Leaving Comfort Zones

Dear HBR:

Harvard Business Review

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4.6 • 782 Ratings

🗓️ 17 October 2019

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How do you feel when you have to do something new or difficult? Dan and Alison answer your questions with the help of Andy Molinsky, a professor at Brandeis International Business School and the author of "Reach". They talk through what to do when you’re terrified of giving presentations, big changes at work make you uneasy about the future, or your voice quakes when you deal with conflict.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Dear HBR from Harvard Business Review.
0:03.9	I'm Dan McGinn.
0:04.9	And I'm Alison Beard.
0:12.3	Work can be frustrating, but it doesn't have to be.
0:15.3	We don't need to let the conflicts get us down.
0:17.8	That's where Dear HBR comes in.
0:19.9	We take your questions, look at the research, talk to the experts, and help you move forward.
0:32.6	Today we're talking about breaking out of your comfort zone with Andy Malinski.
0:36.6	Andy's a professor at Brandeis
0:37.9	University's International Business School and the author of Reach. Andy, thanks for coming on the show.
0:43.1	Thanks for having me. So we tend to think of people as ambitious and sort of wanting that next
0:47.7	challenge. How often do people need a push? They don't want to change what they're doing.
0:52.7	Well, not everyone's ambitious.
0:55.1	But for those who are, often people do, I think, get stuck.
0:59.1	They might want the next challenge.
1:01.0	It might cause them anxiety and fear so much so that they might avoid it.
1:06.9	Has there ever been a time that you've pushed yourself out of your comfort zone and either failed or succeeded?
1:15.2	Constantly. That's why I got so interested in this. I mean, I was the kid in college who would be in the back of the class, like, you know, thinking about something to say. My heart would feel like it's beating out of my chest. My cheeks would get
1:27.9	flushed and, you know, I might raise my hand. I might not. But even if I raise my hand, it would
1:31.9	be very slight. And I've always struggled with this. But I don't know. I think I've also thought
1:37.3	a lot about it. And I think I'm really attuned to what the roadblocks are that people phase. And people do get better at this over time?
1:45.5	Yeah, absolutely.
	...

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