We at Digital Spark Marketing are a huge proponent of getting outside your comfort zone. Unless you walk out into the unknown, the odds of making a profound difference in your life are pretty low.
There are quite a lot of opportunities to step out of the comfort zone and start making a difference. We’ve even covered some of them in our previous blog posts.
Check out our thoughts on team leverage.
In this part, however, we are going to take a closer look at some of the ways you can improve yourself and discover new opportunities while setting out of your comfort zone.
Can you change? Of course, you can. Everybody changes every day. But how versatile, agile, and quickly can you adapt yourself and your organization to stay relevant in today’s society?
Organizations are always evolving. What’s different now, is that we set new speed records of change on a daily basis. Technology gives us unprecedented possibilities. And this sea of opportunities is pushing the traditional bureaucratic, controlled and hierarchical organization into an identity crisis.
Getting started is easier than ever.
Comfort zone … go Back to School
A lot of business owners and executives don’t consider going back to school when in fact it can be the best decision to make.
If you’ve wanted to get a master in business administration online for a while now, or you want to pursue a completely different degree than the current field you are in, now is the perfect time to get started.
Universities like Villanova University are opening up their online learning programs to more students.
These online learning courses are designed to help you get the degree you need and master new skills without quitting your full-time job or abandoning your business.
In fact, online courses are very flexible and easy to manage, even when you have a demanding job.
As long as you can allocate an hour every day for studying and completing course assignments, you should be able to complete an online MBA in about 18 to 24 months.
You can even complete the course faster by allocating more time and taking the executive, accelerated program.
Comfort zone examples … Start a New Venture
When you have a successful business, it is easy to get carried away by the success and stop looking for new opportunities.
This is a dangerous thing to do.
Your competitors are innovating to keep up with you, and the market is changing faster than ever. You need to stay sharp and keep your eyes on the ball.
Starting a new venture is a great way to stay sharp.
A new venture – especially one in a different industry than your current business – comes with new challenges and problems to face.
You’ll be able to remember how much fun it is to work on a new business and take it to new heights.
Get Social and Support a Movement
Lastly, consider starting – or supporting – a social movement. Take a quick walk around your neighborhood, and you’ll find a lot of people who need help.
You may see kids playing on the road; starting a movement to create a park for them can be a great start.
Again, there is no shortage of social causes you can support.
It is best to start a movement closer to home or support a cause you can relate to. You’ll feel more motivated to get involved directly.
You can even position your business as the main supporter of the cause and combine the social movement with various other promotional offers you have in store for customers.
Motivation to leave the comfort zone
Curiosity is a powerful way to motivate people to leave their comfort zone, research finds.
It can even help people make healthier choices.
Across four experiments, researchers found that people’s curiosity encouraged them to take the stairs and eat more healthily.
Dr. Evan Polman, the study’s first author, said:
“Our research shows that piquing people’s curiosity can influence their choices by steering them away from tempting desires, like unhealthy foods or taking the elevator, and toward less tempting, but healthier options, such as buying more fresh produce or taking the stairs.”
For example, in one experiment 200 people were given a choice between two cookies.
One of them was plain, but they were told it was a ‘fortune cookie’ that contained some personal information about them.
The other cookie held no such intriguing information but was covered with chocolate and sprinkles.
Still, 71% of people chose the fortune cookie, preferring some personal information to mere chocolate and sprinkles.
(Incidentally, the fortune cookies all contained the same, extremely disappointing line for everyone: “You are not illiterate”.)
Dr. Polman said:
“By telling people if they choose the ordinary cookie they’ll learn something about themselves via the fortune inside of it, it piqued their curiosity, and therefore they were more likely to pick the plain cookie over the more tempting chocolate-dipped option.”
In a second experiment, researchers promised to reveal the secret to a magic trick — this also strongly motivated people’s behavior.
In a third experiment, people were encouraged to use the stairs rather than the lift by the posting of trivia questions at the bottom, with the answers in the stairwell.
Dr. Polman said:
“Evidently, people really have a need for closure when something has piqued their curiosity.
They want the information that fills the curiosity gap, and they will go to great lengths to get it.”
The effect — sometimes known as the ‘curiosity gap’ — was surprisingly powerful, and can be put to good use, said Dr.Polman:
“Our results suggest that using interventions based on curiosity gaps has the potential to increase participation in desired behaviors for which people often lack motivation.
It also provides new evidence that curiosity-based interventions come at an incredibly small cost and could help steer people toward a variety of positive actions.”
