My brother in law rescued a drowning girl a few weeks ago from some river rapids (and I am so proud of him by the way!) but his actions made me think about courage and bravery. People who are fighting to overcome illness or circumstance are courageous. People who help others in dire emergencies are heroes. Someone overcoming a personal challenge is brave (irrespective of scale). If something is difficult, if it has impact on others, if it is unknown, then it requires courage to undertake. Yes?
And I would argue that creativity and business also require bravery and courage. When we create something, we are putting our artistic endeavours in the public domain and this makes us vulnerable. As with setting up a new business, we are opening ourselves to great opportunity and also to great risk. We might fail. We might be criticised. We might succeed beyond our wildest dreams!
Risk is always relative and what is challenging for me would be different for you. When we started Event Cornwall and took on our first employee, I was petrified. How would we cope? And now the pressure was on because our brand new staff member had a mortgage….it was no longer a hobby but a proper business and now I had even more responsibility to ensure that the risks we were taking as a business weren’t too risky!
There have been hundreds of thousands of risks that we have taken since and some are easy risks to take because we are familiar with them and others have been life-changingly big! It can be very difficult to manage these kinds of risks and one can never calculate the full potential impact of any one decision but we can be brave and we can trust our gut instinct. As a general rule, we are not making decisions or taking risks that are of the magnitude of saving lives but that should not diminish their importance.
Being human requires risk. Being in business requires bravery. Being creative requires courage.
Claire Eason Bassett, Managing Director, Mackerel Sky Events
Mackerel Sky Events 