Making Sense of Your Comfort Zones
Andy Molinsky
Organizational & Cross-Cultural Psychologist at Brandeis; 3x Book Author: Global Dexterity, Reach, Forging Bonds in a Global Workforce
Welcome back to my LinkedIn newsletter where I share tips, ideas, and strategies to help you become more effective in business and life.
If we haven't been acquainted yet, I’m a professor of organizational and cross-cultural psychology, the author of?Global Dexterity?and?Reach, and an HBR contributor and consultant.?I also work closely with coaches, trainers, consultants and teachers to certify them in my?Global Dexterity Method.
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I hope you enjoy today's newsletter?about one of my favorite topics - comfort zones.
You need to speak in public, but your knees buckle even before you reach the podium. You want to expand your network, but you struggle making small talk with strangers.
We all have situations outside our comfort zones.?But we also have situations in our lives that are inside our comfort zones.?And then there are also situations in between.?How can we make sense of this?
I’ve found that asking yourself 2 simple questions about any situation can help:
(1) Am I good at doing this? (competence)
(2) Do I feel myself when doing this? (authenticity)
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Looking at the two ideas together creates 4 situation types:
1.????Comfort Zone (where you feel competent + authentic)
2.????Poser Zone (where you feel competent + inauthentic)
3.????Fumbling Zone (where you feel authentic + incompetent)
4.????Terror Zone (where you feel inauthentic + incompetent)
Let me give you an example: my journey of teaching in an MBA classroom.?When I first started teaching (in the early 2000’s), I was definitely in the terror zone:?I felt incompetent and also inauthentic, constantly wondering to myself: who was I to be standing up there and delivering information to anyone??
Over time, I vacillated between the poser zone (competent at delivering material but inauthentic being the so-called “expert.”) and the fumbling zone (teaching topics I’m not as familiar with), and then finally, with a great deal of effort, persistence and strategy - I've reached the comfort zone in my teaching. But it has taken effort, persistence, and a great deal of trial and error to find what works best for me for taking a leap.
How about you? Can you find a situation in each of the zones of the framework? And how can you use this framework to start working on a path forward?
Intercultural Communication Coach and Consultant
3 年Great names to describe the different competency and authenticity combinations. Ironically Zones 2, 3 and 4 are also "Growth" Zones and staying too long in the Comfort Zone can lead to it being a "No-Growth" Zone. That's what rotates most of us back into the three challenging zones, enduring the discomfort, while attending to our growth or in Andy's case the growth of his students. For me personally feeling incompetent causes greater stress than feeling inauthentic. Also, in entering another culture I'm instantly in the zone of feeling inauthentic and incompetent. Sometimes that generates a feeling of terror but often for me a feeling of exhilaration depending on how high the stakes are.