Why Taking Big Risks Can Backfire (and What to Do Instead)

You're listening to the Savvy Painter Podcast Episode 341. Hello, hello, my friend. Welcome to another episode of the Savvy Painter Podcast. I am your host, Antrese Wood, and if you have been listening for a while, welcome back. If you are new here, I am so happy that you have found the podcast. Savvy Painter Podcast is the podcast for artists who want practical, tactical tips to create a meaningful art practice that is both fulfilling and supports you.

In this episode, I'm going to show you how to take small, controlled risks as a way to build confidence, practice new skills, and keep that nervous system protected from overwhelm. Because here's the thing, growth doesn't come from forcing yourself into these big, giant, high-stake situations where failure feels catastrophic. Growth comes from practicing discomfort in very small baby steps, gradually expanding your capacity so that the bigger moves feel natural and authentic and genuine and totally doable.

In this episode, we're going to talk about why incremental risk-taking works better than extreme leaps, how your nervous system plays a role in your confidence, and I'm going to give you a step-by-step process for expanding your comfort zone without freaking out. How does that sound? Sounds amazing, I think that's why we practice it every single week inside of Growth Studio. Let's jump in, shall we?

How many times have you heard someone say, just put yourself out there, take the leap, just do it? If it were that easy, wouldn't we all be doing it already? Here's the problem, your brain and your nervous system, they don't like big leaps. If a risk feels too big, then your body interprets it as danger so you will shut down, you'll freeze up, or you'll avoid doing the thing entirely.

The solution isn't “Don't take any risks.” The solution is take risks, but do it in a way that doesn't send you into a full-body panic. In today's episode, we're going to talk about why small controlled risks are the best way for you to build confidence and how to gradually increase your capacity for challenges. Then we're going to talk about how to adjust your approach so that you don't burn out or stall out or just get freaked out. Stick around till the end because I'm going to give you a very simple framework for increasing your risk tolerance over time so that you can do it in a way that sustains you and fulfills you.

Let's talk first about why small controlled risks work so much better than huge leaps. There's this myth of go big or go home. I have subscribed to that myself and I have done it myself and I will talk to that in a little bit when it's appropriate to do that. But here's the thing, the internet loves to glamorize huge leaps, like quitting your job, going all in on your art, putting your work in front of a massive audience. But for most people, that approach will backfire.

What happens is you try something too big, too fast. It doesn't go the way that you wanted it to, or it goes badly, and then you shut down. Now you're even more afraid to try again. The result is that you lose any momentum that you might have created by taking a risk. Oftentimes, you'll just altogether. The science behind this is that your nervous system is designed to keep you alive. It's not designed to make you brave.

When you perceive too much risk, your body treats it like an actual danger. That's because your brain doesn't really know the difference between something you imagine and something that is real. When you imagine all the things that can go wrong and you perceive that much risk, your body steps in to protect you and it responds as if it's true.

So when that risk feels really big and your body is treating it like it's a danger, what happens is your amygdala gets triggered and you go into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. So, what fight might look like is you push aggressively through something, but you feel absolutely drained afterwards. That's where you might get into that negative self-talk, like you're fighting against yourself and you're just very aggressively pushing through it.

Flight might look like avoiding it all together. So, you are procrastinating. You are cleaning the kitchen. You are doing something else that you've convinced yourself is sort of close to it, but it's not actually doing the thing. Freeze looks like just getting stuck in overthinking and doing nothing.

Freeze just looks like you just get into this catatonic state and just space out and don't do anything. Fawning looks like people pleasing instead of doing what you really want, so trying to anticipate how somebody else would have you do the thing. What this means is that you need to train your brain. You need to build the skill by increasing your challenges gradually and not all at once. You don't want to throw yourself into the fire.

The alternative is taking micro risks. Instead of one giant leap, think of it like a staircase. You've probably heard me talk about this before, but we're talking baby steps. When I say baby steps, a lot of the times I mean something that could be so tiny that it almost feels ridiculous. What happens when you allow yourself to take these baby steps? Each step is going to push your comfort zone just a teensy, teensy little bit, but not so much that your body goes into panic mode.

Let me give you a couple of examples of what a micro risk might be. You might want to take a baby step in terms of selling your art and offering it for sale. Maybe instead of posting a big thing that says, “Hey, here's my work. This is how much it costs and doing this sort of sales pitch for your art,” maybe you just talk about what you're working on. Maybe you just say, "Contact me for sales." Say one thing about it, one sentence. That's it, and then you're all done.

Another example of a micro risk might be instead of cold pitching your dream gallery and walking in with your portfolio in tow or calling them up and saying, "Hey, can you take a look at my work,” you might just start by showing up to another artist's opening at that gallery. You're easing yourself into the idea of pitching this gallery. Or maybe instead of going live on Instagram, you record a short video and post it, or you just record a short video and don't even post it.

You let your body know that you have the option to say no and that it's not forced. It might just be recording a whole bunch of videos or taking a whole bunch of photos of you working in your studio that you never post. The idea behind this is expanding your capacity for risk without throwing yourself into overwhelm. So now that we know why these small incremental risks work, let's talk about how to do this in a way that builds your confidence.

What you're going to want to do is identify your current edge. Think of one thing that feels slightly uncomfortable but it's not terrifying. Again let me give you a couple of examples. If talking about your work makes you nervous, then maybe you write about your process instead of speaking, or maybe you decide to tell one trusted friend about your work first.

In Growth Studio, this is something that I work on, well, they all know it now because I just told them that there is a method behind my madness, but every single week, every single meeting we have, I very, very gently get them to talk about their work. They're constantly practicing this. Constantly just having these micro-moments of speaking about their work and telling us things very specific things about their work. That micro-moment works because it is an environment where they feel very safe already and what I’m asking them to do is very, very small.

I do shift it depending on who it is. The goal for you is to find your next small step. You're not trying to find your ultimate goal. You're trying to find, “What is the smallest, tiniest thing that I can do?” I often think of it like creating a risk ladder. Think of risk-taking like you're climbing up this ladder that has tiny little steps on it. Like you're just going up a little itty-bitty bit with every rung that you climb up. Or you can think about it also, like maybe playing a video game. You don't jump to the final level, you start with level one and you learn these little skills in level one that allow you to get to level two.

Then when you get to level two, the difficulty of those skills that you just learned gets a little bit harder. Maybe there's a slight introduction of something, an obstacle that you have to get past that's just a little teensy bit harder. If we think about this in terms of talking about your work, level one might be just recording yourself talking about your work knowing that nobody will ever see this. You just pick up your phone and just say, "Hey, here's one thing that I like about my work today." Done. That's level one, that is it. It is one sentence and that is it.

Level two might be talking about your work in a private group, around a group of people that you trust. Level three might be writing a social media post about your art. Again, I'm going to say write the social media post, but don't require yourself to post it yet. That posting introduces another level, another barrier. Level four might be actually posting one of the things that you wrote, one of the posts that you created about your work.

Then level three might be recording a behind-the-scenes video. Might be recordings just you in your studio or just what we call B-roll in your studio of just “Here's what my studio looks like.” Then the next level might be you actually talking about your work on camera. Remember, these are the full levels. If you think about it as a video game, a video game, a level is a series of small obstacles, skills that you're building. You might be learning how to move around in that environment, how to jump where the doors are, you're learning about that environment in very small ways.

Every single one of these pieces that I just mentioned, you're not doing it once, you're doing it multiple times so that you build that confidence and you allow yourself to experience what that is like in tiny, tiny, and I mean once again, I cannot emphasize this enough, the tiniest baby steps until you feel like, "Oh, that's just a no-brainer." Years and years and years ago back, I feel like a dinosaur right now, back in the early days of the internets, I did some work with this Stanford professor.

It was like this email, he was doing some testing, he was studying something, obviously, because he's a professor in behavioral sciences. That's what he does is he studies how human beings, what we do, why we do it, et cetera, et cetera. It was this email course, I guess, it was like this email study. It was interesting, all we had to do is tell him, “Okay, this is one habit that I want to create,” and then every day he would email us and all we had to do was either respond with a Y for yes or an N for no and that was it and the question was always the same, “Did you do the thing?”

Really fascinating but the reason why I'm mentioning this is just that email that he sent and that he had the participants in this study respond, he made it as easy as possible for us to respond. It was a single letter and that was it. I mean, it was such a no-brainer to respond, I don't know if anyone dropped out of that study, but he just made it so easy, so stupid easy that there is no way, I mean, to me it just seemed like there's no way. It's either like I type one letter and hit send, I push two buttons and then I'm done.

I'm telling you that story to show you that when you are increasing your risk tolerance, the baby steps, I mean make them so tiny that you almost just cannot say no. The reason why is because you want your nervous system to feel very, very safe doing this. As you're taking these baby steps, pay attention to your nervous system and regulate it as you go along. If anything feels too scary, scale it back a little bit.

Some signs that you might be pushing it too hard is that you avoid the task completely or you feel exhausted just thinking about it. Your brain is going to give you excuses disguised as logic like, “Maybe I should wait until I feel more ready,” or “Maybe I will do that later.” Those are some signs that you might need to scale back your baby step. But first, before you scale back your baby step, I want you to regulate your nervous system so that you stay in a very calm, comfortable, relaxed state.

What that looks like is taking breaks and stepping away when you need to using breathwork, movement, or journaling before doing the scary thing. Breathwork might be just taking three long, deep breaths. Do not ever underestimate the power of that very, very simple exercise of deep breathing. Movement is another one, get up, walk around, jump around. Our emotions are stored in our body and movement is what releases them.

You can also journal before doing the scary thing. Just get all your fears out on paper so you can see what exactly it is that you are afraid of. I teach a lot more ways to regulate than I can go into on this podcast, but those are the top three that are the most accessible, the simplest, and the easiest. Then finally, celebrate each small risk because progress is cumulative.

When you celebrate the tiny risks and the baby steps that you take, you are indicating to yourself, you are showing yourself that you are making progress, and you're giving yourself a reward for doing the scary thing, which is also extremely important. Once you've done that, I want to give you some ideas of how to know when you're ready to move up to the next level.

You want to be looking for signs that it's getting easier. If a step starts to feel boring or effortless, that is fantastic. That is a perfect sign for you to move up. As an example, I will give you an example of my dogs because I think it's been at least an episode before I've mentioned my dog, so here we go. When I'm training my dogs, from the outside, it looks extremely boring because I'm taking them through the tiniest baby steps and I'm making it all just so easy that it just becomes natural for them to do the thing that I want to do.

Oftentimes when I'm trying to acclimate them to a new environment, it looks incredibly boring because I'm off to the side and I'm just doing these tiny, tiny things with them and then giving them a reward for the simplest thing. They look up and they look back down. They get rewarded for that. That is the tiny step that I want from them. They look up at something that may have been triggering for them. They don't react. I throw a treat down. They get to sniff for the treat, which for them is a way of regulating their nervous system, and that's it.

I might do that three times, and then we're done, and we go play, and then it's fun again. I don't take them up to a trigger and be like, “Here's a bulldog, don't react.” I don't take them to the extreme, I take them to the tiniest, tiniest step, and their experience of it is, “Oh, that was easy, and not only was it easy but we get to go play afterwards.” Okay, so that was not just, I mean maybe it was a little bit, but it wasn't just a gratuitous story about my dogs. What it really is, is this triggering of our nervous system is primal. It is the most primal part of our brain and all living beings are wired for survival.

When we see something or experience something that we perceive, whether it really is or not that we perceive as a threat, we will be triggered. In the same way that my dog sometimes gets triggered over the silliest things, I can see that it's not a threat, but he's not perceiving it that way. We take the baby, baby, baby, baby steps and you want it to feel boring and effortless. That is your sign to move up.

When I get to that point with Sam, my dog, I can see that he's bored by it too, I've done my job and then we can level up. That for you might look like something very, very tiny, like recording a video on your phone and then deleting it, not even posting it, just getting really comfortable with that. I don't know what your baby step is by the way, I'm giving you some examples, but you will be able to figure these out by yourself by really paying attention to your nervous system and looking for those signs that as you are practicing this, it's getting easier and easier and easier.

If writing about your work is no longer terrifying, then maybe it's time to talk about it in a little short video or to call a friend and say, "Hey, can I have your ear for a second and talk to you about this and share with you about my work?" A good challenge should feel exciting and not paralyzing. That's what we're looking for when you're ready to move up, when you're ready to level up with or risk-taking in a way that is comfortable.

The sweet spot is that it makes you just a teensy bit nervous, but it still feels doable. You could maybe confuse that nervousness with excitement because maybe it's actually becoming a little bit fun as you're becoming more and more comfortable with it. That is when you know it's time to level up. Then you want to just keep that momentum going. You don't want to stop and lose that momentum.

If you ever do stall out, you can just return to the last step that you've mastered and do it over again. So risk tolerance is like a muscle. The more that you train it, the stronger you get. I promise, promise, promise, it gets so much easier. So your next steps. I just want to remind you, here's some of the biggest takeaways that I want you to get from this podcast episode. Confidence comes from action. It doesn't come from waiting until you are feeling ready.

Feeling ready comes from having taken action. Taking risks slowly and incrementally protects your nervous system and protecting your nervous system is what allows you to take bigger risks. When you expand your comfort zone bit by bit, big moves feel natural instead of terrifying. You can sort of, at that point, as you build this skill and as you increase this muscle of your tolerance for risk, that ladder that I described early on, maybe the rungs get a little bit further and further apart so you can take these bigger steps and bigger risks. But at first, you want to keep it tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny.

Here's your challenge. What I want you to do is to identify one micro risk that you can take this week, make it small enough that you won't avoid it, make it so small that it feels ridiculous not to do it. Here's an example that just a lot of you might think sounds really silly, but I promise you this is highly, highly effective.

Here is an example of a micro, micro-step. Open your sketchbook, draw one line, and then close the sketchbook and you are done. Don't let your brain tell you that that wasn't enough, just sit with that feeling of “I said I was going to draw in my sketchbook today and I did what I said I would do. I said that I would draw one line and then close the book and let it go.” That is an example of a step that is so small that it just feels ridiculous not to do it.

If you are experiencing a lot of resistance, a lot of fear around doing this thing that you want to do, look for something that is that small and do it a couple of times until it just seems silly not to do it and then increase the risk. Again, we're looking for that you're almost bored taking that one little step, and taking that one little step in a place that feels safe for you, that is supportive of you.

You're not going to take this step in front of a huge audience. You're going to do it in a place where you already feel safe. That's what I have for you today. I hope that was helpful. I hope you go out and flex those risk-taking muscles and if you do, let me know about it. I would love to hear what it is that you are doing. Have a great week and I will talk to you soon.

Hey, if you want to take what you are learning here on the Savvy Painter Podcast even further, join us in Growth Studio. This is where you will take what you've learned here on the podcast and apply it, practice it, and take these concepts from just good ideas that maybe you'll do someday to habits that become part of your practice. Growth Studio is a unique community of artists. We meet multiple times a week for live coaching, critiques, and demos. Just go to savvypainter.com/join.