MBA876 Guest Teacher Andy Molinsky – How to Successfully Reach Outside Your Comfort Zone

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Hey, everybody. I'm Andy Malinski, author of the new book Reach A New Strategy to help you step outside your comfort zone, rise to the challenge, and build confidence. Thank you so much for joining me today. Today I'll be teaching you how to step outside your comfort zone, why it's hard, how we avoid doing it, and how to do it more successfully. So let's get down to business. So first of all, I should say that if you struggle stepping outside your comfort Z, you are not alone. In fact, I have struggled many times stepping outside my comfort zone in my life. Even though I wrote a book on it in college, I never once spoke in class. I was the kid in the back with the red cheeks, the beating heart, you know, tentatively raising my hand but then putting it down. After college, I would frequently sign up for, but not go to networking events. I avoided giving speeches for years and so on. And so I've had these struggles myself. And in addition, many famous people have struggled stepping outside their comfort zones. You might not know that Gandhi had got panic attacks whenever he spoke in public. Hugh Grant, the actor, gets panic attacks. Natalie Portman, she talks about how she experienced the imposter syndrome as a student at Harvard. Warren Buffett, like me, avoided classes with participation and so on. So many, many famous people have struggled and do struggle stepping outside their comfort zones. So I did to try to understand what are the key characteristics that enable people to step outside their comfort zones. Why is it hard? How do they avoid it and what can they do about it? I spoke with managers and executives firing people, doing layoffs, performing negative performance reviews. I spoke with doctors performing painful procedures on children and also talking with parents about these procedures and the consequences. Police officers evicting people from their homes. Actors, students, priests, rabbis, teachers, even a goat farmer. So lots of people, lots of different situations. So the first question is, why is it so hard? Now we know it's hard, obviously it's hard to step outside your comfort zone or else we do it all the time. But why specifically is it hard? So across all these folks and also reflecting on my own experience, I found five key reasons. Number one, authenticity. The idea that this is not me. I feel like an imposter speaking in front of a meeting or putting on, putting on my grown up voice when pitching to venture capitalists. So feeling inauthentic is number one. Number two, feeling incompetent. That keeps people inside their comfort zone. The feeling that I can't do this well and I'm afraid others can tell, for instance, about speaking in public, you can imagine. Number three, like ability. The idea that people worry they won't, that others won't like or respect this version of you. You know, they'll hate me if I'm assertive. They'll hate me if I deliver bad news. Number four, resentment. Frustrated that I have to step outside my comfort zone in the first place. Logically you understand you need to. But psychologically you can be really frustrated by it. I've spoken with a lot of introverts who feel that way. Why should chit chat, why should networking matter so much? The quality of my work stand on its own. And then morality in some cases, in some situations, people can feel it's against their ethics and morals when Stepping outside their comfort zone I begin my book, actually, with a story of a young entrepreneur who had to fire her best friend to save her business. So why is it so hard? Authenticity, competence, likability, resentment, and morality. You're not necessarily going to experience all those every time, but even one can make stepping outside your comfort zone challenging. So how do we avoid it? We're all very good at avoiding. I know I am. And I found a series of ways in which we avoid stepping outside our comfort zone. See if any of them apply to you. Number one, we might just choose not to do it at all. Say no to that speech because we're afraid to speak in public. Number two, we might do it, but only part way. Maybe only deliver part of the negative feedback that you need to deliver. Number three, we might replace a task outside our comfort zones with an easier but less effective alternative. So instead of going to the networking event, as a small business owner, I'll send out an email blast or use social media. Of course, those are fine too, but probably not an exact substitute. Number four Procrastinate. We all procrastinate. Or many of us do. Entrepreneurs I spoke with talked about tinkering and tinkering with early prototypes and being afraid to put them out into the world. Number five, Pass the buck. Have someone else deliver that bad news when you probably should be the one doing it. And then number six, telling yourself this really isn't that important.

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Even though it probably is so those Are all the different ways that we avoid stepping outside our comfort zones we've covered? Number one, why is it challenging? Number two, how do we avoid. And then number three, what does it take to do it successfully? So across all these cases, all these people I spoke with, I found three keys to successfully stepping outside your comfort zone. Number one, conviction. Having a deep sense of purpose, almost like psychological permission, an antidote to avoidance. It doesn't. Having a deep sense of conviction in why you're doing this, it doesn't necessarily erase your discomfort, but it does give you the motivation and drive and sense of purpose to take action despite the discomfort. So perhaps you say to yourself, this is the right thing for me to do, or this is the necessary thing for me to do, or this will make me feel good about myself, or this will enable me to help others, or this is my calling, whatever it is, and it's always very personal, find your source of conviction and embrace it. That's number one. Number two, customization. This is probably the most interesting and unanticipated finding of my study. People have more power than they think to customize, to tweak, to alter the situation outside their comfort zone in a way that it's just that little bit more comfortable. You can change your body language. You can bring a prop to a situation. Like, for example, I know someone who's afraid of making small talk and she brings a selfie stick to social gatherings. It's a great way for her to catalyze the social gathering. You know, all of a sudden start talking to people when her tendency would be to stand in the corner. You can stage the context. You can do a Q and a session instead of a formal speech. You can bring a friend to a networking event. You can play with timing. You can alter your language in subtle ways. The point is, is there are many ways subtle. You can customize a situation to make it just a little bit more comfortable for you. So there's conviction, there's customization, and then there's clarity. In scary situations, we tend to often have exaggerated views of the worst case scenarios. We worry that we will flop as a speaker, we'll be a total disaster. Or sometimes we fixate on the unrealistic best case scenarios. You know, I'm not giving a speech unless I'm the best TED talker ever.

Though.

When you're trying to step outside your comfort zone is to develop a more evenhanded, realistic perspective. And that can really ground you when you step into a situation that's uncomfortable. So that is it Those are the three key tools. You've got conviction, you've got customization, and you've got clarity. So, in sum, there are a series of challenges people face stepping outside their comfort zones. There's also a range of different ways that we avoid situations. But if you apply the three C's customization, conviction and clarity, you can do it. You can do it. With enough inspiration, anyone can step outside their comfort zone. But it really does take more than inspiration. It takes effort, it takes persistence, it takes strategy, and it takes the tools that we just talked about. All right, guys, this was Andy Malinsky, author of the new book, A New Strategy to help you step outside your comfort zone, rise to the challenge, and build confidence. If you want to continue learning about comfort zones and how to get out of them, please visit my website, which is www.andymolinsky.com. a n d Y M O L I n s k y.com where you can read some great content, get some awesome free stuff, and learn more about the art of stretching outside your comfort zone. Thanks again for joining me today. And back to Omar.

Thank you, Andy, for that great lesson. I especially like the fact that he encourages you to ask interesting questions, ask yourself interesting questions, and really focus on the positives of doing what you have to do. What am I going to get out of this? How am I going to feel? Really? Imagine how things are going to be different when you do the things you need to do to reach out of your comfort zone. You're going to feel confident, you're going to feel better about yourself because you actually went and did the thing you had to do and followed through. You're going to feel like you're growing. You're going to feel like you're not just staying the same. There's nothing worse than feeling like you haven't grown as a person. And the longer you feel that way, the more you're convinced that you can't change. It's all in your head. You can change, you can improve. That's the miracle. That's the great thing about the human condition, is that we keep evolving. We keep changing, we keep improving and improving the way we think and do and act and the way we impact the world. So you gotta make the conscious effort of framing things in your benefit. And this is a little exercise I like to do if I have a problem, an issue, something's happening in the business where it's a bit challenging, whether it's dealing with the team, whether it's financial, whether it's crunch time for A launch or something like that. You gotta frame it so it's to your benefit, so you feel good about it so it's not like, oh my gosh, another problem, another issue. You feel like, no, this is great. This is a great challenge. I'm gonna take it on. This is what great entrepreneurs do. This is my time to shine. Frame it so you feel better about the whole situation. Put a positive spin to it and stay focused. That's your job. No one's gonna do that for you. You gotta do that for yourself. Thanks again, Andy for the great guest lesson. And Andy doesn't want you to leave empty handed. He's giving us an amazing guide to go with today's lesson. The guide is called 10 Powerful Questions to ask yourself to reach outside of your comfort zone. And you can get it right on today's Show Notes. Just go to 100- MBA-NET MBA876 and you'll find a link to that guide right on the Show Notes page. And don't forget to check out Andy Malinsky's book Reach. I highly recommend it. Don't take my word for it. Read the reviews on Amazon. See what people have said about this book and how it has helped them. And the best compliment you can give any entrepreneur or anybody who's creating anything is to support their work. Alright, that's it for me today, guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. I've said this time and time again on the show, but I need to remind you all and remind myself. Of course. 95% of business is a mental game. It's a mental game. You win it in your head. You win it with the stories you tell yourself. You win it with your mentality and your approach and your perspective on what you're doing. If you are confident, if you are positive, if you feed yourself the right thoughts, it's going to tremendously help you be successful. In fact, it's pretty much impossible to be successful if you don't do that. If you're negative, if you tell yourself the wrong thoughts, if you allowed bad thoughts to go into your mind and stay there. The reason why people are successful is because they actually get up in the morning and do what they have to do. And that doesn't happen by accident. They have to tell themselves to do that. They have to put themselves in the right frame of mind and the positive outlook that they have really helps them get up and do the things they have to do. You have to do the same. When you're hit with blows in business, you know, challenges. That's a challenge to your mental game. In business, those who crumble don't make it. So it's not all about skills, sales technique and, you know, optimizing. You know, the color of your buy button. All that stuff is secondary versus what's actually in your head, what actually helps you take action. All right. I hope that helps, and I hope to see you in the next episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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