Focus On the Upside: Advice for Gen Y About Taking Risks
Hi All!
The following guest post is courtesy of Caroline Ceniza-Levine, co-founder of SixFigureStart, a career coaching firm that specializes in working with Gen Y young professionals. Formerly in corporate HR and retained search, Caroline most recently headed campus recruiting for Time Inc and has also recruited for Accenture, Citibank, Disney ABC, and others.
Her article is entitled “Focus On the Upside!”:
Two strikeout leaders in baseball are Reggie Jackson and Babe Ruth. Neither player is remembered as a strikeout leader. Still, people hear stories of great success coming only after great struggle, and this is not enough to encourage them to go after their dreams. The potential downside of failure often greatly outweighs the potential upside from success.
Here are some tips to focus on the upside, especially in an anxious market that may reinforce your habit of playing it safe:
Confront the downside. What are the specific consequences of failure to meet this goal? How much money will you lose? How much time will you have invested? How much notoriety will this bring? Really visualize for yourself the worst possible downside, and make specific plans on how to mitigate the consequences.
Confront the upside. What are the tangible effects of success at this goal? Express it in pictures that you hang on your wall. Write it down in a journal that you read regularly. Tell friends what it means to you. Keep your upside in your sight, your mind, and your words, and it will seem more reachable. Replace one fear with another. At some point, we need to just take our shot. You may never get over your fear of failure, but you could replace it with a greater fear of never knowing.
Think about what it would mean for you to never know what happened if you tried. The prospect of living with a what-if is not very appealing. Focus on the regret, remorse, disappointment, shame, sadness, etc. of not even trying, and you may find these feelings worse than any downside from failure.
Reggie Jackson wouldn’t be a Hall of Famer, baseball icon, and candy bar, without also being a strikeout leader. Putting himself in the game meant downside, but also great upside. If you never take your shot, nothing will change. Is the life you have now exactly the way that you want it to be? If not, take aim. As Wayne Gretzky, hockey sports icon, noted “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
Article provided through Recruiting Blogswap, a content exchange service sponsored by CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities.
Bye for now and thank you, Caroline, for the guest post!
Lisa
Lisa Orrell is The Generation Relations Expert, and has appeared on ABC, MSNBC and NPR (to name a few). She is a speaker, consultant, and author of the book "Millennials Incorporated" (on Amazon). Based on her expertise, Lisa is an in-demand expert who educates well-known companies (such as Cisco Systems, Paul Mitchell, and Blue Cross/Blue Shield) about effectively attracting, recruiting, managing and retaining Millennials (Generation Y). She also conducts popular seminars on how to improve generation relations within the workforce – thus improving communication, productivity and revenue. MEDIA: Contact Lisa for an interesting interview!
May 19th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
[...] Focus On the Upside: Advice for Gen Y About Taking Risks: This post was not written by a gen yer but she gives us tips to focus on the upside, especially in an anxious market that may reinforce your habit of playing it safe. [...]