Best of IdeaCast: Escape Your Comfort Zone

CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch.

The business world values expertise. Take the ten-thousand-hour rule. Or the expression that practice makes perfect. Whatever framing you have for it, this definition of expertise is grounded in comfort. The idea that you’ve gotten so good at something, that it has become second nature. Nothing is a stretch for you. You’re comfortable. You’re effortlessly in the zone.

But the flip side of expertise is that we learn by doing things we have not yet mastered. We also know that many breakthroughs happen when you are outside of your comfort zone.

This anti-expertise is something that Andy Molinsky has studied. He’s a professor at Brandeis International Business School. And he wrote the book Reach: A New Strategy to Help You Step Outside Your Comfort Zone, Rise to the Challenge and Build Confidence.

Back in 2017, he came on the show and spoke with Sarah Green Carmichael. He shared the strategies and benefits of getting out of your comfort zone. And we feel his advice still applies today.

Here’s that conversation.

SARAH GREEN: So how can you tell if you’re avoiding something that is making you uncomfortable just because it makes you uncomfortable and you’re avoiding it, or because there’s a really good reason?

ANDY MOLINSKY: I think we’re really good at tricking ourselves and tying ourselves into psychological knots around these issues.

SARAH GREEN: Yeah. My dad likes to say that smart people come up with the smartest excuses.

ANDY MOLINSKY: Exactly. A question that I like to ask myself, and that I like to ask people who I work with on helping to learn to step outside their comfort zones, it’s sort of a thought experiment. If all of a sudden you could snap your fingers and making anxiety go away– just as a thought experiment in whatever situation it is– really eliminate it, would this be something that you’d be excited and happy…