Chad Silverstein says growth happens in the challenge zone between comfort and chaos. Find people or practices that push you there, but build guardrails so you don't tip into overwhelm. Growth happens together.
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How do you get stronger? And the one thing we know about leaders getting stronger is that it doesn't happen when you're comfortable. It happens when you're being stretched, when you're being pushed, when you're being challenged. And it's real simple, and it's easy to understand. It's just hard to do. It's hard to put yourself in this circle. And basically what you're looking at is in the middle of the circle is your comfort zone. And if you live in that comfort zone in the middle of the circle, you're not going to grow much. You're going to be comfortable, complacent. This is where most people live. Most normal people live. Right. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, but it's not the way to grow as an individual, as an employee, as a leader, as an entrepreneur. And outside that circle, in the middle is going to be where people are challenged. It gets a little bit harder, right? So whether you're challenging yourself, which hopefully you're doing as a leader, you know, we say it's better to kick your own ass than to get your ass kicked, but you want to be challenged because being challenged allows you to grow your capacity to do whatever it is that you're doing. And then right outside that challenge circle is where there's chaos. And we say just on this side of chaos is where the real growth happens, meaning you're getting challenged. And hopefully you have someone in your life that will really hit you with the truth and challenge you. And as soon as you hit that outer circle where there's chaos, it stops. And right there is where you grow. That's right at that moment where you're being challenged. It's a little bit harder than what you thought. Not maybe what you were planning on doing, but you do it anyways, and you grow from that. That's where the real growth happens. That's where the magic happens. That's when you look back and you realize that even though that challenge sucked and I didn't want to walk into whatever that was, I did it. I had the courage to do it, and I grew from it. And so that's where all the growth happens. So you want to make sure that you're not sitting in the middle of your circle always being comfortable. You want to make sure that you're challenged. And if you don't have people in your life that challenge you, then find some or figure out how to challenge yourself, and then just build some fences, have some guardrails in your life so that you can recognize and identify when you're in this zone of chaos. Because that will create anxiety, worry, catastrophizing things, and you don't want to live in that place. So the quicker you can identify when there's chaos and then pull back into that challenge zone, the better you're off. You are. And this is why at Built Lead we talk about together, we transform. Because you don't, you can't really do it by yourself all the time. You need to have some people in your life that care about you enough to either pull you back out of that chaos zone, put you into the challenge zone, and they know you well enough to know where those boundaries are, and hopefully you start to have some self awareness and figure it out for yourself.
