Risk is woven into the fabric of self-employment.
Every choice you face entails a measure of risk. How will you look? How will you feel? Will others approve? Will you gain or lose money? Will you have more or less quality time?
For the self-employed, risk is a constant teacher. If you are a willing student, you will learn much about business and about yourself. What’s more, you will learn how your own well being is entwined with the well being of those around you.
The lessons you learn will not protect you from risk. Instead, they will give you a keener appreciation of it and an appetite for self-awareness and possibility.
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing
As Helen Keller wrote, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”
The question I invite you to ask in the year ahead is: “What does this daring adventure want from me?”
I believe that risk is a pointed, not always polite, invitation to increased self-awareness and self-efficacy. The pressure cooker of risk urges you to be ever more deeply responsible for your spiritual, emotional, and material well being. In terms of self-employment, it requires you to be responsible for creating wealth in all dimensions.
Risk happens when you put your hopes on the line
Self-employment places you at the intersection of intention, instinct, choice, and desire. There your hopes and fears meet the hopes and fears of the world.
At this intersection, you risk your wealth and well being on multiple levels. You find out instantly if your insides and outsides are in alignment.
With time, attention, and some manner of faith to guide and sustain you, you will be better able to sense into Life’s unfolding mystery as encoded in everyday events. You will discern more clearly your unique role in the cosmic dance.
It’s in accepting this unique role that you experience true success, wealth, and well being in all dimensions. Then, for a moment, and in spite of all the effort that the effortless dance required, you know yourself to be in the right place at the right time.
And you know this, not because things are going your way, but because you will have found a still point within yourself that orients you in the turbulent tumble of ongoing events. In that moment you experience unalloyed success.
This, I think, is what Dame Julian of Norwich meant when she wrote, “All is well, and all manner of things be well.”
In the year ahead, I wish for you the imagination to embrace new possibilities for wealth and well being in all dimensions. I wish you the courage to take the attendant risks. And I wish for you the enduring awareness that you are always at the right place and the right time. That, indeed, all manner of things be well.
Together, let us show up, serve, and thrive.
Happy New Year!
