How to Inspire Yourself to Take Risks

Source: Jack Lloyd/Pixabay

For as long as I can remember, I’ve told myself (and everyone else) that I don’t partake of any sports that involve the sensation or possibility of falling—sky-diving, bungee jumping, hang-gliding, para-sailing, mountain climbing, even roller-coasters. My very first nightmare, and for many years during my childhood the most recurring one, was of falling. Not falling from anything or toward anything; just falling.

So when a friend asked if I wanted to go paragliding with her while on a trip to Turkey a few years ago, I declined, and we more or less shelved the idea. But one afternoon we visited a village on the Turquoise Coast called Oludeniz, considered among the world’s top spots for paragliding, and I spent a solid hour behind my binoculars, watching paragliders come off the mountains along the coast—one after another, sometimes 20 in the sky simultaneously.

My conclusion was that it looked like smooth sailing, and the landings soft. So backed up with this new data, based on personal observation, I changed my mind on the spot, as well as my story.

It helped that I also had, as I always do on such adventures, the additional comforts of travel insurance and a round-trip ticket, which is based squarely on the assumption that I’ll be going back home at the appointed hour, that nothing is going to prevent me from getting back to work on whatever designated Monday morning I’ve scheduled for my return to business as usual.

The next day, in an act of not just courage but paradigm-busting—and in what would become the most literal high of the entire trip—I went paragliding.

Turning Fear Into Exhilaration

What I did to overcome the almost universally unnerving prospect of risk-taking—in fact, to increase my tolerance for it—was to increase what Michael Apter in The Dangerous Edge calls “protective frames.” These are mechanisms you put in place to help convince yourself that you can do it, and help you not only manage your anxiety but actually turn it into exuberance. It's a kind of emotional safety bubble that can turn danger and fear into exhilaration.

"Think of looking at a tiger in a cage,” he says. “Both the tiger and the cage are needed in order to experience excitement. The tiger without the cage would be frightening. The cage without the tiger would be boring. Both are necessary. In order to experience excitement, then, you need both the possibility of danger and something you believe will protect you from it."

This could be the psychological bubble provided by well-honed skills, advance preparation and rehearsal, proper equipment, a support network, an emergency parachute, or just the sense of confidence that comes from having succeeded at managing (or surviving) the risk previously.

It could be rituals and routines that help ground you and keep you balanced while you do your highwire work, whether creative, professional or athletic—a regular regimen, a daily meditation practice, a cup of coffee before and a jog in the park after your peak creative hours.

I used to know a freelance writer who, in order to take himself seriously and convince himself that he was “going to work,” got showered and dressed every morning, left the house through the side door, came back in through the front door, walked upstairs and began writing.

It could even be an act of re-framing. “Don’t call it uncertainty—call it wonder,” suggests Osho in his book Courage: The Joy of Living Dangerously. “Don’t call it insecurity—call it freedom.”

Sometimes it helps to build a case for yourself, to convince yourself that you’re courageous by remembering times when you were courageous. That is, the power of precedence. Make a list if need be: the time you finally got yourself to jump off the high diving board, to act in a play, end a relationship that wasn’t working, get back into a new relationship, quit a job for something better, unfriend someone on Facebook, correct someone who mispronounced your name, ask the waiter to take back an undercooked hamburger, share a vulnerability with a friend, ask someone out on a date, ask for help, let your kid ride his bike alone for the first time downhill.

For roughly half my decade-long tenure at the Cincinnati Enquirer, I kept hearing a call to quit and become a freelance writer, which is rightly considered akin to an extreme sport in its levels of risk and insecurity. In order to balance out the fear factor—and not risk living with something I knew I’d always regret not having done—I followed Apter’s prescription, and Louis Pasteur’s advice that “chance favors the prepared mind.” I created a plan to help skew my perceptions back in my favor, and build some courage into the enterprise.

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It began with a pep talk to remind myself that I’d been told that my chances of landing a job as a reporter at a big-city newspaper right out of college were close to nil, and I did it anyway; and before that, I’d been told that my chances of convincing the college I was then attending to allow me to take the internship that brought me to Cincinnati to begin with—when they didn’t even have an internship program—were also close to nil, but I did that, too.

Then I committed to one year of Thursday nights, during which I became a student of the life I wanted to live, a disciple of its details. So instead of taking the bus back uptown on Thursdays after work, I stayed downtown, went to the public library from 6 to 9, when it closed, and studied the freelance life. I read books about it, brainstormed story ideas, queried editors, researched and wrote articles, conducted interviews, fielded rejection letters, re-wrote articles, and sometimes just slept.

I also met with freelance writers to pick their brains. What do you like about the life, what do you hate, how did you get into it, what kind of job did you leave, how much preparing did you do, how long did it take to start making decent money, what advice do you have for a neophyte, what do you wish someone had told you? And one of the things they frequently told me was that I’d better have two years worth of savings in the bank (talk about protective frames), which was a bummer, because I didn’t have that kind of money in the bank at the time, and it propelled me to extend my deadline another year.

Two years is a long time to be doing something when you’d rather be doing something else, but it’s not 20. And at least I was actively moving toward my goal rather than actively talking myself out of it. The cumulative effect of two years' worth of Thursday nights gave me the running jump I needed to carry me through my leap of faith. By the time I leapt, I leapt into work, not into an abyss. I had relationships up and running with editors, assignments in the queue, published clips, and confidence I didn’t have two years earlier.

Taking the Leap Into Adventure

As for my paragliding adventure, it began with a 20-minute drive up a hairpinning mountain road that one of our pilots said was statistically riskier than the flight itself (another kind of protective frame).

After being harnessed in tandem with a pilot, we each took off by essentially jumping off a 2000-foot cliff and catching a thermal which took us up to 3500 feet. Above the ground. I looked between my legs and there was nothing between me and the ground but empty air. To borrow an expression from whitewater kayaking, it may have been class II rapids, but it had class V consequences.

Naturally, my instinct for survival went off like a siren in my skull, reminding me that jumping off cliffs is not generally in keeping with the agenda of staying alive. But we not only jumped off the cliff, we actually ran toward it, the better to catch the wind in our parachutes. The only other inner narration I heard was that incredulous and electrified voice that so often accompanies taking a flyer: “I can’t believe I’m actually doing this.”

But for the most part, in keeping with the data I had collected down in Oludeniz the day before—the protective frame of first-person observation—it was a very smooth ride. That is, unless you opt for the option of “acrobatics,” which the pilots will gladly accommodate with a series of swoops and corkscrews that may well bring your lunch back up for reconsideration. For this reason, I do not recommend eating lunch before such an adventure, or for that matter breakfast, or possibly even dinner the night before. In fact, a three-day fast leading up to it doesn’t seem like an unreasonable protective frame to me.

We spent a good 40 minutes aloft, gliding high above the Turquoise Coast, and our landing, right onto a concrete jetty at the harbor, was as gentle as stepping off a curb, though the rush of adrenaline I experienced at having done it at all raised my blood pressure more than anything I experienced on the ride itself.

The whole thing from beginning to end was also captured by the pilots in photographs and videotapes which they were, of course, happy to sell us for an exorbitant fee back at the office, and which, in our triumphant state, we bought.