How to play to your edge

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Several years ago I signed up to an online course because I wanted to take some time out each week to work on my business, rather than in it.

My expectation at the time was that I’d be given a step-by-step framework to map out my business goals and marketing plan - a bit like a paint-by-numbers approach telling me what to do and how to do it.

As you can probably imagine, that isn't what I got!

Rather than a list of activities and advice to follow, it delivered something very different, and much more powerful:

It taught me how to play to my edge.

It’s fair to say that until that point, I mostly did what was familiar.

I didn’t often push past my comfort zone.

Anything that worked, and therefore felt easy and straightforward, I put on rinse and repeat.

And actions that scared me or required trying something unknown got pushed to the bottom of the list.

Now you might be familiar with this because, let’s face it, no-one likes hard things.

Hard things are uncomfortable, unsettling and often downright nerve-wracking.

But the problem is, hard things are inevitably the difference between good and great.

You might have come across this image before, which perfectly sums up what I was missing, until the course set me a specific challenge.

The challenge was this.

It asked me to undertake an act of “productive discomfort”.

I'd never come across this term before, but it had an interesting effect.

Rather than unconsciously avoiding anything that felt difficult, it brought those things to the fore and made them visible.

I had to consider what those actions might look like and make a list.

I was instructed to break down big action items into lots of single components. 

So for example, "Call coaching prospects" became a list of ten actions, e.g. "Call Jane Smith", "Call Matt White", and so on.

And then I had to choose one of those list items to undertake each day that week.

This clever approach achieved three things.

Firstly, it made me contemplate activities that I’d never thought of before.

Secondly, it created a simple action list (which incidentally didn’t feel nearly as bad as my fear-based brain imagined it might).

And thirdly, it broke the challenge down into one small step to try. I didn’t have to scale the mountain. I just had to put on my walking boots and move 50 meters forward.

As I put this strategy into action and kept it up over a period of twelve weeks, something surprising happened - I saw a sizable shift in my business momentum.

On its own this was an amazing result, but I wasn’t prepared for the greatest change of all...

I started to enjoy acts of productive discomfort!

Seriously.

I realised I really liked the feeling of being bold.

The more I did it, the more I felt like a master experimenter, and the more fun it became. As a consequence, I started to fear hard things less, which fuelled me to take even more action.

Effectively, it turned my business approach into a daring adventure.

So, if you feel you are safely ensconced in your own comfort zone, whether personally or professionally, and you want to step out into the place where magic happens, you know what to do.

Make a list and undertake one small act of productive discomfort.

Choose the one that feels the easiest and start there.

Challenge yourself to do this for a few weeks, taking one bite-size step each day, and make a conscious note of two things: how it feels and what progress you start to make.

You might just discover like I did that playing to your edge not only propels you forward exponentially, but it's creates a brilliant and pretty addictive feeling to boot!

Alison x

P.S. If you'd like help defining and playing to your edge, book a free consultation call with me to explore how I might support you, or visit livetrue.co.uk.