Stepping Outside Your Comfort Zone

In the previous chapter, we talked about how to acquire the hard and soft skills necessary to advance your career. In this chapter, we will help you learn how to get out of your comfort zone. The most important thing to focus your mind on involves taking action. Learning, improving, and growing are difficult things that require deliberate, focused effort. If you do too little, nothing happens. If you push too much, you give up. This chapter will present strategies for you to keep pushing in a consistent manner. We will give you the specific steps required to force your brain to take action, find the right balance, and acquire consistency in continuing to push yourself outside your comfort zone.

In this chapter, we’ll cover the process to do the following:

• Force your brain to take action
• Find the sweet spot
• Be consistent

Let’s begin!

Forcing your brain to take action

We have to appreciate the fact that taking action is very difficult. It is difficult for our kids and for our team. It is difficult for us!

Many bosses think that you can force people to act or at least convince them to do it. But forcing – and convincing (a subtle way of forcing) – is counterproductive. When people recognize we are forcing them, they react against it.

Our brains work the same way. Maybe you experimented trying to be your own “boss,” thinking you can force yourself to do things. But when you try to corner your brain and be a tyrannical boss with yourself, your brain reacts with fear. You procrastinate. You find excuses and reasons not to do things.

Leaders recognize the fact that forcing is the wrong way and instead inspire people to take action. Inspiring is helping people to decide to act.

That works for us also. Here is a four-step process that you can use to inspire yourself into taking action...

Step 1 – Create and visualize a great future

To take action, you need to see a clear and better future, one that you want to be part of, one that you can see yourself living. That’s because our brains need a clear image to act upon. The more detailed the future we see, the more invested we will be in trying to achieve it.

The industry knows this very well and uses this to inspire us. You can go to an Apple store and hold and use iPhones, MacBooks, and iPads. You can hold them in your hands and see yourself owning one.

When you go and buy a car, the salesperson invites you for a test drive. You drive the car, and make it your car, long before you make the real decision about acquiring it. When buying a house, the real estate agent walks with you inside a furnished house, and they help you visualize your kids playing in the garden. Those things make our future decisions more real. You can see yourself living in your house, driving your car, and programming on your...

Finding opportunities within our limitations – the sweet spot

When you imagine a better life in the previous areas and describe your amazing future, it is normal to not immediately believe it is possible. We limit ourselves, to prevent taking risks or putting ourselves in discomfort.

The way the brain does that in our daily lives is by creating a sense of fear. That is why it is helpful to think far ahead, a year from now. It helps to subdue this fear, so you can think clearly. But this subdued fear does not disappear. It can show up as anxiety, a knot in the stomach.

When you were writing down or imagining your future, did you feel anxiety about some of the things? When you think about committing yourself, do you feel a knot in the stomach, such as negative ideas or the feeling that this is impossible, and you are unable to commit to that future?

Take note of those feelings. They are what we call limiting beliefs – things that you believe about yourself or your...

Step 2 – Maximize the current problems

Having a clear vision of your future will help you create the motivation to take action; however, this alone is not enough.

How many times have you created, or seen your friends create, New Year’s resolutions? How many of them get dropped or forgotten even before January ends? We create excuses and reasons to not do things that we think are important:

• I don’t have the time
• I don’t have the money
• My boss won’t let me do this
• My company will never help me
• I can’t. My wife this, my kids that...

To help us overcome those excuses, we need another push. We need to see our current reality and realize that staying put is a bad idea. We need to see our current situation and have a clear understanding that we can’t continue to live like this. We can’t continue to not take action.

What happens if you don’t go after your dreams?

If you continue to repeat...

Step 3 – Build a bridge from here to there

You now have clear dreams and understand you can’t stay put. Congratulations! This is more planning than most people do for their lives!

But it is still not enough! One of the reasons it is so hard to take action is that we are very adaptable. No matter how bad the situation is, we adapt and are able to survive.

To prevent our fears from paralyzing us, we need to believe we can go from where we are to where we want to be. We need to believe we can become who we want to become.

For that, we need to build a bridge – a bridge that can take us from where we are right now, to our desired future. A bridge is basically the steps that will take us from our limited problematic situation of today to our amazing life in the future.

Building the bridge

In order to build the bridge, it can be helpful to consider the different areas of your life. Think about a few of these areas listed next and consider what needs to...

Step 4 – Plan small actionable steps

Now you have created goals and objectives, you have an amazing dream for your future! You know you can’t stay where you are! You even have a plan! Maybe you are now very motivated to cause a change in your life and take action.

Nothing can stop you now!

Well...maybe...So many people have all of that and still don’t get to the other side, and stay stuck.

Why? You see, the issue here is motivation. Motivation can only take you so far. It’s a great catalyst for change and can get you started. But real change takes time. And motivation is tiring, and not very useful to keep us going during all the time needed for change to happen. For real change, you need consistency. You have to make sure you have small steps and create the right habits that will get you doing the needed things, long after motivation has run out. That is the only way for you to cross to the other side of the bridge, step by step by step.

Two...

Be consistent

To keep doing things, we will apply the SCIENCE of sticking with it. This is explained in detail by Sean D. Young in his book Stick with It: A Scientifically Proven Process for Changing Your Life-for Good. How can you maximize your chances of sticking with it, and how can you get to the end result? It is normal to get lost in the goals along the way. But you can plan and create the conditions that will help you stick with your goals and give them a better chance to succeed. For each of your steps and tactics, apply the S.C.I.E.N.C.E. of sticking with it. The way to use this is for each goal, think of strategies to apply at least three or four of the following ideas. For the most important goals, apply all of them.

STEPLADDERS – small steps

Our brains go into crazy-fear mode every time we try to commit to something that seems to be too big or too dangerous. That causes all kinds of self-sabotage against our plans, such as procrastination, lack of motivation...

Interview

Scott Wierschem

Q: Scott, can you quickly introduce yourself?

A: My name is Scott Wierschem. I’ve been doing software development for about 40 years. I’ve been doing Java development for 20 years.

My forte is working on legacy systems: old crusty code that most people are afraid to dig into. I like to find ways to get in there and make it maintainable.

I have a project I call the Keep Calm and Refactor project. It’s a mentoring program to help developers who have got some experience but need help to become better at handling legacy software development, as that’s really what most of us are going to be working on for most of our careers. If you can be good at that, you will have a much more enjoyable career in software development. That’s what lights my fire these days.

Q: That’s awesome. One of the things that you do is help developers not only deal with legacy code but actually to become better developers. You practice...

Summary

This chapter has been all about getting out of your comfort zone. You have learned the four steps to taking action, the correct way to work out of the comfort zone, strategies for being consistent, and the science behind consistency, as well as the most important aspect of consistency. These skills and strategies will enable you to be able to continue to expand your skills in your technical career.

This concludes Part 1 of the book on learning and practicing technical skills. In Part 2, we will focus on the next set of skills that will help you to advance your technical career, one that is often overlooked. You will learn how to get involved and how to participate in the community. In the next chapter, we will start with how to become a team player by embracing communities.