Testing the Waters of Your Comfort Zone & Beginner Brain for Leaders
September 22, 2013 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
All leaders go through testing phases. Facing tests builds your confidence, strengthens your self- image and shores up your anxiety about what you can face and how you can get through it. When you’re comfortable as a leader and living in your comfort zone, you may be comfy, but are you testing the waters outsize that zone? Are you stretching and growing your knowledge, skills, abilities, compassion and passion for situations, people and things to expand your horizons?
What are you doing to regularly test the waters outside your comfort zone? I believe leaders and non-leaders (but we really are all leaders in one way or another, whether the name plaque on our desk or door says so or not….we’re leading our lives, leading our families and leading friends or sports teams, eh?) need to continually bring themselves to a point of having Beginner Brain. Putting yourself in situations where you’re not the expert, where you don’t know all the answers, where you are challenging your mind and body to do things that may be unfamiliar to you is a way to grow your dendrites and make more neuro-connectors to expand your self-esteem, and bring you back to a place where you don’t know it all and need to rely on your problem-solving skills. I believe in putting yourself into positions which aren’t so easy to figure out.
Beginner Brain can be exciting and exhilarating – putting you back to times when you were much younger and just exploring the world and figuring things out. It’s when you can claim those AHA experiences of having just succeeded over a task or reclaim the joy of discovery when something worked even when you weren’t sure it would. What kinds of things can you experience, new hobbies and adventures to try, new trails to blaze that will put you a little closer to the edge of discovery and test your abilities?
As one who lives for new discoveries, adventure and AHA moments; I recently embarked on a boating odyssey with my best friend to be a part of the 200th anniversary reenactment of the war of 1812 Battle of Lake Erie with 1000 other boats and 19 tall ships. Being amidst the mayhem of 1000 boats with northerly winds whipping up the water of Lake Erie into swells up to 7 feet was something I hadn’t ever experienced. Seeing the tall ships maneuvering and listening to their captains on the radio adapt to all the small craft as they made their way to the reenactment site was stirring. Feeling a little out of control as we were tossed in the waves and wakes of the bedlam was a little disconcerting. Hearing the clash and clang and thuds of every item in the salon being thrown about in the fray was unexpected. Not being the one at the wheel and having trust in my captain and taking orders to keep us safe was yet another level of lessons learned.
Being a life-long boater; I’ve had many experiences in all kinds of water around the world. Having sailed the Greek Islands in a 24? sailboat, helped crew a 100-year-old 65? schooner in the North Sea, captained a 50? yacht through the canals of Provence, was a winch wench for years in sailing races on the Potomac and off the California coast, and on a retired America’s Cup boat in the Caribbean as well as growing up with ski boats on the inland lakes of the Midwest; I knew my way around vessels from bow to stern. I had never been amidst the chaos of so many other crazy boaters and on a 20-ton tugboat. It seems to be the other human elements that trip us up now and again. Being in an unfamiliar vessel added to the learning curve. We ended up anchoring 7 times that night due to wind, water and sea-bed conditions and dragging anchor to ram into another boat at 1am.
My Beginner Brain was moving steadily towards advanced beginner by the time the weekend was over. We also tested the waters in a newly-purchased dinghy and it was like Lucy and Ethel do anchoring and dinghy patrol. In the end we ended up losing only a flip flop, a toenail and lots of sleep….and maybe a little ego. Beginner Brain puts you right back at the start of figuring things out and pulling together out of necessity and really engaging parts of your brain that may have been dormant for a while when you’re an accomplished professional.
It was an exhausting, exhilarating and exciting weekend. Experiencing what Steven Covey in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People calls Sharpening the Saw is highly recommended to stay sharp and keep your edge in business and in life. What are you doing to sharpen your saw, get back to Beginner’s Brain and test the waters outside your comfort zone?
Your Time is Your Life: Learners are Leaders
May 16, 2013 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
If we are wasting time, we are wasting our lives. We trade out our energy for time and our life is made up of time. So when we waste our energy, we waste our time, and we waste our lives. What are you doing with your time? What are you doing with your life?
What I’ve found in my years of consulting, working with leaders of organizations, entrepreneurs, solo-preneurs and from self-study is that leaders are learners and those that learn more, earn more. What I believe to be true from my experience is that when you’re done learning. . . . you’re done. I view life-long learning as something to look forward to in the quest for continuous improvement.
Some studies suggest the average American watches 6 hours of TV per day, making the average 60 year old an avid TV viewer of 15 years of his life, a quarter of a lifetime vegging on the couch! So what if we all eliminated 1 hour of TV per day = 365 hours per year, which equals 2 months of additional time. That equates to 9 average 40-hour work-weeks to do what is more important in your life than click away in front of a screen. And many of us wish we had more time to do the things we like to do. May I suggest re-organizing your time?
My experience has also shown that leaders are readers. If we read just 1 substantive book per week, that’s 520 books in 10 years and if those books are in an area of interest where you make your livelihood, that would make you an expert in your field, and experts are in demand. If you’re reading the gossip publications all week. . . that’s another story altogether.
What about the time spent in your car commuting? The average American commutes 30 minutes each way from work which equals 1250 hours in your car in 5 years. That’s enough time spent in your car for a college education. Are you listening to schlock or are you learning a language or something useful to society or your family or yourself? How are you choosing to spend your time and spend your life?
What about delegating the tasks that can be done better by somebody else, somebody you will gladly pay to take the work off your hands. I have chosen in the past to do some home improvements on my own. It somehow always looks better in my mind than in real life; hence the electricians and carpenters parading through my home at the moment. I know my limits and I know what don’t want to do and what I need to be doing. . . . what I do best . . . which is not installing crown molding, or cleaning windows, or doing my taxes. I pay others to have those little pieces of my life back and save a few gray hairs in the process.
What are you trading your life for? What could you outsource that fits somebody else’s genius to save you the stress? How could you better use your time? What are you reading/watching/listening to? Are you moving yourself forward with your choices or are you treading water in your comfort zone and checking out? Learning new things gives us energy, passion, zest and zeal. Teaching does the same. Once you’ve learned something new, why not pass it along to others?
Here’s your challenge: don’t just delegate, eliminate. Create a stop-doing list along with your to-do list. Name your list a “policy” because most of us follow policies and we respond to policies vs. mere suggestions because a policy is a boundary. What is on your stop-doing list?