81: How to step outside your comfort zone and unlock your leadership potential with Andy Molinsky

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ep 81 FB How to step outside your comfort zone and unlock your leadership potential with Andy Molinsky on the TalentGrow Show with Halelly Azulay

When you find yourself in a tough situation in the workplace, the most effective solution often lies outside of your comfort zone. Going against the grain of our regular routines and responses, however, can be incredibly difficult to do. That’s why author, professor, and consultant Andy Molinsky works to help people develop the insights and courage necessary to act outside their personal and cultural comfort zones when doing important, but challenging, tasks in work and life. In this energizing episode of The TalentGrow Show, Andy and I talk about why it’s so important to step outside of our comfort zones, the five key challenges that stand in our way, and three great tools Andy recommends for implementing his advice. Listen to learn the simple, practical steps you can take to overcome the difficulty of breaking out of your comfort zone, and how you can become a more effective leader and professional as a result. And be sure to share what you’ve learned with others as well!

ABOUT ANDY MOLINSKY:

Andy Molinsky is a Professor at Brandeis University’s International Business School, with a joint appointment in the Department of Psychology.  Andy received his Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior and M.A. in Psychology from Harvard University. He also holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia University and a B.A. in International Affairs from Brown University.

Andy’s work helps people develop the insights and courage necessary to act outside their personal and cultural comfort zones when doing important, but challenging, tasks in work and life. His research and writing has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Inc. Magazine, Psychology Today, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, NPR and Voice of America.

Andy was awarded as a Top Voice for LinkedIn for his work in education. His first book, Global Dexterity (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013), received the Axiom Award (Silver Medal) for Best Business Book in International Business & Globalization and has been used widely in organizations around the world, including Boeing, AIG, the US Air Force Academy, and the Clinton Foundation, among others.

His new book Reach was published with Penguin Random House in January 2017.  He teaches, consults, and lectures widely to university and corporate audiences.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:

  • How Andy’s academic work gives him unique insight into the corporate world (5:25)
  • Why is it important to step outside your comfort zone? When is it appropriate to do so? (7:12)
  • The kinds of people Andy reached out to and learned from when researching his latest book (8:48)
  • Andy lists the five key challenges that make it hard to step out of your comfort zone (9:27)
  • Which of the five challenges do people most commonly face (11:05)
  • Halelly talks about the “learning cycle,” and both the value and the challenges inherent in moving from conscious competence to unconscious competence (12:09)
  • Andy shares some insights he got from teaching and working first-hand with people attempting to break out of their comfort-zones (13:26)
  • Andy shares an inspiring story that highlights the three key tools he recommends using to practically implement his ideas: conviction, customization, and clarity (14:34)
  • Don’t catastrophize! Acknowledge the worst-case and best-case scenarios, and anchor yourself in the middle-ground (18:55)
  • “Great is the enemy of good.” Why it’s important to avoiding perfectionism as a crutch (21:06)
  • Think of failure as an opportunity to gain more data (21:55)
  • The three zones that situations in your life fall into: the comfort zone, the stretch zone, and the panic zone (22:38)
  • As a first step to getting outside of your comfort zone, you can build confidence by doing things in the stretch zone (23:11)
  • What’s new and exciting on Andy’s horizon? (24:26)
  • What’s one specific action you can take to upgrade your workplace or leadership effectiveness? (25:29)

RESOURCES:

Transcript

Episode 81 Andy Molinsky

TEASER CLIP: Halelly: In your latest book, Reach, you say there’s tons of benefits and it’s really important to go outside your comfort zone, but that lots of people don’t do it. I’d love to hear more from what you’ve found in your research, why? Why are people not doing it, and why should we rethink that?

Andy: You do want to pick your spots. You want to pick and choose. If you want to grow and learn and develop, if you’re taking on a new role, a new responsibility, a new job – if you’re sort of at a key transition point, that’s where stepping outside your comfort zone becomes critical. You’re an entrepreneur starting that company. You've been an individual contributor and now you’re a manager. You’ve been tapped as a high potential person, but you don’t really know how to manage or lead or maybe you’re a leader and now you have to do things like, I don’t know, create a vision and inspire people and you have to public speak and you’re terrified of public speaking. Whatever it is, there are always challenges at these sort of critical inflection points in our career, and I think that’s why to grow and learn and develop and succeed in these contexts, that’s why stepping outside your comfort zone becomes really important.

[MUSIC] Announcer: Welcome to the TalentGrow Show, where you can get actionable results-oriented insight and advice on how to take your leadership, communication and people skills to the next level and become the kind of leader people want to follow. And now, your host and leadership development strategist, Halelly Azulay.

Halelly: Welcome back TalentGrowers. I’m happy that you’ve come back for another episode of the TalentGrow Show, and if you’re new here, welcome. I’m so happy that you’re here. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow, and I try to help you become the kind of leader people actually want to follow. This week we have a guest who is completely talking about things that are up my alley. It’s Professor Andy Molinsky, and we talk about how important it is for you to go outside your comfort zone, to stretch, to grow, and knowing that when you’re outside your comfort zone, you’re going to feel really uncomfortable and you’re going to feel like you want to go back to what you’re used to. So, Andy shares five common reasons and fears why people don’t go outside their comfort zone enough, why it’s important for us to go there anyway, and he shares with us three things you can do along with a great story he wrote about in his book that can help you move into that discomfort and stretch yourself so that you can grow new skills, raise your level of confidence and become an even better professional, no matter what it is that you do. I can’t wait to share the show with you. I’ll give you much more detail when we get into the conversation. Without further ado, here’s Andy Molinsky on the TalentGrow Show with me. Check it out.

Hey there TalentGrowers, I’ve got Professor Andy Molinsky on with me today. He’s the author of the award-winning Harvard Business Review book Global Dexterity, about stretching outside your cultural comfort zone without losing yourself in the process, and Dr. Molinsky also has a new book called Reach, with Penguin Random House about acting outside your comfort zone, why it’s so hard, how we avoid doing it and how to be more successful at it. We’ll definitely talk more about that today. Andy is a professor of organizational behavior at Brandeis University’s international business school, and an expert on organization behavior, cross-cultural interaction in business settings and self-help and improvement. And he regularly writes for the Harvard Business Review and Inc. and has been featured in the Economist, Fast Company, Fortune, Financial Times, the Boston Globe, the New York Times and NPR. And I’m sure the list goes on. Andy, welcome to the TalentGrow Show!

Andy: Thanks for having me.

Halelly: It’s such a pleasure. I’m so happy that you’ll be sharing some of your insights with us. But before we do, we always ask our guests to describe their professional journey very briefly. Where did you start and how did you get to where you are today?

Andy: Great question. I never in a million years thought that I would be doing what I’m doing today. Not that I really knew what I would be doing, but it sort of emerged over time. Today I’m a professor. I sort of wear two hats – I’m a professor at a university with all the typical roles a professor would have. I do research, I teach, I do a lot of administrative work at the university and so on, but I also do a lot of stuff outside as you mentioned before. I write popular business books and I write for Harvard Business Review and Inc.com, and I do a lot of consulting and keynotes and off sites and so on and so forth. I just sort of emerged over time. I think the best way to say it is when I went to go do a PhD, I knew on some level that I didn’t want to spend my entire career exclusively speaking to other academics. Most people who are professors really do. There’s nothing wrong with that, but my aim has always been to kind of use academics almost like R&D, as a way to really understand stuff and there’s a lot of benefit that you have in the academic world to really get to the bottom of things, to understand how to simplify and clarify very complex ideas without losing the complexity. That’s what I think I’ve learned to do, and now I sort of translate that even beyond the world of academics, to managers an executives and employees in a variety of contexts.

Halelly: So it sounds like you’re kind of a bridge between the two worlds, whereas most people put their stake in the ground in one or the other?

Andy: Yeah, that’s a good way to put it, actually. I like to flip back and forth and be a bit of a cultural bridge. It’s interesting, because the two worlds are very different, but I find that they’re both very interesting. They both can learn from each other, and I learn from kind of being immersed and having a foot in both. Yes, it’s a good way of putting it.

Halelly: Neat. I admire it. Those who might have listened to my flipped episode, episode 50 where I talked about my own path, I considered going into an academic career early in my career, and then when I was an instructor at the University of Maryland and saw the inside workings of the department, what the professors had to deal with and what it was like, I was like, “No, this is not for me.” And so I shifted into the corporate world and I totally appreciate that you’re able to do both and I appreciate that you recognize that one of the challenges that many people in academia have is translating to lay people language and making all of the wisdom that they have at their hands useful. And usable, to regular folks in the corporate world.

Andy: Absolutely true. I’d add another thing is that not all academics study things that are sort of pain points or challenges or problems for people in the corporate world. I’ve always wanted to do that, so I’ve studied from an academic standpoint, in academic journals and so on, issues like stepping outside your cultural comfort zone or dealing with difficult situations outside your personal comfort zone and so on and so forth. All my academic work is focused on very specific kind of real-world problems, and there are some people who do that. I’m at a business school, so I think people are more likely to do that at a professional school like a business school, but most academics don’t. Most academics focus on theories and ideas that are interesting to other academics, which is great, but maybe not as immediately applicable to the business world. That’s, in a way, how I’ve created the bridge as well.

Halelly: Makes sense. So, the words comfort zone are popping up in both your books. One is talking about your cultural comfort zone and the other one is talking about comfort zone more generally. So, let’s think about that. In your latest book, Reach, you say there’s tons of benefits and it’s really important to go outside your comfort zone, but that lots of people don’t do it. I’d love to hear more from what you’ve found in your research, why? Why are people not doing it, and why should we rethink that?

Andy: I actually don’t want people to come with the takeaway here that I should always be stepping outside of my comfort zone in every possible situation. Please don’t take that as a takeaway, because that’s not the case. I think you do want to pick your spots. You want to pick and choose. If you want to grow and learn and develop, if you’re taking on a new role, a new responsibility, a new job – if you’re sort of at a key transition point, that’s where stepping outside your comfort zone becomes critical. You’re an entrepreneur starting that company. You've been an individual contributor and now you’re a manager. You’ve been tapped as a high potential person, but you don’t really know how to manage or lead or maybe you’re a leader and now you have to do things like, I don’t know, create a vision and inspire people and you have to public speak and you’re terrified of public speaking. Whatever it is, there are always challenges at these sort of critical inflection points in our career, and I think that’s why to grow and learn and develop and succeed in these contexts, that’s why stepping outside your comfort zone becomes really important. That’s what inspired me to write the book. That’s the why.

I should also mention who I spoke with for this book and what I’ve done for this book. Executives, managers, entrepreneurs, but I also even broadened it to other professions – doctors, police officers, therapists, actors, students, priests, rabbis, all sorts of people. Even a goat farmer, actually. I wanted to sample broadly. In the situations I looked at, all sorts of situations from speaking up and speaking out and being assertive and public speaking and making small talk when you don’t feel comfortable doing it and selling something and stopping to be such a micromanager, all sorts of situations that people experience in their lives. Stepping outside of their comfort zone. I just wanted to set that up too.

In terms of why it’s hard? I’ve found it all boiled down to five key challenges. I called them psychological roadblocks. The first is authenticity. This doesn’t feel like me. The second is likeability. I’m worried that someone will not like this version of me, if I step outside my comfort zone in this way. A third one is confidence or the feeling that I'm not good at this, or I’m afraid I’m not going to be good at this, and by the way, it’s pretty obvious. People will see that I’m not good at this. That’s confidence. Resentment. Sometimes people felt resentful they had to step outside their comfort zone in the first place, like why should I have to … let’s say you’re introverted and you don’t feel comfortable making small talk with people, or with executives, but you realize that the way to make it in this company and to get chosen from key assignments and so on is to build these relationships. But you don’t feel comfortable doing it and you’re very resentful that your skills and qualifications are fantastic, but you’re not getting those key roles and key opportunities because of your discomfort with small talk. Some people feel deeply resentful of something like that. That’s an example. And the final one is morality. Not every case we’re going to feel like stepping outside our comfort zone is immoral in some ways, but I have to tell you, I open my book Reach with the story of a young woman to started a company and one of the very first things she ended up having to do is fire her best friend, who was one of her early employees. It might not be every one of these. It might just be a couple of them. Authenticity, likeability, confidence, resentment, morality, but even one can make stepping outside your comfort zone pretty tough.

Andy: Interesting, wow. And of course I wish we had five hours so we could talk about each of those in depth. I know people will check out your book. We’ll have a link to it in the show notes. Is there one that’s more common than the others?

Halelly: It’s an interesting question. I do a lot of training sessions and off sites at companies, and I do exercises to help people try to diagnose and understand these in a group setting. I think the big three, the ones that are the most common, are authenticity, likeability and confidence. The worry or fear that this is not going to feel like me, not going to feel natural, going to feel awkward, unnatural doing it. People won’t like this version of me. If I do start to be more assertive, if I do try to own the room and have more executive presence, which is outside my comfort zone, people are going to think that I am a pompous jerk. These aren’t necessarily logical – they’re more psychological, that’s likeability – and then confidence. I’m going to be bad at this. People on the cusp of considering stepping outside their comfort zone often feel some sort of cocktail of these three. That often times will cause us to avoid, to kind of sculpt our professional lives in a way that avoids these situations. Maybe even rationalizes whey they’re not important, when in fact they probably are.

Andy: And certainly I can see how you could become complacent if you just stuck with what you know well and what comes naturally. Eventually, you’re going to be able to do it with … I like to teach people about the learning cycle, and how you move from a conscious competence to unconscious competence, where you can do something with your eyes closed, and not even think about it. If you’re on that kind of autopilot, it’s great for whatever that action you’re taking, but it’s not really great for you or anyone else, because at some point, your eyes are closed. You’re not looking around. You’re missing key changes in the context or on the horizon. You yourself are bored because you’ve done it so often. You do it so well. So I think there’s a lot of excitement people maybe overlook that comes with a new challenge and all learning, all growth happens outside the comfort zone for sure. But I do think, as I said earlier, I think it’s really key to pick your spots. It takes energy, it takes effort, it takes focus, it takes sort of psychological resources to actually do this, because it’s not easy. The first couple of times it will probably be really hard. So much so that it might cause you to avoid stepping outside your comfort zone. Saying this just isn’t worth it. I should also mention, in addition to doing interviews for this book, I also teach and train and work with people stepping outside their comfort zones, so I see it firsthand. It’s interesting how usually the first or second time trying something like this, it’s really hard. In some ways you need that coach or mentor, some source of accountability to try and push through. Because after the third time, usually, I see people are like, “Oh, yeah! Hey, this isn’t as bad as I thought it was. I’m a little better at this than I thought I was.” But you can only get there if you’re able to actually approach instead of to avoid. To actually persist instead of throwing in the towel.

Halelly: And having that coach by your side kind of push you and prod you and urge you and coax you and cheer you on and so forth, it’s probably really helpful to overcome your own internal barriers that might put the brake on things. So I’d love to hear, since you do this kind of work and you did all the research, is there some kind of a prescribed step-by-step way that you teach people or is there … and I’d love to hear it through the story maybe of someone you’ve helped transform or do something different than they were able to do otherwise?

Andy: Sure. There are three key tools that I’ve found to be critical, and I can tell you them in the context not of someone I’ve worked with, but what just pops up as we talk is a story that I actually talk about in the book Reach. I kind of carry it through the book and it’s just such a good story. I kind of wish I had worked with her, but she ultimately figured it out on her own. But it captures all these points. The stories about this woman Annie Harris, and she worked for an investment firm where they try to encourage high net worth people to invest their money in the company. That’s the typical personal sort of investment sort of firm. Her job was to cultivate these clients and encourage these clients to invest in the firm, and she did a really good job of it. According to the protocol of the firm, anyone like her – anyone like her role – had to bring along a portfolio manager. It was just part of the protocol of the firm. That was someone to sort of answer more specific questions around the portfolios while she was managing the relationship.

It turned out that the portfolio manager in this case, his name was Rick Schmidt, he was a complete jerk. He would undermine her in client meetings, he would shame her. She would tell Rick, for instance, before a key meeting that this particular high net worth person is very concerned with tax implications for their investments or something, and Rick would sort of brush it off and say, “Oh, yeah, okay.” He would minimize it and then in the actual meeting itself, he would again brush it off, minimize it and make her feel so ashamed and angry and just completely undermine her in front of the client. This kept happening, one way or another. She was so angry at him.

Stepping outside her comfort zone was to be assertive. She was not an assertive person. Kind of a modest sort of timid person, didn’t like conflict. But she knew that she needed to be assertive and she needed to sort of tell him off. So what did she do? The tools that I have in my book that are critical for stepping outside of your comfort zone, there are three key ones that I highlight. The first is conviction. Sort of a deep sense of purpose in why this is worth doing. Why the pain is worth the gain. In some cases it could be personal. In some cases it could be professional. In Annie’s case, it was professional. She really wanted to be a manager, and ultimately to become actually a director. She had very high professional ambitions and she realized that this was a skill she needed to learn to do. Yes, it was very, very difficult for her, but it was very meaningful for her to be able to learn to add this to her skillset and become the professional that she ultimately was hoping to be. For all of us, conviction is going to mean different things in different circumstances, but pinpointing that source of conviction and having it be sort of a wind at her back was a first key thing she did.

A second key thing she did, a second tool I talk about is called customization. This is the idea that there’s no one size fits all way to step outside your comfort zone. You actually have more power than you think to kind of tweak and personalize and customize a situation and the way that you do something, so it fits you just a little bit better. In her case, she actually scripted out how she was going to confront Rick, and she ultimately did. She used her body language. She actually walked back and forth in the hallway and if we were all together here I wish I could show it to you. She said, “I did my executive walk,” and she walked back and forth and built up the courage. She opened his door – didn’t knock, by the way, that’s a nonverbal sort of cue by not knocking – she closed the door, again, not saying, “Is it okay if I close the door?” No, she just closed the door, walked over to his desk, she put her hands on his desk and I said to her, “Oh, wow, was that like a power pose?” And she said, “I wish. No. I was just afraid I was going to faint.” And then she scripted out something to tell Rick. She scripted out how she was going to do it. She also told me she wore her favorite power suit. Now, no one knew that this was her power suit. This was her own little, gave her that little teeny boost of confidence, so my point is that through her verbal behavior, her nonverbal behavior, even wearing the power suit, she customized this situation to try and make it sort of her version of it. I find that people do that all the time when stepping outside their comfort zone. Kind of putting their own little twist or spin on something, and people have more power than they think to be able to do it. So that’s a second tool which is customization.

The third tool is clarity. Clarity is the idea that in these scary situations outside our comfort zones, we often do what psychologists call catastrophizing. We think about the worst possible scenario. I’m just going to look like a total jerk. I’m going to completely flummox the situation. I’m going to lose myself. I’m going to cry in front of him and I’m going to hate myself for doing it. So I’m thinking of the worst possible situations. What Annie told me is that what was critical for her was to think about the fact that yes, there is a worst case, but the likelihood of that worst case is very, very unlikely. She also thought to herself, “Huh, there’s also a best case. I’m going to waltz in there and I am going to be so assertive and so smoothly assertive that he won’t know what hit him. And I will feel just in charge and like the professional I’ve always wanted to be.” She also said, “But that wasn’t that really likely, either.” She sort of set the two extremes aside and then focused on the middle ground. She said the most likely middle ground, almost like an anchor, if you imagine these emotions bringing you to one side or the other, like a boat on a stormy sea, the clarity was like an anchor that sort of anchored her to the ground and said, “You know what? I’m probably not going to be the best version of myself in this situation. I’ll probably be able to do it much better in the future, but I’m not going to be a total failure. It’ll be good enough and I’ll learn from this and I will get what I need to get accomplished and I’m just going to go for it.” Sort of that middle ground perspective that I find is very important for people to not catastrophize and to have some sort of clarity about the fact that, you know what? This is a learning opportunity. It’s not going to be the worst ever. It’s not going to be the best ever. It’s going to be somewhere in the middle. And people that had that sense of clarity, in the research that I do and also the work that I do, trying to help people develop that, are more successful. So the bottom line here is she was able to do this. She learned a lot from it. Her relationship with Rick never got much better, but she certainly started to become more assertive and he stopped doing what he was doing and she actually started to develop a bit more kind of professionalism and confidence that she then carried over to other aspects of her job.

Halelly: Nice. And I love that your message sounds like you’re telling people that they’re allowing perfect to get in the way of good. Like that they’re using perfection as a crutch to not try something, because whenever you try something for the first time, or when you’re new at whatever skill it is, you’re not going to be perfect at it. Because that’s just not how it works.

Andy: That’s a good way of putting it. I think you’re right. What do they say? Great is the enemy of good. I think that’s true, it can become a crutch. I think it’s really important for people, when stepping outside their comfort zone, to try if they can to develop a bit of a learning orientation. In other words, that if I slip up – which by the way is very likely – that’s in some ways actually good. It’s data. See, instead of failure, code it as data. Data for improvement. And I think it’s hard sometimes for people to do that, but the more that they do that, I think the more successful that they are.

Halelly: And have what Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset, right?

Andy: Absolutely.

Halelly: A work in progress. Great. In all the stories that you’ve seen and all the people you’ve worked with, in all the research that you’ve done, is there some kind of a hidden opportunity that’s right there that lots of us are completely ignoring or maybe that is a piece of advice that just is not often articulated, but that can make a very big difference? Is there some kind of a secret nugget of gold?

Andy: One that comes to mind as you’re talking is the idea that if you think about it, there are kind of three zones you can think of in terms of situations in your life. There are things that are truly in your comfort zone, and then there are things that are in what I would call a stretch zone for you. These are sort of challenging things, but they’re not in your comfort zone but they’re also not in what I would call your panic zone. Which are things that are just you’re absolutely terrified of doing. For you to ultimately do those, sure, you might be able to, but they’re a less low hanging fruit situation than something in your stretch zone. So my nugget would be to try and think of situations for yourself in your life to try to arrange them into these three zones, and if you’re interested, start with something in your stretch zone. Start with something that is a stretch for you, but that's not going to create that panic and it’s not already going to be in your comfort zone. That’s where I would start to construct your confidence, because over time, as you start to build that confidence and learn to step outside your comfort zone in these stretch situations, you can start to translate what you’ve learned about yourself and about how to step outside your comfort zone, to more challenging situations over time.

Halelly: And you’re more open to learning when you’re in the stretch zone than when you’re in the panic zone and that your brain can’t really function in a very rational way when you’re in that mode.

Andy: Absolutely. Sort of the self-protective flashing red light becomes so intense that you’re in avoidance. You’re running away from the bear.

Halelly: Exactly. It’s so funny, you don’t know this, but what you just described, I have a chart that describes that in the first chapter of my book, Employee Development on a Shoestring. Amen. We are totally aligned on that. We don’t have time to talk about your first book, Cultural Dexterity. Maybe we’ll have you back to talk more about that. But, before you give everyone one really specific action that they can take right away, what’s new and exciting on your horizon? What’s got your attention these days Andy?

Andy: What’s really fun actually is that I’m starting to translate my books and what I do into online courses. That’s actually, in 2018, I’m going to be launching, very soon actually, I’m launching a class called Mastering American Business Culture, an online course, for foreign professionals in the United States, or outside the United States, who want to learn to adapt and adjust their behavior to work effectively in the United States and with Americans. And then I’m also creating an online course about stepping outside your comfort zone. Just like we described. That’s going to bring people through the process, step by step, and use all sort of the best practices that I know from all my 20 years of doing this. That is what is exciting and on the horizon.

Halelly: Wow, cool. That’s such a growing type of service now, the online courses and people can just go and learn what they want directly and not go through so many gatekeepers and middlemen and women. That’s nice. I wish you lots of success with that. So what’s one specific action that you can recommend our listeners take today, this week, to upgrade their own leadership effectiveness or maybe just in general their workplace effectiveness?

Andy: Aside from taking a look at my book, Reach, I guess, pick a situation. Really try to think to yourself and don’t feel that you have to change everything. But where is one situation that would be a nice, good leverage point for you in your professional world that you could maybe apply some of this stuff to and learn to step outside your comfort zone? What’s that situation for you? Maybe it’s giving feedback and you’re afraid to give negative feedback. Maybe it’s public speaking. Start to think back, when have been a few times when you’ve been presented with that opportunity and maybe you’ve tried to avoid or maybe you’ve sort of given excuses which at the time felt rational and reasonable, but also maybe were a bit of a rationalization? Again, as we talked earlier, ideally something that’s in your stretch zone. That’s not terrifying, but that does create a bit of anxiety and makes your palms a little sweaty. Makes your heart beat a little bit. That’s the thing that you can do today and that’s what you can start to focus on. It’s a longer conversation about how to learn how to step outside your comfort zone, but that’s what I address in my courses and my book and so on and so forth. Really kind of that self-awareness piece is one immediate thing you can do today.

Halelly: Awesome. So it sounds like identify that opportunity for a place or a skill that you can use to start practicing going outside your comfort zone? Certainly we listen to this show and you can review the three keys that Andy mentioned. This is where I have to try and remember, trust my memory. I think it was clarity – you can give me a grade! Clarity, and then it was customization was the second one, and then the third one also started with a C?

Andy: Conviction.

Halelly: Conviction. Okay. What did I get, that’s 66 percent.

Andy: I think you got it. It was just on the tip of your tongue!

Halelly: Very good. We really appreciate you taking the time today to speak with us here on the TalentGrow Show and helping us to learn and I hope that everyone stays in touch with you and learns more from you. What’s the best way to do that?

Andy: My website, which is AndyMolinsky.com. You can get links to all my social there. LinkedIn and Twitter and my professional Facebook site as well and my email is there if you want to reach out. I’ve got all sorts of articles and videos and tools and tips and lots of stuff. I basically tried to create the website to be the kind of place I would want to visit, so that was my goal.

Halelly: And I like it. I think your website is really rich and easy to use, so we will definitely link to that in the show notes and thanks again for your time. I look forward to staying in touch with you as well. Thank you.

Andy: Thanks for having me on.

Halelly: My pleasure.

All right, TalentGrowers. I hope you enjoyed this show. I enjoyed talking to Andy about all that stuff because it’s totally the kind of things that make me want to get excited and share with the world. I know that you’re going to get a lot of value if you take action, so do follow his advice. Think about that one situation where you could push yourself outside your comfort zone and practice. And don’t become stumped by your perfectionism. It is good to practice, even when it’s not perfect, as we discussed. I’d love to hear what you thought about this episode. You can always leave me a comment in the comment section. You can leave me a voicemail on my website. You can write me an email or however you want to reach me. And, recognize that if you leave a review for the show – not just this episode but the show – if you listen to it, if you found value in it, just leave a one-sentence or a two-sentence review on iTunes so more people will discover the show and get value from it. If I’m going to do this work anyway, I might as well help the most people possible. You can help make that happen with your review. It should take a couple minutes. It’s not hard, I even have a tutorial on my website that can help you do it if you’re not sure how to do it. I would so appreciate that. That would be such a small token of your appreciation for the value that hopefully you’ve received by listening to the show. I really value your time and your attention and I thank you for listening. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist and until the next time, make today great.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to the TalentGrow Show, where we help you develop your talent to become the kind of leader that people want to follow. For more information, visit TalentGrow.com.

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Intro/outro music: "Why-Y" by Esta

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