We are taught from a very early stage by our parents, to be careful. We are told to look both ways before crossing the street and not to eat what is unfamiliar. Most parents want their kids to live beyond their years and this requires teaching them to be cautious about many things. It was the same for their parents and so on down the line.
This is one of the biggest reasons why we don’t take chances. It’s all about self-preservation and keeping the family going generation after generation. But there are other reasons that we don’t like to take chances.
Societies have rules that its citizens must follow. Failure to do so can lead us to be thrown in jail. And even if what we contemplate is legal, because we have been adhering to rules all of our lives, this tends to add to our cautious state of being. We hesitate to take chances because these rules are ingrained into our lives.
We also tend to follow the crowd and there are studies to back this up. We have a herd mentality. If you are on a busy city street and you look up in the sky for a long period of time, you will find more and more people gather around to see exactly what you are looking at. There may be nothing of importance up there. They just want to know what the attraction is.
So it is with taking chances. If no one else has done it before, most of us are probably not going to take the plunge. As previously mentioned, we want to see others experience something before we decide to go for it ourselves. This is why people look to product reviews and forums before they make purchases online. They want to know that others have successfully purchased and used products or services without problems.
These reasons that we don’t like to take chances are really just mental blocks that have been put in place. They put up a proverbial stop sign anytime we encounter something that doesn’t sit well with us. This leads us to create excuses as to why something shouldn’t be done. The biggest problem is that these barriers took a lifetime to build up so breaking them down is never an easy task. We first have to have the belief that they can be broken down before we allow ourselves to do so.