Leadership Requires Going Beyond Your Comfort Level – Behind the Scenes

All growth requires you to go beyond your comfort level. Working requires muscle failure for growth. Leadership requires you to go beyond your comfort level. Let me share a quick story about how a leader learned the hard way about growth and comfort levels. To grow as a leader you want to find the edge where you grow and that edge is where you are uncomfortable.

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Beyond Your Comfort Level: The Transcript

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Disclaimer: This transcript was created using YouTube’s translator tool and that may mean that some of the words, grammar, and typos come from a misinterpretation of the video.    

[0:03]
Why am I coming to you to the gym? Well, today we’re gonna talk about growth, we’re gonna talk about change. And here’s what I believe. Hopefully, you believe the same thing too. But you can’t truly change your body.

[0:18]
If you’re trying to be comfortable. It was comfortable for me to be in the bed this morning, warm, play next to my wife, and, and just comfortable. And I could stay there. But I knew that I needed to get my body moving, I needed to sweat a little bit, I needed to challenge my muscles. And that’s not comfortable. So get out of bed, got my gear on, went to the gym.

[0:44]
Now you may prefer weights, something like this. Maybe you prefer this, this contraption here, which is where you can really sweat it out, I’m going to get a run in indoors. Many of you hate that probably. Or maybe you’d like really torture devices like this stair stepper thing here. But either way, you want to grow, you’ve got to get uncomfortable. And I truly believe this and how does this relate to your job as a leader? Well, a lot of times leaders, you know, work so hard to get to where they are, but they just want to take it easy, they want to rest. And I was one of those leaders I had the kind of business where I work really hard for three or four years, got it to about five, 6 million. And I was happy to coast, I was happy to drift along. But this was dangerous. I wrote about it in my book the trap of success. But you don’t need to buy my book to get this lesson, I’m just going to tell it to you right here.

[1:40]
That if you want to grow as a leader, if you want your team to grow, if you want to have higher-performing teams, you want to have more alignment, you want to get more people thinking about the business and innovating, you want to empower them, you want to make sure that you are challenging yourself to grow, you have to lead by example. And one of the best examples I can give you is a story that I had, I want to buy the Inc 5000 founders come into my events, small little intimate leadership event. And we really wanted to find out what was keeping you as a leader from evolving and identify it and move forward.

[2:21]
Alright, had to move out the way a little bit. So I remember this leader, having a conversation about his own evolution. And, and we get on the topic of giving feedback. And everyone pretty much agrees that giving feedback is not the ideal way to perform the day, especially when someone’s not performing at the level which they need to or they’re not seeing something that you see. And you need to give them feedback so that they do pay attention to whatever it is right. And as a leader, we have these moments where we can choose to give the feedback or not get the feedback. And if we choose not to give the feedback, we’re probably choosing our comfort over the entire organization. And it’s certainly over the other person who probably wants to grow and wants to know where they can improve. But if you have a choice of feedback, and you choose to not give the feedback, then you’re gonna have what something similar happened to this executive founder, which was asked him about, you know, was there a time in his career that he knew he should give someone feedback that he didn’t? And then it cost him dearly? He goes, yep, I know.

[3:33]
Exactly. Just recently, I was talking to my HR director, HR director, was in charge of hiring, but also in charge of retention of employees. And he saw something that the HR director was not bringing up in the meetings, and he failed to bring it up for a few weeks, even a few months, he said, and eventually one day, they end up losing, like 18 employees. 18 employees may not be a lot to you, because if you have a really big business, if you have a smaller business 80 employees is a crap time, right. But what happened next was my questioning was, you know, what was really going on here because while I knew there was some competition coming up, down the street, some new hair warehouses were being developed, they owned a kind of a drop shipping, three PL kind of thing. And they had all these warehouse workers. Well, they lost 18 in one day, and it didn’t stop there.

[4:28]
There were some other people that left and asked him, you know, give me an idea what this cost you and he goes, Yeah, I know exactly what it costs me. I had to go find some temporary workers, and it cost me but a quarter-million dollars because I failed to have that conversation. I failed to get uncomfortable. I failed to give the feedback that was necessary so that we could get back and it’s like, do you know what the real issue was this here’s, yeah, unfortunately, the places down the street knew what we were paying employees because they asked and they offered them $1 more per hour and we And we had to scramble and cost us, you know, overnight dollars.

[5:04]
This story here may not be exactly your business, but here’s the real message behind it. In order to grow as a leader, you’ve got to accept that change is difficult and change will require you to be uncomfortable. I was in the gym today to be uncomfortable, you know, by growing my muscles and really pushing myself to the next level. And that’s the way I grow. The same thing with leaders, we look for those opportunities to grow, to be uncomfortable. And we do that we exercise that every day, we don’t sit back and wait for things to change, or hopefully get better. We’re very intentional about it.

[5:43]
So if you want to be a visionary leader, you want to make sure that you are looking for these places where you can grow, you can looking for places where you can really go beyond where you are as a leader right now. And I’m just here to remind you that change is difficult. change requires you to be courageous. And I share this message with you because this leader, founder client had to learn it the hard way or million dollars. And, you know, wrapping that up, I said, you know, what did you learn from all this because, well, you put in a spotlight today led me to believe that anytime I see this, I’m going to have that conversation, I’m not going to push it to the side. And I’m going to urge you to do the same thing for someone on your team that needs some feedback.

[6:27]
Today’s the day to be able to take some time and have that even if it makes you uncomfortable. Even it makes them uncomfortable. Because you get to choose the mini the organization, stakeholders, the customers, investors, the other employees over the few which is you or that other one person. Choose the mini always appears every time. This is Gene Hammett. I help CEOs and their teams align together to continue growing. I bring this message to you because I want you to continue to grow as a leader. If you think of growth and you think of leadership, think of growth think tank has always been the courage. We’ll see you next time.

Disclaimer: This transcript was created using YouTube’s translator tool and that may mean that some of the words, grammar, and typos come from a misinterpretation of the video.

Beyond Your Comfort Level

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