From the course: Teamwork Foundations

Explore your job, your comfort zone, and your potential

From the course: Teamwork Foundations

Explore your job, your comfort zone, and your potential

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- It's important to understand yourself, but how can you get better at that? Asking for feedback is one way, and another way is to experiment. Try taking different roles within the team. Try doing work that you wouldn't normally do and see how you get on. Force yourself to come out of your comfort zone and do some things that you don't find easy and you might surprise yourself. An interesting exercise that you can do is to give yourself a score out of 10 for the following three things. First, how much does your job require out of 10? So 10 would be that it stretches you to the limit, while 3 would be that it's easy to the point of being boring. Next is, what is your current performance level in that job? 10 would be performing to the max while 3 or less would be on the brink of getting fired. And finally, how big is your comfort zone compared to all these? Are you performing above your comfort zone or are you well within your comfort zone? So if your comfort zone is 8 and your current job and performance are both 5, then you are cruising and maybe you ought to push yourself more. For example, you are comfortable presenting at large conferences, you are an 8, but your job only requires occasional presentations in sales meetings, so that's all you are doing. But if your comfort zone is 5, you're quite anxious about presenting, but your job and performance are both 8 and you are doing those big conference talks, then well done. You are really going for it. Try writing down those three numbers and thinking about yourself. Are you pushing yourself? Are you even pushing yourself too much? Are you learning and developing for the future? And what are the parts of your job that are stretching you, if any? And what parts of your potential are you not exploring? Do you at least have some parts of your job that take you out of your comfort zone? Maybe you hadn't thought of these as a good thing before, but I think you'll agree that they probably are. The more you learn, the better you can perform in the future, both for yourself and for whatever team you find yourself in.

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