we don't go at all. And I know there's all that, you know, we, we miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take blah, blah, blah. But I'm not talking about that dramatic version, the deathbed regret, the road not taken. I'm really talking about that practical day-to-day version, the slow drain of carrying something unlaunched, the low grade exhaustion of that simple decision that just didn't get made.

The creative energy that [00:04:00] keeps circling back to the same idea 'cause you haven't given it a yes or a no. That's not safety. It's a different kind of cost. It's just a quieter one. The unlived risk has an energy price too. And unlike the risk you actually take and it never resolves.

In my own work and working with founders, one of the things that I've really seen is the more that you understand your choices, options and outcomes, the more willing you are to take action.

And I'll, I'll give you an example.

When I was running the nonprofit center in Tacoma, we had a black tie fundraiser that had grown every year. By year three, I knew we needed to take it to the next level, and that meant hiring a professional auctioneer. I had seen one at an art auction. She was amazing. The cost was significant for us.

At the time. We're talking a month of my salary, which let's be clear, it wasn't high, but it was still a big big risk for us. But I had seen her work. I knew what she could do. So I told the board, if she doesn't increase our auction proceeds by more [00:05:00] than she costs, don't pay me that month pay her instead. She more than doubled our earnings.

And here's the thing, I wasn't operating on hope. I had done the assessment. I had watched her work, I had run the numbers, and I knew I would be okay either way. And that's what made the leap possible.

Not the confidence that it would work, although I really was confident. It was the confidence that I could handle it if it didn't. Clarity is the antidote to fear, not certainty. You're not waiting until it's guaranteed. You're waiting until you trust yourself enough to handle it.

And that's the goal. Not this won't fail, but win or lose. You'll be glad you played.

So I wanna leave you with a question that started all of this. It was at the end of the post that I made about this topic. What is a risk you're glad you took, regardless of how it turned out? So with that. Because the answer tells you something important about your relationship with risk, resilience and your capacity to recover. I'd love to hear your answer.

Drop it in the comments where, wherever [00:06:00] you're listening, come find me on Instagram or LinkedIn. And if you wanna dig into what's really draining your momentum right now, what's making a risk feel bigger than it is, the energy equation Snapshot is a good place to start. It's free, it's fast, and it's at bicurean.com/energysnapshot.

Thank you for tuning into business as unusual, remember, in this ever evolving world of modern business, it's not about fitting in.

It's about standing out. See you next time. Stay curious, stay innovative, and always keep it unusual.