Ben Morton walks through three steps to handle perceived threats: focus on the opportunity first to counter negativity bias, separate imagined risk from actual risk by weighing likelihood and impact, then identify specific actions you can take now to prevent or reduce it.
By starting here, by focusing on the opportunity, you're doing something very deliberate. You're giving your brain permission to see the positive, the best case scenario before worry kicks in and it focuses on the worst case scenario. From there, we move on to think about the risk. Now, it's not the imagined risk, it's the actual risk. And just like in a real risk assessment, we think about the likelihood of that thing happening and the severity if it did. And I find by the time we've done that, we generally notice that the risk is smaller than we thought, and the severity or impact if it did happen is far less significant than our negativity bias had us believe in the first place. Next, you think about the control measures. What can you do now in the setup whilst you're planning ahead to reduce that risk before it even happens?
