Things we dream to do in our lives

When I sometimes chat with friends we like to talk about things we dream to do in our lives. Often these things involve us to take risks, personal risks we can’t foresee and in most cases like to avoid.

Not being brave enough to take these risks we often don’t change anything and keep on doing the things we know. Ultimately this ends up being worse than taking the risk.

Existential fear is deeply engraved in our human brains and will do everything possible to hold us back from whatever we like to do.

From then on, every time I was facing a big risk I asked one simple question:

“If everything goes wrong, whats my personal worst case scenario, and is it really that bad?"

I know the answer. My worst case scenario is polishing silver ware. I’ve been there, and no, it’s not that bad.

I believe that in most cases when we talk about “risk taking" that these risks aren’t as big as they seem. In our head things often look bigger than they actually are. Visualizing our worst case scenarios & fears often help us more than visualizing our goals.

Visualizing our goals is common and powerful, but often it comes with defining safety as well. And the moment we think about our safety we reinforce our fears.

The amount of suffering we go through by not taking risks often exceeds the suffering we imagine our worst case scenario would bring.

So the question is, what is your personal worst case scenario? It’s different for all of us, but often smaller than we think.