Last week, on a sunny 60F (15C) day in San Diego, I found myself outside, shirtless, in nothing but a bathing suit, surrounded by 60 other entrepreneurs, and volunteering to be the first to plunge up to my neck in an ice bath. In the past, this kind of thing was ridiculously outside of my comfort zone. Even on the hottest day of summer, I was the last kid in the pool.
Comfort zones are weird things. There is nothing that inherently changed in my physiology, my skills, or the temperature of the water. I just became psychologically comfortable with the cold. Perhaps it is my cold-water scuba diving experience. Perhaps it was being buoyed by 60 members of my tribe. Who knows?
I find that when I talk with entrepreneurs about their sales practices, there are some very strong barriers to their comfort zones. It can be hard to get them to be willing to introduce us to their clients. It is even harder to get some to consider taking a different approach to interacting with their marketplace. This is despite the fact that they reached out because what they are currently doing isn’t working!
In the beginning of Geno Wickman‘s book, Traction, he shares the following parable:
An entrepreneur slips and falls off the edge of a cliff. On his way down, he manages to grab onto the end of a vine. He’s hanging there, a thousand feet from the top and a thousand feet from the bottom. His situation seems hopeless, so he looks up to the clouds, and decides, for the first time, to pray. “Is anybody up there?” he asks. After a long silence, a deep voice bellows down from the clouds: “Do you believe?” “Yes,” replies the entrepreneur. “Then let go of the vine,” says the voice. The entrepreneur pauses for a second, looks up again, and finally responds, “Is there anybody else up there?”
Likewise in Marshall Goldsmith‘s classic What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, which is more about personal behavioral change, he drives home the point that “here” can be a great place in spite of gaps, but “there” can be much better. However, it takes big effort to let go of what got you here. It’s why he uses the dreaded anonymous 360 review to shake leaders awake! Having gone through both, the ice bath was way easier!
In each case, it is so hard for us to move out of our psychological comfort zone that we’re willing to suffer in our current situation rather than take the plunge.
Shifting your comfort zone
So how do we get ourselves to move out of our comfort zones? One thing that I absolutely love about the Entrepreneur’s Organization is that this group consistently pushes me outside of my comfort zone. There is a saying I hear frequently about getting comfortable being uncomfortable. So, that’s certainly been a help for me.
The other technique that I use, as I wrote about earlier, is getting comfortable with my inner perfectionist. Carol Dweck does a great job of describing this in Mindset. I’ve found that, by default, I can be so afraid of failure that I’m not willing to try new things. In its misguided attempt to protect me, my inner perfectionist keeps me from “sticking my neck out.” Interestingly, I’ve seen that the cost of failure is almost always much lower than I expect.
Failure and discomfort are almost statistically impossible to avoid during growth phases. However, we can be so afraid of changing things up, we allow ourselves to suffer on the side of a cliff. We know that our situation is untenable but can’t find the energy to make that change. Literally, all we have to do is let go!
Photo by Dirk Spijkers on Unsplash