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You need to balance emotion and logic.
- Amy Morin is a psychotherapist, mental strength coach, and international bestselling author.
- There's one mistake that people make when taking risks: They fail to equally balance emotion with logic in their decision-making.
- Excess emotion can cause some people to be overly excited and impulsive, while being too analytical can leave others overwhelmed by fear or anxiety.
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Life is full of risks. There are social risks, like inviting an acquaintance to join you for coffee. There are physical risks, like driving without a seatbelt or drinking excessively. And, of course, there are financial risks, like investing money in the stock market.
While some people enjoy risk more than others, the truth is that most people spend little time thinking about why they take certain risks and avoid others.
As a psychotherapist, I see what happens to people who constantly avoid risk - they live far beneath their potential. A 2008 study published in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychology found that some individuals become so risk-averse that they actually grow depressed as they dodge social invitations and avoid exciting opportunities.
Other people are impulsive risk-takers. To them, carefully examining the facts can seem tedious or anxiety-provoking, so they jump into new situations without thinking.
And then there are the people who always convince themselves that nothing will go wrong. They disguise their impulsivity as positive thinking while insisting everything will work out just fine. Yet in reality, they just don't want to invest any time into thinking about the risks they're taking.
But no matter which end of the risk-taking spectrum a person lands on, almost everyone makes one common mistake - they calculate risk based on their level of fear. If they feel nervous about the slight possibility of a negative or embarrassing outcome, they refuse to take the risk. However, the truth is that the level of fear you experience has nothing to do with the actual level of risk you face.