Law Eight

Always Make Your Confidence Greater Than Your Comfort

Increased confidence is crucial for lifetime growth. Many successful people start off life as dreamers and risk takers, but the moment they become successful, they begin to seek greater security and comfort over everything else. This attitude puts them to sleep motivationally, and they lose the confidence that made them so successful. Security and comfort are desirable by-products of goal achievement, but when they become the goal itself, they quickly stop lifetime growth. Treat any increase of comfort in your life as only a temporary stage for establishing bigger goals. Continually strive for higher goals and achievement, and your confidence will always be greater than your comfort.

All growth requires that we stretch beyond where we’ve been before. As we do this, our confidence about being able to take on new challenges increases. Our commitment to pursue new levels of confidence gives us the courage to overcome fear and stay in motion, continually realizing our bigger future.

Short Breaks Build Confidence

Growing confidence also requires that we periodically take “comfort breaks.” These are periods of rest, which are necessary so that we can acknowledge and celebrate our achievements and rejuvenate for the next challenge—key preparation for approaching a new task with confidence. We need to take the time to say to ourselves, “I’ve done this and proved I can do it. Now what else does this make possible?”

Continued growth requires a balance between stretching ourselves beyond where we’re comfortable, to increase our confidence to new levels, and taking comfort breaks at those new levels so that they can begin to feel normal.

It’s a lot like exercising our muscles: If we constantly push our limits without any rest, we run the strong risk of burnout, injury, or at least hitting a point of diminishing returns, where more effort returns less and less progress. But if we stop for too long, we lose strength and momentum and can even lose the ability we’ve gained. The trick is to keep comfort breaks short enough that we don’t lose our momentum; otherwise, confidence can begin to slip away, and it can be hard to get going again. We can become trapped in comfort, at which point it becomes a growth stopper.

Transforming Fear into Action

The biggest challenge to leaving our comfort zone is always fear: fear that we’ll fail, fear that someone will discover that we’re not as good as they thought we were, fear that we’ll lose something important, fear that people won’t understand what we’re doing—the list goes on and on. Courage is the ability to transform these fears into focused thinking and action. New levels of capability are the reward for persisting courageously even when it feels uncomfortable or discouraging, and with these new capabilities come increased confidence. If you admire someone with greater confidence in some area, or imagine yourself there in the future, the way to get there is by leaving comfort behind and making a commitment to courageously face whatever it takes to build that capability.

Even highly successful people still experience fear often when they’re reaching for a new capability, though eventually they learn to not be stopped by it. For some, it just means that the challenge is big enough and meaningful enough to be worthwhile.

Dan Taylor, whom you may remember from the fifth chapter, believed in taking on big challenges to increase his confidence. In this spirit, he wanted to do something special with his team to celebrate his 50th birthday, in October 2002. He and his team decided to create five events, to be done over the five weeks before his birthday. They included running a 26-mile stretch of Class IV and V rapids in the Gauley River, in a four-person raft with a guide; going on a 100-mile bike ride; running the Chicago Marathon; walking 50 miles in one day; and swimming 5 miles. None of the team had any cycling, whitewater-rafting, or long-distance-swimming experience. The most any of them could run was 3 to 5 miles at a time, but in five months they were going to run a marathon: 26 miles. It seemed like a suitable challenge.

Now, you might ask, why would anyone in his right mind—especially someone who doesn’t have a lot of spare time because he’s running a business, coaching, and creating new teaching programs on the side— want to take on something that would require so much work and preparation just to celebrate a birthday? The answer is that Dan got tremendous energy from challenges. It was important to him at this point in his life to see if he could do these things. And once the idea was in his head, it became normal to talk about it. Together, he and the team mapped out a five-month training plan that had them gradually increase their abilities in running, swimming, and cycling.

Making your confidence greater than your comfort requires that you take on new challenges despite any fears you may have. Each time you succeed, you’ll create a new sense of what’s normal for you that provides a new platform for growth and achievement. Think of it as building a set of stairs. Big achievements that might have seemed impossible to reach several steps ago become attainable as we build our confidence to higher and higher levels.

Come October, after much training, Dan pushed himself to the limit, physically and emotionally. He completed all the events but one: his swim was cut from 5 miles to 3 by six-foot swells and a small-craft advisory. He describes the whitewater event as “sheer terror,” yet he got through it. Week after week, event after event—being alone with himself on the bike, swimming against big waves, walking 50 miles, and running the marathon—he took his belief about his physical and mental capabilities to new levels.

Dan’s new normal fitness regime, after this experience, included running 22 to 30 miles a week, biking 50 to 100 miles a week, swimming for 2 hours a week, and strength training. This gave him tremendous confidence about his ongoing physical quality of life as he continued to pursue his other goals. Two other members of his team, neither of whom had run a marathon before, completed the Chicago Marathon and the river rafting, and acted as spotters on Dan’s swim. One of these two went on to complete a Half Ironman Triathlon the following year, inspired by his new training regime to take on an even greater challenge.

Escaping the Comfort Trap

So how do you know if you’re in a comfort trap? Usually, if you’re really honest with yourself, you can feel when your growth is slowing down and it’s time to take on something new. The exercise at the end of this book may help with this kind of reflection. Life starts to feel a bit too easy or routine, or it begins to lose the sense of meaning and excitement it once had. You may start feeling bored or restless, or find yourself asking, “Is this all there is?” Even with these nagging feelings, sometimes we can be very good at convincing ourselves that where we are is OK, especially if it’s comfortable and the alternatives for growth are less comfortable. There are lots of justifications and distractions we can use to reinforce our decision to stay put. When we do this, we end up selling out our dreams in exchange for comfort.

There’s only one way to escape from a comfort trap, and that’s to let go of what’s lulling you to sleep motivationally and take on a new challenge, big or small, to build your confidence. Sometimes it requires a major life crisis to create the impetus to do this. But often a boost from someone who sees your potential (or even a book like this) can be enough to help you realize what you’re missing out on and get you back into motion so that you can take the next growth step.

Lisa Pijuan-Nomura (whom we introduced in chapter 3) was a dancer who wasn’t dancing. Running a literacy program offered more security with its regular salary, and it was somewhat related to one of her longtime goals of working with children’s books. At least it was related enough that she could tell herself it was an OK thing to do and a respectable job.

Then one night she had a dream about one of her dance mentors, a woman named Karen Kaeja. The next day, out of the blue, Lisa received an e-mail from Karen, asking, “What are you doing with your dance?” Lisa replied, “Oh well, you know, I’m not sure how much the world wants to see chubby dancers, and I’m a bigger girl . . .” Karen wrote back and said, “Dance isn’t about shape or size, it’s about spirit. You have one of the most beautiful spirits, and people in Toronto and the world have to see it.”

These words of encouragement and the strange coincidence with the dream were enough to make Lisa see that she had been hiding behind excuses. If she wanted to be a dancer, she should just go out and do it. In that moment she decided to quit her job and become a full-time performer. Despite her complete conviction that it was the right thing to do, the thought was still terrifying. The dance show she was working on at the time would run for another month and a half, but after that she had nothing planned. Three days before the last performance, she still had nothing new lined up.

Then, on the day of her last performance, something extraordinary happened. She got a phone call from a production company in Ireland looking for dancers for a film. They had heard about her. They would need her in Ireland for two months starting the following Wednesday. After she got back from that trip, good things continued to come her way. People kept hearing about her and work kept coming. It was as if her decision and conviction had opened the floodgates of opportunity. Her confidence about her ability to do anything blossomed. She discovered that she also had a talent for programming other artists, and quickly made a name for herself as an innovative and successful curator of shows that combine many different types of performance.

Five years later, with a bimonthly cabaret in which to showcase artists and a growing career as a creativity coach, she had become the one providing the opportunity and encouragement for others to take risks they might not have taken on their own. She has continued to challenge herself by becoming a visual artist, and moving to a new city where she has quickly become a fresh voice and respected innovator in the local arts community.

The Growth Is in the Striving

It may sound as if Lisa was just very lucky, but the truth is, no matter what had happened, she would have grown once she made the decision to commit herself wholeheartedly to being a performer. If you take on a new challenge and don’t succeed at achieving your goal, you can still grow just as much by transforming the experience into lessons for the next time. She is fairly candid about the fact that not every day was easy. But her own periods of self-doubt ultimately made her a better coach and a better artist. In fact, her work often draws on the humor, humanity and everyday heroism that we can all relate to in moments of vulnerability and transition. Your own story of becoming who you are (which is always a work in progress) is made much more interesting by the challenges you take on and overcome, especially when these require courage, and when we fight through the uncomfortable parts, proving to ourselves and others that we can.

Those who are used to making their confidence greater than their comfort will tell you that after awhile, you become less fearful of making mistakes. In fact, you begin to realize that the biggest breakthroughs often come from making mistakes, because that’s where you get your best improvement ideas. The “courage” phase, with all its discomfort, between making a commitment to do something new and the feeling of accomplishment you have once you succeed, becomes more tolerable once you realize it’s the temporary price of growing, and that growth, at least, is guaranteed. No matter how things work out, you’ll always grow more and reap rewards from leaving comfort behind and doing things that force you to develop new capabilities and confidence as long as you see them through. You just have to be okay with not always knowing in advance what those rewards are going to be. Where lifetime growth is concerned, always making your confidence greater than your comfort is a no-lose proposition.

Where Do I Start?

  Use goals to get yourself in motion. If you know you’re stuck in a comfort trap, it’s probably time to set some new goals. They can be big goals or small goals. Big goals can be especially inspiring, but you may need to break down a big goal into smaller, manageable, measurable steps in order to know where to start. Small goals are useful because they are easy to accomplish and give us a quick boost in confidence, but you’ll need to make sure that you either keep setting new ones or connect them to some larger goal, if you want to stay in motion. Here’s a secret about goals: what matters most is not whether you achieve the goal, but that the goal gets you striving, because striving leads to growth. Often the most valuable results are actually unexpected by-products of pursuing other goals.

  Take a break if you need one. Sometimes people lose their confidence in the middle of a particularly challenging activity, project, or series of events because they become overwhelmed or exhausted. It’s often a better idea to take a comfort break to rejuvenate yourself than to continue to work if you’re becoming less and less effective. After you’ve renewed your energy and focus, you’ll be able to accomplish more in less time and make up for the time you spent resting. If possible, take at least one full day in which you completely disconnect from the source of your stress and do something that gives you pleasure. And remember: discomfort, and the courage it takes to get through it, is a natural part of developing any new capability. Once you get through it, you’ll be at a new level and able to enjoy the fruits of your efforts.

  Use your past as a model. Here is a case where you can use the past as raw material in a different way, as proof of concept, proof that you’ve done this before and you can do it again. In Strategic Coach, we have an exercise we call The 4 C’s Formula, and one way you can use it is to look at a past experience so you can see how you built a new capability more clearly. Once you see it in one experience it’s easy to recognize it in others.

Think of a time in your past where you developed a new capability. The place it starts is with commitment, with a decision to leave your comfort zone and try something new. The next step is courage. You have to get through the fears and unpleasantness that comes with the learning and uncertainty of doing something that stretches you. As you work through this fear, though, you develop new capabilities and those lead to confidence. Look at your own experience and write down what each of those stages looked like for you and you’ll see how it worked in the past. Then the next time you have an opportunity to make a commitment to something that requires courage, you’ll be able to map out what the process will look like in your mind and be more conscious as you go through the stages. This is especially helpful as you go through the courage stage. Feeling crappy because you’re in a courage phase of growth is very different from feeling crappy because you’re stuck or stagnant. Being clear on the commitment you’ve made and the capability and confidence you’re working to build won’t necessarily take the suffering out of the courage phase, but it will put it into a context that reminds you why what you’re going through is worthwhile.