Happy out of your comfort zone

At the end of a recent week-long leadership development program with a group of engineering managers in Singapore, the participants were asked to share one key thought or take-away for the intense week. One of the participants shared ...

"I have come to realize that, if you are pushed often enough out of your comfort zone, you can actually get used to it."

This is a thought that stuck with me. In several leadership development programs, I have seen participants who become very aware about themselves, and get a good understanding of what their own comfort zone is. Awareness is of course the necessary condition towards progress.

But while many understand the concept - and manage to apply it to themselves - pretty well ... the majority still struggle to do anything with this new awareness. As if they now have a good understanding of their own challenges, but remain stuck like a deer staring into the headlights.

So once you are aware of your own comfort zone, what's next ? My personal experience is that it helps to see the situations where you are moving out of your comfort zone, as ... learning opportunities. Not performance opportunities. Not opportunities to show to yourself, or someone else, what you can do (because you can't !). Just learning opportunities. If you can develop your mindset that these situations help you to learn, then the experience becomes far less stressful. And any of these experiences helps to learn more about yourself. Maybe learning that getting out of that comfort zone was easier, or harder, than you thought. It is not about doing it right. It is not about trying to copy what the others (the experts) do. I try to reflect out loud (in my head !) what I am learning, what is going better than thought, or what is not going really well and I would do differently next time. I try to keep myself in the learning mode.

Developing a mindset of learning, when faced with out-of-comfort-zone situations, goes a long way in becoming happy being out of your comfort zone.