It begins with assuming responsibility for managing your career life cycle in front of your personal and professional inflection points. But in order to do this, you'll first need to get clear about what you consider to be outside your comfort zone.

Begin with a review of 2009 and identify the peaks and valleys of your personal and professional life. You could do this "low tech" by placing twelve self-adhesive poster-sized sheets of paper on the walls at home, one for each month. Either use sticky notes and write your major successes / setbacks on these before posting to one of the twelve sheets or you can write directly on the paper. You can also do this exercise using the computer and your favorite word processing or spreadsheet application.

What you are looking for are the common elements, or themes, associated with these peaks and valleys. You might want to step back and review the results after a few days in order to get a big picture look at your life in 2009.

Personal Risk taking Style and Organizational Culture

In general, would you consider yourself more fear-based when responding to situations with unknown outcomes? Or, perhaps, you're fine with assuming more personal risk if others assume more of the professional aspects of risk taking, e.g., a high-visibility project where you are a participating team member and not the project leader.

You'll then want to assess your company's cultural playing field. What is considered acceptable risk and what does skirting the "edges of the playing field" look like and, at the extreme, what would the company consider risky behavior?

This isn't to say that you can't (or shouldn't) go outside the boundaries that your organization has set, as many companies don't do a good job of defining what an acceptable playing field looks like. However, as author Ernest Hemingway once said about writing--learn the rules before you break them.

One thing you can do in the absence of clearly set boundaries by your leadership team is to look across and within your organization for those who model the best of risk taking for you. But don't be fooled into thinking that a company's culture permeates in the exact same way throughout the different business units and leadership teams.

Therefore, if you're looking for a new job or planning to pitch yourself for a position inside your existing company, you will want to understand the formal and informal rules for personal / professional risk taking. This includes both inside the company, as well as for the lowest common denominator within the organization, e.g., the department you are looking to join and the hiring manager, respectively.

Personal risk taking is what it looks like for you. If you plan to introduce more risk into your business or career, you will want to develop a plan with a clear set of tactical actions that will help you manage your risk.

Copyright 2010 Dolores McCrorey, Risktaking for Success LLC. All Rights Reserved.