At The Get Real Project, we’re fond of saying, “No risk, no trust, no doubt about it.”Personal risk-taking has the potential to turn ordinary relationships into extraordinary ones. Unfortunately, most people in business operate in the mode of “less is more.”

Real relationships require trust and trust requires personal risk-taking. Those who tend to avoid risk lose priceless trust-building opportunities, while those who master risk-taking as a skill learn to employ what is paradoxically the greatest risk-mitigation strategy.

If you’ve ever used a web browser user, you’ve probably been faced from time to time with an unexpected crash, causing all your open tabs to close. If you’ve ever experienced this with Mozilla Firefox, you’ve probably had to smile at the power of their very disarming error message, which displays on the screen in big, bold letters: “Well, this is embarrassing.”

A colleague and his wife were invited to an important company affair, a dinner party. His wife was seated next to one of the key people at the dinner. She later said to her husband: “What a bore! I didn’t say two words all night; all he did was talk about himself.”

The business world is rife with the unexpected, including uncomfortable and awkward “moments of truth” that occur at the worst possible time.