TRANSCRIPT FROM VIDEO:
I'm here today to share about how you can take more risks.
Might not be the way you normally think of.
This is inspired by two podcasts I was listening to. One is called Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais. He's a sports psychologist who works with NFL teams and high performance sports people.
He was interviewing Jimmy Chin, who's the director of Free Solo. Not sure if you’ve seen it; it's where Alex Honnold does free solo, climbing with no ropes or harnesses, on El Capitan [in Yosemite]. Took like a few hours, but it's pretty much insane; if you drop, you die!
They were talking about how Alex, who's like a super athlete, even in his peer group of people who climb hardcore, he's an outlier.
And they talked about one of his technique of visualization. This is kinda normal for athletes to do, and some people in high performance fields in other areas would do it, too.
But, for example, what he would do is, he would sit in his van for days, imagining either the moves...so he doesn’t do the move physically; he does it all in his mind.
And the interesting thing I found was that he didn't only do the right moves in his mind; he also imagined what if he stepped wrong, and how he would fix or get himself out of it.
So let’s say one of the moves, he will just do like maybe 10 iterations of it, to see, “Okay if I did it wrong, how would I come back and fix it?”
He actually even imagined falling, and how that would feel!
And not to encourage falling of course. And this is when Dr. Michael Gervais talks about his rant about the manifesting field where people are like, “Oh, you manifest something, it’s going to happen, so don't think about bad things!” He's like, “No, that's wrong!”
Ok in this case, Alex was using it to imagine what it would feel like, so that he won't be scared of it anymore.
(And side note, Alex’s fear system doesn't activate much. That's why he does all these crazy stuff.)
But I thought it was very cool that he doesn't only imagine how things can go right, but also how things can go wrong, and how he would fix it.
And let's say he did think if things went terribly wrong, which is falling, how he would feel actually, to help him calm down to say, “Okay. I've lived through it already, and I was okay.”
The other piece was listening to another podcast, there's an economist on Farnam Street [‘s podcast the Knowledge Network]. I forgot his name. Apologies. [Dr. Sendhil Mullainathan, recipient of the MacArthur “Genius Grant”]
They were talking about thinking in your mind and pushing the boundaries of your thought.
And the quote that resonates, that relates to this is,
“If you don't take risks inside your mind, where would you take risks?”
And this is about pushing your idea forward so, for example, you’re coming up with something new. And people tend to prejudge or pre-evaluate the idea, and not even sharing with somebody, just thinking for themselves.
And he's like, “If you, in your own mind, don't push yourself to the limit to say...to see...take risks in your mind, and in the sense of thinking bigger and beyond, and see and push yourself there and then evaluate later. So you never even take risks in your mind, how would you even take risks in your life?”
So for me, I thought these two examples were really cool.
We talk about taking risks, and people think about it more like an action thing. But if it doesn't even happen in your mind in the first place, to think of the best, [and] worst case scenario, think extreme, go big, dream big or go crazy on it and push your brain to the limit of what something can be, how would that even translate to reality at all in the first place?
So we can work on taking risk by pushing our mind first, to be risky in our own mind, before we can even start to try to do any behaviors that are getting us closer to those big things that we're thinking, or those risky things that we’ve been thinking about.
Hopefully that's some food for thought for you of how to push yourself to take more risks.
Podcasts mentioned:
Jimmy Chin on Shifting Your Perspective of What’s Possible from Finding MasterY
This week’s conversation is with Jimmy Chin, an Academy Award winning filmmaker, National Geographic photographer and professional mountain sports athlete. He has led or participated in cutting edge expeditions around the world for over 20 years. Jimmy’s photographs have graced numerous covers of National Geographic Magazine and the New York Times Magazine. Their latest documentary Free Solo, featuring Alex Honnold, won a BAFTA, seven primetime Emmys and the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2019. If you haven’t seen it, it’s the first thing you should watch after you’re done listening to this podcast.
Sendhil Mullainathan: The Chaos Inside Us from The Knowledge Project
Sendhil Mullainathan is the Professor of Computation and Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the author of Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Sendhil reflects on lessons he learned from his father, how creativity is the marrying of ideation and filtration, direct versus associative memory, what we can do to get better, rules versus decisions, positioning over predicting, outcome over ego and so much more. Listen now for some ideas that you can put into practice that will help you become a better version of yourself.