Sure you can't do it?

Lack of skill or lack of balls?

Have you ever been in a situation where you know you can do a thing but you just ‘don’t want to’ take on that responsibility?

Yeah, me too.

Throughout my previous career in maritime, serving as navigational officer on board oil/chemical tankers I’ve seen people fall into this trap a lot. Imagine being in an environment where each decision you make can cause unwanted consequences aka a lot of shit to deal with - that’s cargo operations on board Oil/Chemical tankers.

Although, amount of written procedures is close to number of cells in human body and planning is done strictly adhering to Lincoln's quote “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.’’ - final levers are pulled by a human being and the statistics are daunting, more than 80% of disasters at sea are due to human error.

Frightening, isn’t it?

On ships, there’s a straightforward chain of command: Junior officers, Senior officers, Captains.

When it comes to cargo operations the Senior Officer is in charge, when things go south his head rolls first. Nevertheless, juniors take part in the whole operation and are assisting up to an industry defined standard. This is where the tricky part is, even though Junior is in charge during his watch, Senior can be summoned for help at any time.

You get the drill - Junior's ass is always guarded by Senior.

What happens here is that on many occasions having this option makes individuals intentionally downgrade their skills due to lack of balls.

“Why do I need to solve this if there is Senior, he gets paid more so I let him do that and live stress-free”

Yeah, but how do you envision yourself becoming something more if you don’t even exercise your capabilities when you get the chance?

“Oh, but I am only a Junior..”

In most cases, these people possess the necessary abilities to do the thing, they just overthink the consequences and coward away from their chance to level up.

All of this is easily transferred to any job, any situation. Be it something in your realm of expertise or even when you have to stretch yourself a bit - if you have the courage to take on the challenge and leave your option for help behind, you will eventually succeed.

But how do you begin?

Well, as usual, it starts between your ears. I am a huge advocate of exercising a growth mindset by the means of gradual exposure.

Imagine that the problem you have to solve is like eating a huge onion - doing it in one piece scares you. Then you start peeling off the layers (reducing complexity of that problem) until a point where eating that onion isn’t that scary (level of risk you are willing to take). Although it will still taste horrible (cause stress), you will be able to do it (solve a fraction of the problem) so next time you have to eat that onion, you will be able to have a bigger chunk (solve a more complex problem).

A more straightforward framework:

• Identify the problem

• Break it down into chunks until a chunk you can manage

• Solve the chunks systematically

When giving your problem to others, remember that they also turn your progress into theirs, and that should scare you more.