Awkwardness isn’t a weakness to fix, it's your greatest asset for professional and personal growth. Advances in technology make easy to avoid real human interaction and we lose critical social skills we need to take smart risks. Risk-taking sounds good in theory, but most have a hard time moving from wishful thinking to execution. Why? Because when we have a chance to take a risk in the moment, we feel awkward - and that awkwardness bumps up against our deep desire for others to approve of us and what we do. This social muscle atrophied for many of us in recent years, but there's a solution.