Performance Strategies: Risk, I Mean REAL RISK!

We worry about the wrong things! A wonderful article from MoneySense Magazine (February/March 2007) titled "The Risk Illusion" says it all.

Here's a funny question? What are you more afraid of, a bear or a deer?

The obvious answer is the bear. But, a study showed that in Canada last year 2 people were killed by bear and 159 by deer (think car accidents).

Our mind does a terrible job of assessing true risk. It imagines the worst and that seldom happens. But at the same time, it does not perceive certain real dangers until too late.

So what do you do? Well, let's put this in the context of business risk and leave bodily harm out of the discussion. First, when you assume risk STOP and ask yourself if your response was automatic and emotional versus logical and unemotional. If emotional, take the time to truly assess the "risk". I believe intuition is valuable but I also believe that our mind can trick itself into accepting emotion as intuition. If still unsure, get expert advice and remember it's not what we think about that will usually hurt us, it's what we don't think about that will.