Two Questions to Help Step Outside Your Comfort Zone

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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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. Situations like these — ones that are important professionally, but outside your comfort zone — are, unfortunately, ubiquitous. And it can also be hard for us to truly identify the source of the challenge we face. With this in mind, I’ve developed a quick framework to help make sense of comfort zone type situations.

The trick is to ask yourself two simple questions:

1.????Am I good at doing this?

2.????Do I feel myself when doing this??

The first question gets at skill; the second at authenticity.??Ask yourself these questions for the same situation, and you can classify this situation as one of the following:

1.????Comfort Zone (where you feel competent and authentic)

2.????Poser Zone (where you feel competent, but inauthentic)

3.????Fumbling Zone (where you feel authentic, but incompetent)

4.????Terror Zone (where you feel inauthentic and incompetent – yikes!)

To give you an example, let me describe my journey of teaching in an MBA classroom.?At the beginning of my teaching career, I was definitely in the terror zone:?I didn’t know what on earth to do – how to deliver material, engage a room, handle a class – nothing. ?And I also felt inauthentic, constantly wondering to myself: who was I to be standing up there and delivering information to anyone??

Over time, I moved from the terror zone to the poser zone:?I felt competent at delivering material but felt inauthentic standing up there in front of the room as a so-called “expert.”?It was also, at first, a bit of an out of body experience to be called “professor” when I had never had that title before.?I definitely felt like a poser.?

Today, I feel at ease speaking in front of crowds – so authenticity isn’t a problem. And at this point, I’ve grown into the professor title.?But I definitely feel like I’m fumbling with new material – outside my comfort zone in terms of competence, even if I’m still within the zone in terms of authenticity.

The point is that in some situations we might feel like a poser or fumbling (or both) and then in other situations, we might truly feel like we’re in our comfort zones.?And, over time, as we grow and change?- and so too does our experience of these same situations.