Today, at the end of practice 140 with kman’s krazies, I reminded them they are in their comfort zone. This is good. We wouldn’t want Red, who runs accounting and all kinds of analytics, feeling paniced making debits and credits equal. We want our controller feeling in control doing her job. It ought to be comfortable, most of the time. However, if Red is going to master controlling and other aspects of her job she’s going to challenge herself outside her comfort zone. And, if she’s aiming at becoming one of the best in the business she’s got to experience the terror and shear panic that comes when one puts themselves at the hairy edge of their capacity – just this side of chaos.
Comfort, challenge, and panic are the performance zones for all of us in the world of work/life. High performers invest more and more time in the challenge zone and sometimes push it a bit too far and dip into the panic zone. Sometimes they spin out, fall down, and fail. Fact. High performers expand their comfort zone over time and through repeated trips at the edge of their capacity. This is simply the way we get better. Nobody just arrives at excellence and mastery in one giant leap. We all get better the same way we learned to run really fast. We crawl, walk, run and always in this order. None of us skipped the steps, did we? As babies we all begin by crawling, then pulling ourselves up some kinda coffee table and taking those first, wobbly steps. Eventually we take off running. We crawl, walk, and run.
Want to improve your performance at your place of opus? Face your fears. Identify what you could do that your fear of failure is stopping you from attempting. Write out why it matters, why you want to try, and how you could “baby step” into it. Set a date and time. Make sure your PA is really a baby step. Make it a done so. Enjoy the small step and reach for another one. Repeat the process a few thousand times and pretty soon you’ll be some kinda hero at work. Someday, somebody will ask you how you learned to do this kinda wacky, new age accounting with so and so accrual, depreciation derivatives, euro-currency regression analysis, and speaka d’ Deutsche at the same time. Your response will say it all. “No big deal, really.”
Yeah, baby. No big deal…
BUILT TO LEAD 