Given all the triggers that cause procrastination, leaving your comfort zone has got to be at the top of the list! Danny Brown (@dannybrown) got me tProcrastination and your comfort zonehinking about this when he replied to my comment on his blog post, Leaving Your Comfort Zone. In his post, he used Alex Wong (a ballet dancer competing on the television show, So You Think You Can Dance) who absolutely rules when he does a hiphop routine. I’d say hiphop is about as far from ballet as you can go! Definitely beyond the comfort zone!

I’ll admit that I oversimplified things when I left my comment.

Sure Alex Wong is a ballet dancer but he is a dancer. He knows how to move his body so it’s a stretch that becomes possible. The thing with getting out of our comfort zone is we make it seem so foreign. Many of our stretches simply take our current skills and apply them in a different environment or with different methods. As Alex Wong knows he can use his body to move to music, we can trust that we already know how to do what seems risky.

As a trained musician, I’ve certainly seen how other performers support or limit transferring their skills to something different because of perception. If I only play classical piano, then do I limit myself and say I’ll never play ragtime or rock because I think I can only play classical music?

So, what does this have to do with procrastination?

It’s about how we perceive what is outside of our comfort zone. We do make it seem so foreign. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a different kind of dance, music, or business strategy. When we reach a plateau with our small businesses and we don’t want to stay at that level, we know we must do something that is new to us. Consider this-just today, I was talking with a prospective client who is adding staff. She is completely daunted by the necessity of managing them so she has put off developing her system. The supervision and organization that comes with managing employees seems foreign to her even though she has had people working for her for a while now. She is already doing some of what she needs to do with her whole staff. Yet, she perceives that it is totally different than anything she has done before and there is a risk is she will do it wrong.

Procrastination is often tied to a lack of trust in ourselves. We don’t trust our skill set. We don’t trust that we can cope with the task. Leaving our comfort zone implies that there is risk involved and we won’t be the same afterwards. Maybe this is true, maybe not. It remains that we have the necessary abilities already waiting to be applied in a different way.

What are you avoiding in your small business?

What skills do you already have that are a bridge to beyond your comfort zone?

Which is more important-doing something perfectly or making the attempt?

LinkedInGoogle BookmarksDiggTumblrStumbleUponFriendFeedDeliciousEmailPrintFriendlyShare