Whether or not you consider yourself a risk taker, life requires taking risks every single day. From relationships and parenting to the financial and careers we pursue, we all take risks, bet big, and hopefully win often. We are surrounded by risk, and how we look at it, relate to it, and leverage it makes all the difference.

Angie Witkowski is the NY Times best-selling author of the business books SPARK, Bet on You, and Leading From the Front. She’s been a coach inside the world’s best businesses and has shared a keynote stage with some of the most influential leaders of our time. Angie served as an officer in the Marine Corps and holds a BA and MBA from the University of Michigan.

Too often we celebrate overnight successes while overlooking the years of hard work and risk that went into making the success happen. Taking your time, fully understanding your financial situation, and relying on your ability to make good decisions will all have a major impact on the outcome of the risks you take.

Consider first how much time you are willing to invest in your risks. You can take the short-term route if that is where you feel most comfortable, or you can dive in head first and see what happens. The truth is, you can always make more money if this risk fails.

Angie and Bill share their process for approaching and evaluating risk. Bill aims to first look for the opportunity, then consider the worst-case scenario and create a coping mechanism from there. Angie tends to see opportunities everywhere but asks herself two questions when considering risk: Do I have the bandwidth to make this happen, and do I actually want to do this? The answers to these questions will make the next steps clear.

Interview Links:

Angie Witkowski

Resources:

20,000 Scaleups

Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.)

Bill on YouTube

Recruiter.com Short List (use code scaleup)

Scaling Up is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and our team for Scaling Up Coaches (formerly Gazelles). We share how the fastest-growing companies succeed where so many others fail.

Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach and host of the show, is an international business coach who works with C-Suite leaders to achieve breakthrough growth.

We help leadership teams with the biggest decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth. Scaling Up is based on Verne’s original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits.

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