Here’s Why You Should Take More Risks in Your Career Journey
Advice from Christie Hunter Arscott, an award-winning career advisor, speaker and author of new book Begin Boldly.
Launching your career journey can be intimidating. There’s no blueprint for exactly how to do things and depending on your industry, sometimes it’s hard to figure out if the risk is worth the reward. In her new book, Begin Boldly - How Women Can Reimagine Risk, Embrace Uncertainty and Launch a Brilliant Career, author Christie Hunter Arscott delivers some seriously inspiring advice that you can put into practice right away. Christie is a career advisor, speaker and Rhodes Scholar who has made her own bold career moves with her writing and research appearing in publications like Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company and more.
Generation Hired had a unique opportunity to ask Christie some questions about her new book, how to take career risks and the mindsets (that’s right there’s more than one) it takes to crush your career goals.
Gen Hired: Can you give us a brief description of your book?
Christie: Perhaps you dream of taking more chances but don’t know where to start. Perhaps you get overwhelmed by overthinking or fear of the unknown. Perhaps you grapple with self-doubt and endless analyzing of worst-case scenarios and outcomes. If any of these are the case, you are not alone and this book was designed for women like you who understand that building a career and life they love is no small feat.
My fifteen years of work and research in the gender space has uncovered that women aspire to take risks but often struggle to translate that into action. Begin Boldy is designed to meet the needs of women like you and help you close the gap between your aspirations and your actions by equipping you to take risks in practice.
Gen Hired: Your book talks a lot about risks. How do you define "risk" in the career space?
Christie: During the process of producing this book, my editor, Anna Leinberger, shared the story that in her early career years she didn’t even identify certain critical and career-defining acts as risks that she had the opportunity to take. She thought she had to keep her head down, get the work done, and “not step on people’s feet.” In hindsight she reflected that part of the issue is that we “don’t accurately define things as risks.” Without this ability to discern what constitutes a risk, important bets, chances, and opportunities are either overlooked or not taken strategically.
A Harvard Business Review article on gender and risk highlights that we often think about risk in more straightforward, male-dominated ways, such as in physical or financial terms, which overlooks other types of risk. When discussing risks, many women with whom I’ve worked also fall victim to these limited definitions and think about risk as it relates to handling finances, starting a business, or becoming an entrepreneur. The author of the article states: “The trouble is that historically risk-taking has been framed so narrowly that it skews our perceptions,” which, I’ve found, influences women’s actions and outcomes.
When women I meet define themselves as “risk-averse,” they’re often thinking about risk within these narrowly defined terms. Risks aren’t reserved for entrepreneurs alone. Risks include speaking up in a toxic culture, advocating for oneself and others, seeking new opportunities, voicing opinions, standing up for what’s right despite opposition, and putting your credibility on the line to support others, among other things. Build your risk radar by thinking about risk in broader terms.
Gen Hired: In the book, you discuss different mindsets that readers should have around taking risks. What are they? Can you give us an example of how they can utilize these?
Christie: Be curious, courageous, and agile. Through cultivating your curiosity, courage, and agility, you will unleash your enduring risk-taking skill set. The book is partly dedicated to exploring these three mindsets and showing women how to learn them and leverage them to take intentional risks. The three mindsets critical to a successful and bold career are:
A Curious Mindset. Being curious will help you overcome fears of networking and enable you to build your powerful Support network. It will also help you navigate the double bind and wield influence in situations where you are making an ask and taking a risk. Finally, it helps address a critical barrier to risk-taking: “competing priorities.” While curiosity can’t give you more hours in your day, it can help you make the most of those hours so that you can reduce feelings of conflict and take more strategic risks.
A Courageous Mindset. Focusing on courage over confidence will enable you to move past inaction due to lack of confidence and to take strategic risks with small courageous acts and advocating for yourself and others.
An Agile Mindset. Through focusing on agility, you are able to view yourself and your capabilities and skills as fluid and not fixed and understand that you’re on a lifelong journey of continuous improvement. You’re able to view your life and career as in a constant state of experimentation and design, to view your identity as malleable and flexible, and to view change as a catalyst for your ongoing improvement and growth.
Gen Hired: What's a bold move you have made during your career journey that paid off? What is one that didn't really work out in your favor? What did you learn from both?
Christie: For me, a negotiation on a contract that backfired ended up being a reward as I refined my approaches to persuasive communication and negotiation based on the experience and have embedded these into the book and helped so many women advocate for themselves using these techniques.
A risk that went well? Taking a risk to put my voice out into the world around women and careers. It is a risk. I opened myself up to critique. Not everyone will like my content. There may be online trolls. However, in the end I focus on my why: That my life’s work is to empower and equip women to craft bold and brilliant careers and lives. For me to achieve my why, I needed to write a book for broader reach, for those that won’t have the opportunity to have a career coach or attend a program. I couldn’t stop at equipping a select group of women for boldness. Every woman can be boulder and braver and build a better world for us all tomorrow. For me, stepping into the public eye, expanding my platform, using my voice, and writing this book have been risks well worth making!
Christie Hunter Arscott’s book, Begin Boldly - How Women Can Reimagine Risk, Embrace Uncertainty and Launch a Brilliant Career comes out today. You can order your own copy here or enter to win a copy in our giveaway with our besties at Her Campus!
