When I was a kid I used to hang off the monkey bars without a care in the world. It didn’t matter if I scraped my knees on the way back down, the next day I’d be back on the set with a few extra bandaids and zero f*cks given about the consequences.

On my 21st birthday, I jumped out of a plane for fun and somewhere in my mid-twenties, I went swimming with sharks. Without a cage. Like a fiend chasing the adrenaline rush that came from these actions. I then moved overseas to a city I’d never visited before, surrounded by people I’d never met before. The truth is. I’d always chased the rush that came with these risks. Afterall, the bigger the risk the bigger the reward, am I right?

However, as I embarked into the next decade of my life I noticed that I started to become more risk-averse. The decisions that I used to make with ease in my 20s, were now thrown under a microscope before they were even considered as a solid option. And although the reality is that as we get older we organically become more risk-averse, I crave the adventure that came with making decisions on a whim.

So below are some of the methods that you can implement to help become less risk-averse, in a manner that feels natural and stimulating at the same time:

• Switch up your day-to-day routine: I don’t care how you do it. Do it. Take a different route to work. Switch up your coffee order. Go to a comedy gig after work instead of binge-watching a new season of Netflix. It may feel uncomfortable, but making small decisions that fit into your everyday routine, will help reduce the anxiety that comes with risk aversion.
• Assess your options: The reason we become more risk averse as we get older is because as we get older, taking risks seems scarier (more often than not because we have more to lose). However, coming up with a plethora of options will help you feel more prepared, as you assess the numerous options for success.
• Don’t always focus on perfection: Understand that stepping outside of the norm may get a bit messy and learn to embrace that with ease. Learn to love to process that comes with making decisions that feel different and it will slowly help you become less risk averse overtime.
• It is not that serious: I remember a phase in my life when ‘it is not that serious’ was my mantra. Unless I was making big decisions like relocating countries or changing degrees. I used to make decisions like travelling on a whim, getting tattoos, and going shark diving based on that mantra. It made the decision making process a lot easier for me because I ultimately realised that if the outcome was not what I expected it to be, I would still figure it out.

At the end of the day, not making a decision is a decision in itself. So while you may think that you are protecting yourself from unforeseeable circumstances, you might be doing yourself a disservice by never exploring options that spoke to you. And I don’t know about you, but I would much rather look back at all the risks I did take versus thinking about what could’ve been.