“Insecurity Work” is defined as stuff that you do, repeatedly, throughout the day, without even realizing it. It is stuff that doesn’t move the ball forward in any way, it doesn’t really fit with your strategy of what you are trying to achieve. You’re simply doing it to assure yourself that everything is O.K. This means checking your analytics program to see how many people are checking your website; or your sales figures, to see how many people bought a product or service that you sell; searching Twitter to find out how many spoke about you, or talked about your company; or whatever the information is that you are constantly tuning into, for no real clear thoughtful reason. A long time ago, we didn’t have the ability to do it, because this information was delivered to us weekly or monthly. Now it’s at our fingertips and we can literally do it 30-50 times a day, without even realizing it. It’s a problem because of the switching costs. Going into it, looking into stuff, and then going back into what you were doing – the lost attention, the diluted energy, is really expensive. So what we need to do to combat “Insecurity Work” is, first of all, be aware of it. What are the things you’re doing simply to assure yourself that everything is O.K? The second thing is to compartmentalize this work into small chunks. Doing it for 30 minutes at the end of every day, rather than doing it throughout your day, is the best practice. Make sure that it doesn’t surround you and consume your energy. With an instantly connected lifestyle and our iPhones, you can do a repetition of things over and not even realize that an hour just passed. Instead, you could have been thinking about what your goals are over the long-term. We refer you to one of our THINK 13 speakers, Scott Belsky, On the habits of successful creative professionals. THINK 13 starts on Monday, April 29. You will meet Cory Booker, Daymond John and many other thought leaders. You will also meet hundreds of like-minded credit union professionals, ready to advance the movement. The THINK conference was created to put a fresh perspective on the challenges and opportunities faced by credit unions every day. Let’s face it: Risk is all around us. When we encounter potential points of failure, we’re face to face with risk. The natural reaction to risk is fear. But in the next few days we will talk a lot about new approaches to risk taking, so that risk can be calculated, reduced and managed. And, then there will be less to fear. When you get back to home to your credit union, you can go ahead and innovate.