How to Take a Risk for the Risk- Adverse

Comfort. It is a warm feeling like you are snuggled up drinking hot chocolate while watching a rom com. It is a safe place where you know how to harness your strength and avoid your weaknesses. It is a big hug after a long day. Despite all of comfort’s positive attributes, it is not a place that you can constantly exist within. It is part of the human experience to want to improve yourself and grow.

In our case, with a typical 9-5, there was a lot of professional growth for both of us as we learned more about our technical professions and navigated the convoluted environment that is corporate America. However, with all that professional growth packed into a long work day, it can be challenging to prioritize developing new skills that will add value to your life and those around you. Especially when learning new skills typically means your first few tries will most likely be a crash and burn but hopefully slightly less smokey with each attempt.

Coming home to comfort gave us time to think and truly evaluate what we wanted for our lives next and how we could grow our skills to get us there. We came to the conclusion that seeing and experiencing the world is something that we just couldn’t pass on. With very few roots in place and maximum flexibility, it felt like our window to take a crazy risk on ourselves was starting to close before life started to get in the way.

While some brave souls hatch ideas and are executing them the very next day…that is not our style. Being engineers and extreme planners, we did what we knew how to do to reach our goals: plan.

Over the next year after we made the decision that we wanted to quit our jobs and travel the world, we came home from work every day and researched our little hearts out and plan, plan, planned. The timelines, the gear, the budget… If you can think it, there’s a spead sheet for it.

And that right there is key for risk-adverse people to consider taking a risk. Planning.

That’s not to say that everything will go to plan because, of course, “man plans and God laughs”. But planning has kept our minds at peace as we decided to cliff dive off of our comfort zone and has rebranded plain old risk to calculated risk.

— Kelly Maura