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Pushing Yourself: How to build new comfort zones

This week, I played in the PGA of Canada Women’s Championship. It was held at the Smiths Falls Golf & Country Club, the home course of LPGA player Brooke Henderson and her sister, Brittany.

While I am always competitive when I play, it has been several years since I teed it up with some of the elite in women’s golf. I entered the tournament for one reason: I wanted to push myself to be in a highly competitive arena. I didn’t have to play. I had nothing to prove to anyone. Neither my golf nor my business success depended on my competing. I just wanted to do it.

If anything, I had more to lose than to gain, and I had several “reasons” for choosing not to compete. I’m busy with work. I’m not a full-time tour player. I’m too old for that stuff. Any one of those would have been acceptable in any conversation. Any of those lines would have saved me from the judgment of critics that would be sure to follow the result of my posted scores. And yet, I registered anyway. I booked my hotel room anyway. I shelled out $1,500 anyway because I wanted to give myself that upleveled experience.

When I speak, I have a CLUBS framework, and the C stands for Commitment. I say it’s often the hardest part – fewer than half the people I have met with get past the commitment step. It’s uncomfortable and scary and uncertain, and there’s risk in committing to pushing yourself to a higher level. It’s easier not to try that hard. The status quo is an appealing place.

There’s something empowering about putting yourself into a hard situation just to see how you fare. Being unafraid to try for something higher than you are now is the win. Always. When you commit to doing something next level, you put more distance between you and the average. It’s never about the trophy. It’s always about the try.

Business Tip

You don’t have to get the contract to win. You don’t have to meet your revenue goal to be a success. But you have to try. And if you’re going to try, that means committing to doing something differently than what you are doing right now. Doing something different requires that you enter some uncharted waters, and that can cause trepidation because you don’t know what the outcome will be.  The thing is, you don’t need to know the outcome. The goal is to start building a new comfort zone at a higher level than where you are now.

When you give yourself the chance to have a new experience, you see opportunities you didn’t see before because you’re looking at the situation from a different perspective. Instead of looking at how things are, you view changes to how things could be, and you’ll start to recognize that you’re closer to this next level than you originally thought.

One of my clients was a mental health business that wanted to increase contracts with employers offering employee assistance programs. Their competitors were national companies and had most of the business, and initially, all the client could see was what they didn’t have compared to those providers. What they didn’t see were the benefits they had over those providers, namely a more personalized and accessible service that was easier to use.

Some of the employers they pitched weren’t interested in those benefits – they just wanted a low-cost program to “check the box” for offering this as part of the employee benefits package. But other employers, many of whom had experienced an employee mental health situation, valued accessibility and ease of use in these supports, and onboarded my client’s program instead of the national brand.

When you push yourself to a new level of competition, you don’t need to have everything you perceive that the competition has to be successful. Every customer doesn’t want the same thing. But if you never venture into that space, you’ll never have the chance to win the business. And you can win more than you think.

Golf Tip

If you want to uplevel your golf game this summer, here are some of the things you could do:

• take a lesson
• arrive at the course 15 minutes earlier than normal to practice putting
• play in a competitive event (or a higher-level competitive event)
• play a different set of tees
• play with people you don’t know.

In giving yourself a new experience, you will learn new skills or gain a new perspective, and that’s a game improvement win.

Bottom Line

Go for something bigger. Even if you don’t get it, you’ll be further ahead than where you were when you began. That’s the win.

I speak on this type of work for businesses and high-performing people. If I could be a fit for your event, or for someone you know, I appreciate the referral.

Resources

Free! – My interview with The Traveling Golf Diva podcast aired July 6.

Free! – I was interviewed by Authority Magazine on increasing the impact of communication. Read the article here.

Forward Thinking for Your Business is a book that serves as your marketing reference, saving you time and money.

Forward Thinking for Future Entrepreneurs is your guide on how to start a business using the experience of those who have actually done it.

Reach out by email at jennifer@fwdthink.ca