Yesterday I was visiting some friends, and the hostess was talking about how every week acquaintances called her to ask whether she could help them find a job. She is very compassionate, and I could sense how she worried about them and suffered because she could not help them. At the same time, I saw the fear on her face—the same fear I used to see on my grandmother’s face when, years ago, she advised me “to play it safe” when I decided to leave the secure and well-paid job I had, simply because I felt unfulfilled.
And it wasn’t only my grandmother who told me that. Most of the people around me did not understand me either. By that time, I had already read about Robin Skynner’s mental health continuum, which states that average opinion is not a criterion for high mental health, and this supported me greatly in not allowing others to add even more fear to the decisions I was making. So, despite my own fears and the discouraging messages of most people around me, I still left that job with the clear awareness that this was not an easy choice and that I would have to pay a considerable price to follow my heart.
I decided to share this experience because I see many people looking at the economic crisis with fear and “playing it safe,” even though they are deeply dissatisfied with what they do. I know there are moments when we really do have to endure a situation, however unpleasant it may be. But the truth has two sides, and the other side is that we need to resist the mentality of playing it safe. Being laid off can be seen as a chance to embody our dreams in reality by standing up to our fears.
It is often said that in Chinese the character for “crisis” consists of two parts—one meaning danger and the other opportunity—and that these parts reflect very precisely the contradictory nature of crisis. To see the creative opportunity in an unfavorable life situation and dare to realize it in practice, we need to abandon average thinking and stop listening to the voices of our grandmothers who advise us to play it safe. None of the truly successful people in the world have succeeded by following such advice. Success comes to those who do exactly the opposite. History offers many examples of people who did not give in to fear and turned adverse circumstances in their lives into a gold mine. This is the essence of true creativity in our lives.
To make this happen, we need to believe in ourselves and devote ourselves to the goal—to commit to it one hundred percent. Playing-it-safe thinking leads to partial commitment to our dreams, whereas it is precisely the wholeness of commitment that is the condition for sewing our new garment without patches. Todor Hristov writes about the same thing in the latest post on his website novavizia.com. In it, he describes his impressions from participating in a seminar on “The Psychology of Success,” led by the world-renowned Brian Tracy. He writes that “the truth is simple—people who want to succeed actively look for ways to do so and probably make up around 10% of all people, while the remaining 90% look for (and, of course, successfully find) excuses.”³
This also corresponds to the statistics of the mental health continuum, according to which fewer than 20% of people are in the highest range of the scale. They live their lives at their maximum potential, follow their hearts, and take risks. I know this percentage can become larger. It is enough not to believe the well-meaning but limiting voices of our loved ones who advise us to choose safety.
I would not think this way if I did not have the facts of my own personal experience. Six years after leaving my secure but soul-killing job, I am doing what I love most. For this to happen, I had to ignore many “play-it-safe” voices from outside and many play-it-safe fears from within, which made me feel small and weak. This also meant fully committing to the process and being patient enough for the results to come. And above all, believing in myself even when there were no prospects of success at all. That is why, when I read in the article about Brian Tracy’s seminar that on average between five and seven years are needed “to unfold one’s potential to the fullest and achieve one’s desired (consciously set down on paper) business and personal goals,” I knew that this was exactly right.
From personal experience, I knew what Todor Hristov meant when he wrote that “it is not just about five to seven years of work—no! That work will have to be done anyway. What Brian Tracy means are five to seven years of serious, persistent work that includes learning, refinement, acquiring new knowledge and skills, reading, attending seminars, and so on. This is equivalent to the training of top athletes who prepare for the Olympics and major competitions—day after day, step by step on the path to great success, with far more serious effort than the efforts of average athletes (who will not win medals).”
I know what the pressure of average thinking looks like. It makes us moderately satisfied, moderately happy, moderately successful. It is at the core of my grandmother’s play-it-safe psychology. Our thinking patterns are reshaped with great difficulty—very great difficulty—but they can be reshaped. We can live a much better life than the one we are currently living, and the responsibility for the choice is entirely ours.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
