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Confidence & Risk Taking

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we move up in the world professionally. How do we launch our businesses to the next level or find a new career path? I think it has a lot to do with confidence and the ability to risk it all. Of course, all risks should be supported by calculations, but taking a risk can mean a lot for business. 

What are you doing in 2011 that you never thought you could do? What are you learning? Who are you working with? Consider what risks you can take and believe in yourself to accomplish them. 

A year ago, I never thought I would be speaking at conferences and offering workshops. I’m still very much in the learning stage, but speaking has taken me to new places that I never dreamt I would be. Thankfully, I had a lot of friends and family members who believed in me and helped me learn how to believe in myself to give me the confidence to try it out.

Let’s make 2011 the year of big chances and learning from mistakes. I’m in. What are you going to do to build confidence in your skills this year? Surround yourself with people who will push you to take your business to new levels this year.

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Liz

Liz King is a social media-integrated event planner and award winning blogger. As the owner of Liz King Events, she runs an innovative firm that creates dynamic branding events integrating the use of social media. Planning events from soup to nuts, she works with her team to create and sustain your event brand and enhance attendee engagement. Liz is also a co-founder of the Event Technology Showcase PlannerTech. As the owner of Liz King Events, she has been featured as a speaker at the International Association of Exhibitions and Events, National Association of Colleges and Employers, ExpoWest/Supply Expo and several other events as an expert on the topic of social media and events. She has also been featured in Connect Meetings Intelligence and Convene Magazine, among others.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 5th, 2011 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Event Professionals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://www.etouches.com Suzanne Carawan

    Hi Liz–this is a big topic! One thing that has helped me tremendously is studying taekwondo. In learning and practicing the martial art, there is a phrase called “pilsung” that has changed my life. “Pilsung” means “certain victory” and is a mindset that no matter what, you will approach the situation with a calm, inner strength of determination and conviction. It doesn’t mean that you’ll always win the battle, but it does mean that you need to believe that you will always win the war. I think this is a good way to approach risk with confidence.

    • http://www.lizkingevents.com Liz

      Suzanne – This is a great concept and certainly in line with my thoughts as of late. What is it that prompted you to try taekwondo? Are there other business principles you think it helps to enforce? Would love to hear more about your experiences!!

      • http://www.etouches.com Suzanne Carawan

        Hi Liz
        To be candid–I am a very complicated wacky woman and needed something to keep me moving that would take up enough mental space so that I was actually absorbed with soemthing that took my full attention. I found that taekwondo allowed me to literally be consumed for an hour and i would emerge realizing that i had been concentrating and fully focused without thinking about business or anything else! It was totally refreshing! What I started to learn is how to turn off the mind so that when it was time to turn ON the mind for business, that I wasn’t exhausted. I was refreshed and ready to concentrate on the issues at hand. TKD also helped me to start to not to second guess myself as a woman… which I think we all do and is terrible. I got a better mindset of making the decision, taking action and moving forward. If action is wrong, then make new decision, take action and move on. I started to eliminate the worry and found I had a lot more time and was far more productive!

        TKD also helps with overall health which always makes you feel better. I am a recovered bulimic and have body dysmorphia and had to just let go of looking at myself in the mirror and assessing myself on appearance. Instead, I started to focus on actual health: what do I feel like, what is emotional state, how strong am I , how much endurance do I have, what level of energy do I have? These were new metrics to me and TKD really helped me to practice assessing myself based on these concepts. Since TKD is a never-ending journey and there is no end to learning, this helped me to stop working with an expectation of completion and instead focus on enjoying the journey. I found that I stopped living in expectation of the next event and instead, living more in the moment.

        My Grandmaster’s philosophy is “nothing is impossible” which he derived while behind Communist lines in N. Korea as a black beret left to survive for weeks in the hills in enemy territory. Despite his military training, he teaches “passionate perseverance” and teaches students to walk through life with grace and humility. His info and article on his philosophy is here: http://www.myustma.com/index.php/cms/about_us Very very interesting man!

        I also forced my best friend, who had never done a sport in her life, to take TKD. She was scared to death and didn’t think her body could do it. She had zero confidence in her body. 3 years later, she got her black belt and changed the entire course of her life. She credits TKD and her best friend who wouldn’t let her give up and had total confidence in her.

        The other thing I’ve learned in TKD is that you are never alone–there is always a community waiting for you to join them. I think this is an important business principle–as businesses have to focus more and more on people–human capital–the culture and organizational behavior of an organization is going to be more and more important. Treat people well–don’t treat employees as worker bees–don’t treat colleagues as competitors. It’s a different way to operate and brings the level of excellence up and makes positive attitudes de facto.

        After all, we can only do our best when we are safe, healthy and interested!

        • http://www.lizkingevents.com Liz

          Suzanne, Thank you so much for sharing your journey. This is an amazing story and I’m glad to see you also shared it on your blog. There are so many parallels between your work with TKD and with business and I can see how it helps you stay focused and think more clearly. I think you may have convinced me to give it a try!

  • http://tahiralovesevents.blogspot.com Tahira Endean

    Interesting – years ago I studied a similar martial art – but then life got in the way. Now my husband and kids (10 and 12) have after three years of study in tkd received their black belts. I can tell you that it has made an enormous difference to the kids in confidence and respect / integrity and their understanding of these very basic life skills.

    Although I teach every week (for a decade) speaking anywhere else still makes me nervous. I think that something like ToastMasters which forces you to look weekly at how you speak, prepare and focus would be a great thing to do.

    Otherwise, you have strong messages to share – so just keep going forward – and being your best you – with you deciding what that looks like. Embrace and enjoy – cheers! Tahira

    • http://www.etouches.com Suzanne Carawan

      Hi Tahira,
      I’ve always been interested in Toastmasters, but never really understood how it works. Can you explain your experience and how the meetings actually work? I think it’s a great idea and EVERYONE should receive public speaking training in today’s world of videos! As we move out of the industrial age and more and more into the creative age where communication is key–we ALL need to be on our A game as communicators. I tell my husband who has barely had to communicate with anyone throughout his career because he’s a financial analyst that he had a good run and his time is UP! the expectation will soon be that everyone can read, write, speak and present themselves well through correct body language, etc.

      One other thing I’d recommend for confidence is going through body language training–read a good book and become more self-aware!

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  • http://www.icon-presentations.com/blog/ Jenise Fryatt

    Liz,

    I read this post a while ago, but didn’t have time to respond. This is a very big subject in my life so I thought I’d take the time to weigh in now.

    For many of my younger years I was paralyzed by my fear of failure. For me, this meant that I wouldn’t even try anything unless I thought I would be good at it right off the bat. When I did screw up my courage to try something, I would always make it into this HUGE life and death thing and then when it (almost inevitably) didn’t work out, I would be devastated.

    Needless to say, I spent many years frustrated by the vague awareness of my potential and my powerlessness to do anything about it. Becoming a parent was a huge step for me, because of course I wanted to be perfect at it so I read all the self-help books and the one thing they all kept repeating was that you have to be the kind of person you want your children to be. I looked at myself and realized that my habit of giving up on things was something I wanted to change. So I started to pursue some of the things I had always wanted to do.

    Acting was big on that list so I started taking classes. I began to audition for things and see the positives of doing it WITHOUT getting the part. This helped me a lot. I was sick of seeing myself as inadequate and constantly berating myself. I began to see how destructive this was. Meditating and a spiritual practice helped me to start to change those thoughts.

    But the biggest thing that really helped me to let go and start taking risks was improv. I had been scared of it, but forced myself to take a class and because the teacher was so kind and nurturing, I had fun. She subsequently asked me to join her improv performing group and I wound up doing that for 6 years.

    Improv has taught me to embrace failure as an opportunity for learning and even for creating something great. It has taught me to be comfortable with falling on my face publicly. And most importantly, it has ingrained in me how supremely rewarding it usually is when you take a risk. I’ve done things in the last few years I never dreamed of because I am now in the habit of taking leaps of faith.

    I’ve learned that risk taking is a very important habit to cultivate, not only for business but for our own personal development. It leads to a fulfilling life.

    Thanks so much for raising this very important topic.

    • http://www.lizkingevents.com Liz

      Jenise – Thank you for sharing your experience. I think many of us have had similar experiences with learning to accept that we can’t be perfect and learning to fail forward. However, it’s not often that we can all put our experience in such a succinct way! I think this experience is what helped you to do so well at Event Camp with your improv session and I could see you doing much more of this in the future. I don’t have direct experience with improv, but I can certainly imagine how it is the perfect combination of risk and confidence! I so appreciate you sharing on this topic. You are awesome!!