Creative Risk-Taking for High Performance

By Mark Gorkin

As a public speaker, it's not surprising that risk-taking is a subject dear to my heart and ego. It's well known that most Americans would rather contemplate their own death than face an audience.

This self-conscious majority apparently associates public speaking with a classic definition of social risk: "The estimated likelihood of being embarrassed, shamed or humiliated, or of experiencing a loss of valued affection or respect of others." (Zuckerman).

Of course, some of us platform performers have had to deal with both demons: as a speaker, believe me, I've died many times. And while skeptical about reincarnation, I'm still alive and talking…but not just talking. Over the years, I've transformed my share of humbling learning curves into a modus operandi for risk-taking. Now, drawing upon my experience as a speaker and mass media communicator, I'll show how grappling with the need for control and perfection can stimulate more productive and innovative performance in a variety of settings.

Humbling is the right word, for when you experiment and explore as a speaker you are spotlighting personal anxieties and defenses, flaws and foibles, as well as narcissistic illusions. Even with some calculation, you are still throwing caution and control to the wind. So let's hope we are not just talking hot air. When coming out from a bunker of notes or stripping away the armor of a too practiced and predictable "canned" program or lecture, the public presenter's learning environment rapidly becomes both vital and vulnerable.

Clearly, a myriad of roles and undertakings, not just the speaking arena, can become a creative, double-edged crucible for quickly challenging your cognitive, emotional and interpersonal strengths and vulnerabilities as a high performance risk-taker. Anytime you: a) break away from conventional thinking and knowledge-building, b) pursue new, uncertain or still fluid models, methods and mediums, or c) generate "a process that is extended in time and characterized by originality, adaptiveness and realization" (MacKinnon), you are into the creative risk-taking adventure.

What lets risk-takers mine primal sources or soar with creative currents? These "on the edge" individuals:

1. Are not overly preoccupied with making mistakes or with social disapproval; they are able to tolerate the anxiety of separateness.
   
   
2. Have a strong enough ego to admit when they are wrong or in trouble.
   
   
3. Analyze, emotionally experience, and learn from trial and error.
   

And with this foundation, "creative persons are precisely those that take the cards that make them anxious" (May).

Four Steps for Creative Risk-Taking

Here are key steps and strategies for developing your "Creative Risk-Taking" potential:

1. Aware-ily Jump in Over Your Head. Only by jumping into the fray can you quickly discover how adequate your resources are with respect to the novel challenge ahead. This approach precludes a strategy that eliminates all risk in advance. You may need to encounter realistic anxiety, exaggerated loss of control and even some feelings of humiliation to confront your "Intimate FOE." But often the reward for the risk is a unique readiness to build knowledge, emotional hardiness and skills for survival, along with evolving imaginative mastery.
   
   
2. Strive to Survive the High Dive. There's no guarantee when grappling with new heights or depths, but four fail-safe measures come to mind:
   
   a) Strive high and embrace failure – failure is not a sign of unworthiness, but a learning margin between perfection and achievement, especially as one explores the fine line between vision and hallucination
   
   b) Develop a realistic time frame – recognize that many battles are fought and lost before a major undertaking is won
   
   c) Be tenaciously honest – continuously assess the impact of outcomes, changes within yourself and your environment, and the rules underlying your operation
   
   d) Establish a support system – have people in your life who provide both kinds of TLC: Tender Loving Criticism and Tough Loving Care
   
   
3. Thrive On Thrustration. Learn to incubate or be stuck between thrusting ahead with direct action and frustration. Creativity often requires being more problem-minded than solution-focused. Increasing tension or "thrustration" (Rabkin) can shake the habituated, settled mind and may transform a dormant subconscious into an active psychic volcano – memories, novel associations, and symbolic images overflow into consciousness. You're in position to generate fertile problem-solving alternatives. Problems are not just sources of tension and frustration, but are opportunities for integrating the past and the present, the conscious and the unconscious, the obscure and the obvious. Here lies creative perspective.
   
   
4. Design for Error and Opportunity. Innovative and risk-taking individuals and organizations are more attuned to a range of possibilities than to fixed or ideal goals. These systems prefer the risk of initiation and experimentation to preoccupation over deviation or imperfection. Floundering through a sea of novelty and confusion often yields new connections, long-range mastery, and an uncommon big picture. A narrow, safe course creates the illusion of achievement and short-lived control. Of course, limited predesign means opportunity for errors. In open people and systems, startup misplays are vital signs for self-correcting and self-challenging feedback.
   

Remember, errors of judgment or design doesn’t signify incompetence; they more likely reveal inexperience or immaturity, perhaps even boldness. Our so-called "failures" can be channeled as guiding streams (sometimes raging rivers) of opportunity and experience that so often enrich – widen and deepen – the risk-taking passage. If we can just immerse ourselves in these unpredictable yet, ultimately, regenerative waters.

Mark Gorkin, "The Stress Doc," is a licensed Clinical Social Worker and a national speaker and trainer on stress, communications, team building, creativity and HUMOR. He is the "Online Psychohumorist" (TM) for the major AOL mental health resource, Online Psych, and for AOL's Business Know How. Check his Web site, recently featured as a USA Today Online "Hot Site," at www.stressdoc.com or email StressDoc@aol.com.

Published in Networking Today, March 2002.