What gives you Cold Feet?
What gives you Cold Feet?
“Cold Feet” is a term used most often when we describe others, usually a third person. In my experience, nobody really likes to use the term to describe themselves because it has a negative connotation to the phrase.
So what does it mean?
To have Cold Feet is to hesitate, to lose your nerve or your confidence. There is a dozen or more similar terms used to describe “Cold Feet” but the bottom line is that you lost control of the situation. Your emotion led you to the point that you were no longer in command of your positivity.
And this is why we do not generally like admitting to that, yet we use it when referring to others. We are at a get together or a party and we can say someone got Cold Feet and decided not to pitch up. Someone could be making a decision to take up a new job or to move to a new city and they get Cold Feet.
Only through observation would we be able to tell whether this was a good call or not. Unfortunately, it seems that Humanity is plagued by its indecisions. We do not hear much of people speaking about the choices they did not make or the chances they did not take. Those kind of make for a bad story.
We usually want to hear about the chances that people took and that it turned out alright. We venerate and applaud those brave people from taking the chance and succeeding. More often, we get to hear about other people's regret at not taking that leap of faith or something similar.
Dare to Dream
The reason we venerate the idea of successful risk taking is because nobody ever got what they wanted by taking The Slow Lane
If you're living in a first world country or if you have a first world mindset then we generally have hopes, dreams and aspirations to succeed in something. Unfortunately none of these things are ever achieved by going at things slowly these days.
You always hear about somebody who took a risk when making an investment or somebody that worked when they could have played in order to achieve where others failed. I know from experience that I sacrifice a lot of time that I could have spent entertaining myself by working, studying and giving my all in order to achieve some goal. I'm sacrificing and risking time I could have spent with more joy in order to achieve something of greater importance.
We want to hear about the person who took the right risk and became a millionaire. We want to hear about the guy who risked it all for his girl and got happily married and lived happily ever after.
That is just it - we might have grown up and we no longer read bedtime stories, but we do like to hear about real life fairy tales.
We come across situations and decisions that we could be making and we wonder if this is the time in our lives we we take that chance and we change our lives forever.
And yet all of us know that there are many people who take chances and that they don't succeed. Who makes it public knowledge that they strived to achieve something and took a risk and then failed?
We all understand that life is full of little tragedies. These are the unsung examples that people do not like to focus on, because their need for a way out forces us to devalue such examples.
Cold Feet - an Synonym for Stagnation
It is easy for us to talk about somebody else who got cold feet. As I said we hardly ever use the term for ourselves.
It is easy to criticize somebody else for not taking a chance that could have changed their lives, because there is no risk in it for ourselves.
We are not in the position where were we could possibly be losing something. Therefore our criticism is needlessly biased, because we can stand on the outside and say that this person could have taken the chance and easily succeeded. All the while, we have no emotional attachment and zero doubt.
We think of not taking chances as stagnation because we know that if we do not take chances we probably will not succeed. Yet there is a exceedingly large amount of people who have failed because they take risks that they should not have.
We will hear about people who did not take the chance. We hear about those who did take a chance and succeeded. We almost never hear about a person who speaks about the risks they took and how they failed, because nobody likes to admit that they fail.
So instead of criticizing someone for not making a move, you should quietly assess whether or not this is wisdom. Nothing can be gained if you do not risk but if you do not know when to take risks then maybe it is better not to lose.
Conclusion
It is best for us to take risks after we've done our homework and we know what the rate of success is. For everything else it might be foolhardy to believe that we can easily take risks without proper consultation or thought.
We should be less judgemental of those who do not take needless risks.
Disregard the stories of those people that you hear about who made their millions with minimal effort. Those are the people you always see advertised on the margins of a website who made thousands of dollars or perhaps even millions by taking a risk - this is just fantasy. Most of us know by now that those adverts are scams and clickbait.
Do not put yourself into a position where you have a fear of missing out on an opportunity just because there are others that have succeeded. If you can't walk away from the risk after you failed and survive, then there is probably too much at risk.
You need to clearly understand all the factors that contribute to the success of the risks that you take before you lead yourself to a condition of tragedy.
Everybody likes to hear about quick successes and yet there are many more people out there who are successful because of a consistent effort, than taking needless risks.
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