6 Ways Successful People Stretch Their Comfort Zones

Truly great entrepreneurs aren't satisfied with comfort. Pushing their own limits is how they get to greatness.

 By Marla Tabaka

Everyone has a so-called “comfort zone.” You know what I’m talking about: that mental space you live in where there are boundaries and you feel a sense of emotional security with your work and your decision making.

What distinguishes successful people from everyone else is what they do with their comfort zone. There are those who are perfectly happy staying warm and cozy in this safe box they’ve built; and then are those who constantly push and test the limits.

You already know which person goes on to be a successful entrepreneur

Now I’m not suggesting that the comfort zone is a bad thing. It’s there for a reason: to protect us. Otherwise we all may be jumping off cliffs and out of airplanes. It also protects us from taking on more stress and anxiety than we are equipped to deal with. But eventually the familiar routine of your comfort zone will keep you from learning, and experiencing new things that are potentially good for us. It is also likely to prevent you from building a thriving business.

So how do you know when your comfort zone is holding you back? Here are a few things you may notice:

·         Excessive stress

·         Boredom

·         Self-criticism

·         Envy

·         Anxiety about your situation

·         Excuses–lots of them!

·         A stagnant, or failing, business

Any of those sound familiar? It’s time for a stretch. Try these baby steps and watch your world grow.

Accept that you are less than perfect.

Are you afraid of what others may think, or of letting someone down? Usually the “rules” we create around how to behave so others will accept us are nothing but self-imposed, ridiculously high standards. Get a little crazy. Do something fun, like dance in the department store (my kids were mortified) or sing at karaoke. Break the illusion of perfection and join the rest of us in the human race.

Break the fear barrier.

So what are you really afraid of? Make a list. Include everything, from fear of spiders to fear of financial devastation. Now make a plan to face your fears one at a time. Begin small. If you have a phobia, for instance, reach out for help to eliminate it. The Emotional Freedom Techniques has an amazing track record of curing phobias. Knock these fears off your list one at a time and celebrate each success.

Get a partner.

There are some things that just aren’t meant to be done alone. For over two years, I’ve had a dream to produce and present an empowering women’s conference. But it remained a dream and nothing more. Then one day my coach said to me, “that’s just not something you take on all by yourself,” and I finally got it. I needed a partner in this endeavor. Sure enough, I found someone within a week and “Make It Happen” is happening this September. It’s amazing how much fun it is to create and I am certainly stretching the limits of my comfort zone. But since I’m no longer alone in this little adventure, I still feel safe (mostly).

(MORE: 5 Negotiation Tips From Steve Jobs)

Is there something you want to do that just shouldn’t be done alone? Find a buddy and make it happen.

Detach and accept.

Your comfort zone keeps you in a very predictable space: You usually know exactly what’s going to happen. A fear of the unknown will keep you stuck forever. So the trick here is to let go of your expectations and accept the results of your actions. Take risks in measured amounts. If you are designing a new consulting program or rolling out a new product, do it in small bits. Don’t go gangbusters and risk losing it all. Gamble with something you are willing to lose. These losses will teach you something, such as how to make the product better or market it differently. Look forward to the outcome, whatever it is.

Hang out with someone different.

Often we choose our friends and peers based on what we have in common. Instead, try to find someone who’s crazier than you. Choosing the company of people who go farther out on the limb will bring out your adventurous side. Be open-minded and observe the benefits of being more daring.

Imagine your success.

If you spend a few minutes each day visualizing your success you will become more willing to take the risks associated with it. Give your brain a break and daydream a bit. You’ll be amazed at the results.

Now go ahead and break those silly rules.

Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives

The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives

Sydney Finkelstein, the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, published “Why Smart Executives Fail” 8 years ago.
In it, he shared some of his research on what over 50 former high-flying companies – like Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, Rubbermaid, and Schwinn – did to become complete failures.  It turns out that the senior executives at the companies all had 7 Habits in common.  Finkelstein calls them the Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives.
These traits can be found in the leaders of current failures like Research In Motion (RIMM), but they should be early-warning signs (cautionary tales) to currently unbeatable firms like Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), and Amazon.com (AMZN).  Here are the habits, as Finkelstein described in a 2004 article:
Habit # 1:  They see themselves and their companies as dominating their environmentThis first habit may be the most insidious, since it appears to be highly desirable.  Shouldn’t a company try to dominate its business environment, shape thefuture of its markets and set the pace within them?  Yes,but there’s a catch.  Unlike successful leaders, failed leaders who never question their dominance fail torealize they are at the mercy of changing circumstances.They vastly overestimate the extent to which they actually control events and vastly underestimate the role of chance and circumstance in their success.
CEOs who fall prey to this belief suffer from the illusion of personal pre-eminence: Like certain film directors, they see themselves as the auteurs of their companies.  As far as they’re concerned, everyone else in the company is there to execute their personal visionfor the company.  Samsung’s CEO Kun-Hee Lee was so successful with electronics that he thought he could repeat this success with automobiles.  He invested $5 billion in an already oversaturated auto market.  Why? There was no business case.  Lee simply loved cars and had dreamed of being in the auto business.
Warning Sign for #1:  A lack of respectHabit #2:  They identify so completely with the company that there is no clear boundary between their personal interests and their corporation’s interestsLike the first habit, this one seems innocuous, perhaps even beneficial.  We want business leaders to be completely committed to their companies, with their interests tightly aligned with those of the company.  But digging deeper, you find that failed executives weren’t identifying too little with the company, but rather too much.  Instead of treating companies as enterprises that they needed to nurture, failed leaders treated them as extensions of themselves.  And with that, a “private empire” mentality took hold.
CEOs who possess this outlook often use their companies to carry out personal ambitions.  The most slippery slope of all for these executives is their tendency to use corporate funds for personal reasons.  CEOs who have a long or impressive track record may come to feel that they’ve made so much money for the company that the expenditures they make on themselves, even if extravagant, are trivial by comparison.  This twisted logic seems to have been one of the factors that shaped the behavior of Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco.  His pride in his company and his pride in his own extravagance seem to have reinforced each other.  This is why he could sound so sincere making speeches about ethics while using corporate funds for personal purposes. Being the CEO of a sizable corporation today is probably the closest thing to being king of your own country, and that’s a dangerous title to assume.
Warning Sign for #2: A question of characterHabit #3:  They think they have all the answersHere’s the image of executive competence that we’ve been taught to admire for decades: a dynamic leader making a dozen decisions a minute, dealing with many crises simultaneously, and taking only seconds to size up situations that have stumped everyone else for days. The problem with this picture is that it’s a fraud. Leaders who are invariably crisp and decisive tend to settle issues so quickly they have no opportunity to grasp the ramifications. Worse, because these leaders need to feel they have all the answers, they aren’t open to learning new ones.
CEO Wolfgang Schmitt of Rubbermaid was fond of demonstrating his ability to sort out difficult issues in a flash. A former colleague remembers that under Schmitt,” the   joke   went, ‘Wolf  knows everything about everything.’  In one discussion, where we were talking about a particularly complex acquisition we made in Europe, Wolf, without hearing different points of view, just said, ‘Well, this is what we are going to do.’”  Leaders who need to have all the answers shut out other points of view. When your company or organization is run by someone like this, you’d better hope the answers he comes up with are going to be the right ones.  At Rubbermaid they weren’t.  The company went from being Fortune’s most admired company in America in1993 to being acquired by the conglomerate Newell a few years later.
Warning Sign for #3:  A leader without followersHabit #4:  They ruthlessly eliminate anyone who isn’t completely behind themCEOs who think their job is to instill belief in their vision also think that it is their job to get everyone to buy into it.  Anyone who doesn’t rally to the cause is undermining the vision.  Hesitant managers have a choice: Get with the plan or leave.The problem with this approach is that it’s both unnecessary and destructive. CEOs don’t need to have everyone unanimously endorse their vision to have it carried out successfully.  In fact, by eliminating all dissenting and contrasting viewpoints, destructive CEOs cut themselves off from their best chance of seeing and correcting problems as they arise.  Sometimes CEOs who seek to stifle dissent only drive it underground. Once this happens, the entire organization falters.  At Mattel, Jill Barad removed her senior lieutenants if she thought they harbored serious reservations about the way that she was running things.  Schmitt created such a threatening atmosphere at Rubbermaid that firings were often unnecessary.  When new executives realized that they’d get no support from the CEO, many of them left almost as fast as they’d come on board.  Eventually, these CEOs had everyone on their staff completely behind them. But where they were headed was toward disaster.  And no one was left to warn them.Warning Sign for #4:  Executive departuresHabit #5: They are consummate spokespersons, obsessed with the company imageYou know these CEOs: high-profile executives whoare constantly in the public eye.  The problem is that amid all the media frenzy and accolades, these leaders’ management efforts become shallow and ineffective. Instead of actually accomplishing things, they often settle for the appearance of accomplishing things.Behind these media darlings is a simple fact of executive life: CEOs don’t achieve a high level of media attention without devoting themselves assiduously to public relations.  When CEOs are obsessed with their image, they have little time for operational details. Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski sometimes intervened in remarkably minor matters, but left most of  the company’s day-to-day operations unsupervised.As a final negative twist, when CEOs make the company’s image their top priority, they run the risk of using financial-reporting practices to promote that image.  Instead of treating their financial accounts as a control tool, they treat them as a public-relations tool. The creative accounting that was apparently practiced by such executives as Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling or Tyco’sKozlowski is as much or more an attempt to promote the company’s image as it is to deceive the public: In their eyes, everything that the company does is public relations.Warning Sign of #5:  Blatant attention-seekingHabit #6: They underestimate obstaclesPart of the allure of being a CEO is the opportunity to espouse a vision. Yet, when CEOs become so enamored of their vision, they often overlook or underestimate the difficulty of actually getting there.  And when it turns out that the obstacles they casually waved aside are more troublesome than they anticipated, these CEO have a habit of plunging full-steam into the abyss.  For example, when Webvan’s core business was racking up huge losses, CEO George Shaheen was busy expanding those operations at an awesome rate.Why don’t CEOs in this situation re-evaluate their course of action, or at least hold back for a while until it becomes clearer whether their policies will work?  Some feel an enormous need to be right in every important decision they make, because if they admit to being fallible, their position as CEO might seem precarious. Once a CEO admits that he or she made the wrong call, there will always be people who say the CEO wasn’t up to the job.  These unrealistic expectations make it exceedingly hard for a CEO to pull back from any chosen course of action, which not surprisingly causes them to push that much harder.  That’s why leaders at Iridium and Motorola (MMI) kept investing billions of dollars to launch satellites even after it had become apparent that land-based cellphones were a better alternative.Warning Sign of #6:  Excessive hypeHabit #7: They stubbornly rely on what worked for them in the pastMany CEOs on their way to becoming spectacularly unsuccessful accelerate their company’s decline by reverting to what they regard as tried-and-true methods. In their desire to make the most of what they regard as their core strengths, they cling to a static business model.They insist on providing a product to a market that no longer exists, or they fail to consider innovations in areas other than those that made the company successful in the past. Instead of considering a range of options that fit new circumstances, they use their own careers as the only point of reference and do the things that made them successful in the past.  For example, when Jill Barad was trying to promote educational software at Mattel,she used the promotional techniques that had been effective for her when she was promoting Barbie dolls, despite the fact that software is not distributed or bought the way dolls are.Frequently, CEOs who fall prey to this habit owe their careers to some “defining moment,” a critical decision or policy choice that resulted in their most notable success.  It’s usually the one thing that they’re most known for and the thing that gets them all of their subsequent jobs.  The problem is that after people have had the experience of that defining moment, if they become the CEO of a large company, they allow their defining moment to define the company as well – no matter how unrealistic it has become.Warning Sign of #7:  Constantly referring to what worked in the pastThe bottom line: If you exhibit several of these traits, now is the time to stamp them out from your repertoire.  If your boss or several senior executives at your company exhibit several of these traits, now is the time to start looking for a new job.

This Article was published in 2012 in Forbes.com . Link provided below.

 - http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/01/02/the-seven-habits-of-spectacularly-unsuccessful-executives/

Everyone needs a Coach!

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This Link conveys & establishes that " Everyone needs a coach"...

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Manager as a Coach – Coaching Situations

 It was a cold foggy evening in Chandigarh on 31^st Dec, 1998. I was in office. I was served an official order from High court of a state at almost 6 pm. This High Court order gave us ( my company) directions to act in a particular manner. It meant that our Pre decided action intended in early hours of 1^st Jan 1999, based on another Superior Court Order, cannot be executed.

By this time, people had started leaving office, eagerly looking forward to a officially sponsored fun-filled evening. In fact I was also supposed to attend the same party with family. Wishing New Year to others, I also left for home.

At 7 pm reached home too. I had no option now but to read, interpret papers and then take a final call on going ahead. Acting on new order served, meant that we are in contempt of other court order, higher court. It was after good 2 hours of reading, say around 930 pm, I called my General Manager. It was a call of a life time for me. Over the next 2 hours I kept answering his questions. All open ended questions. He asked me initially on what needs to be done on 1^st Jan morning.  He did not share or indicate his agreement with my views, instead kept asking me a series of questions.

My family meanwhile left for party, while I was still on phone. It was around 1130 pm and I almost felt exasperated with my GM not being sensitive to need to validate my decision quickly. Finally he said that let us go ahead with what you consider as appropriate and we will face consequences, if any.

I kept the phone and called my officer at Shimla and asked him to go ahead with our original intended action, irrespective of High Court order.

I rushed to the party & enjoyed myself with family and friends.

On 7^th January, I met my GM in his office at Delhi. I pointedly (with a bit of humour) asked him about the long call on 31^st Dec as to why he took so long and asked me so many questions. In any case he finally agreed with my view. He could have agreed and we would have been free in few minutes to enjoy our respective evenings.

He smiled.

I realized later that he had used those 2 hours to coach me in that situation. All his questions made me think hard. His questions helped me share my thought process and helped me get few more insights. New insights helped me fine tune my action substantially.  And finally when I ended the call that night, I felt completely responsible & accountable for the decision and its consequences. So when decision went right, I was elated.

I am reminded of this incident almost 15 years back, as someone asked me to share a practical example of coaching. This to my mind is a perfect example of being coached in situation. In today’s world arguments of targets / timelines, stakeholder pressures are extended by managers to defend that there is not enough time or situations to coach people. This situation that I have narrated is an example of most inappropriate time, event and with both time and stakeholder pressures. Still someone felt I need to be coached.

The learning which is now validated many years later is that coaching situations can be sensed by Manager Coach only when the agenda is team member (Coachee). Whenever Manager overlooks a situation perfect for coaching, blaming time and stakeholder pressures, he is driving his own agenda. My own experience suggests that we can coach our team members as long as we think about them, their development and growth.

So next time when you are rushing in to provide answers and solutions to your team members, think hard. Think of them. It will be easy. Believe me.

Coaching in Action

Coaching intervention at various levels of organization would need to be tailored based on maturity & responsibility levels of staff (coachee) levels. There are enough and more situations that provide an opportunity to coach our team members. When applied, coaching is:

• Holding a conversation and engaging in dialogue. Coaching is not about telling the staff member what to do. Rather it is about encouraging them to reflect and learn. As adult learners, we generally like to create our own solutions rather than be told what to do.

• Collaborative. Coaching is about brainstorming issues together. Share your experiences of similar situations. Jointly identify possible solutions to problems.

• Focussed on achieving outcomes. You want the staff member to leave your meeting with a course of action to take. Look for specificity and certainty.

• Present and future-oriented, with consideration given to the past where appropriate. When we dwell on the past and a problem, the problem often ‘gets bigger’. If we focus on the way forward and a solution to the problem, the problem becomes more manageable and we have the energy to deal with it.

• Challenging to the individual, in a positive way. Ask open-ended questions of the staff member to encourage them to reflect on the issue or situation and think through the possible options. This is your opportunity to enable the staff member to see the situation differently, to embrace a different way of dealing with it, and potentially to change their approach or behaviour.

• Focused on the staff member. Your aim is to focus on their needs and learning requirements as well as facilitating ways for them to find the answers (rather than you providing the answers or directing). You want the staff member to take ownership of the problem and to take action to solve it. From this they learn and are more likely to develop capacity to find solutions to problems independently.

• Dependent on high quality feedback. Positive feedback builds self-confidence and makes people want to take more action. Review how implementation of the action plan went. Identify learning’s. Celebrate successes.

• Encouraging the individuals to achieve. We learn better when we discover for ourselves. Enable your staff to ‘extend’ themselves and remember ‘blame’ has no place in coaching!

To be effective, coaching depends on a positive relationship between the Manager-Coach and staff member being coached. The relationship needs to be based on trust - where the staff member knows he/she can come to you and brainstorm issues in a supportive environment and leave with encouragement and your support to take action on a chosen solution.

Do your team members feel this? Much before a manager attempts to coach , he needs to think himself, new. Rewire himself. Old wiring is virtually impossible to be deleted or erased. Begin.