Posts Tagged ‘true potential’

Push your limits – Get out of the comfort zone

Comfort zone is the primary cause for laziness in most of the people.

It’s similar to the gravitational field. You got to do some real work against it in order to break its barriers.

It’s happy and comfortable in your present comfort zone but you have to expand your comfort zone to realize what you are truly capable of.

You must push your limits to get into the new levels of the comfort zone to experience the real fun.

“If you can’t, you must. If you must, you can” – by Tony Robbins

I would like to share a real life experience of mine with you that might help in understanding the comfort zone concept.

It was 1995. It was my first job as IT trainer and I had to get training from our training center. So I went to training center at about 9:30 am and reported to the front desk.  I was very much tensed as well as excited.

In about 5 minutes, a woman came from inside and introduced herself as a training manager. She  gave me a serious look and mentioned that I was late 30 minutes late and it cannot happen again. It clearly indicated that she’s a very low tolerance for such kind of mistakes.

She took me into the office and introduced to the all other new employees who were already there for training. I soon became familiar with all of them and  I was amazed to see one of the trainee’s who was barely speaking.

She handed us our training schedule which was already prepared for us.

Then we were told to get into a class room to attend the training sessions.

The first training session was for about two hours. We took it easy and casually attended the session and also took some notes.

The training manager came in and handed out some papers and told us we’re going to take an exam from the class we just attended.

What?… It was a shock for all of us. How can anyone expect an exam within the first two hours of training?

She left the room without even waiting for our answer. When we looked at the questions, and there’s another shock. The questions were so complex and it’s demanding almost each and every word that was taught just a while ago.

We somehow finished the exam.  She came in again and started going through our answer sheets. By seeing her face, we could easily figure out that she wasn’t  happy with our performance. Surprisingly, she hadn’t speak a word about it.

Later, she called me to the podium and told me to speak everything from the same training session. I had a lot of stage fear freaked out.

How can she expect us to remember everything and reproduce without preparation?

All of us had the same thought in our minds. “It’s impossible to get through this training!”.

I myself could see my voice shivering as I went through a couple of words. Then, she invited other trainees and they also had similar experiences. She told the trainee who has a low voice must learn to  speak up. He agreed.

Our afternoon session was not much different. We had to go through another two training sessions, then an exam followed by our lectures. By end of the day we were told  we must to take up the same exams again as we didn’t do it well.

We were totally exhausted when we got back to our hotel room and it was almost 8 pm. We somehow finished our dinner until 10 pm and then guess what?…

… We started preparing for the next day’s exam.

The next day was different. Surprisingly, we’re able to do everything well unlike the previous day. We’re able to concentrate well in the training session, took notes for each and every word and in detail. We also were able understand the topics much better. We could see an amazing difference in our confidence levels at the end of the session.

We all had the same feeling and  we were ready to take any kind of test and we did. We could answer every question from the test and were saw a little smile on the face of the same lady who wasn’t happy on the previous day.

When we were called for the lecture we could reproduce everything perfect.

It’s time for the trainee who had a  low voice to get on to the stage. We haven’t seen him talking loud and doubt if he’s fit for a trainer job.

It’s when, the most shocking thing happened in my life !

It was like a miracle. The guy from whom we cannot hear the voice even from two feet, amazingly started talking aloud. Everyone couldn’t believe their ears for quite some time. I wasn’t hearing the lecture and I didn’t need to as we already heard it a number of times. I was just watching the guy who was speaking with huge confidence levels.

I used to believe it takes months to years to make a change in human behavior.

This all happened in one day!

I was just realizing how the limits get pushed to get you out of your comfort zone.

The only  person who did not have any change any feelings is the training manager . 

She behaved as if  it’s quite normal for her.

This incident changed not only me but also everyone who participated in that training.

Everyone can push their limits once it’s seriously demanded by the situation.

The perfect analogy is lifting weights. When we start, we start with 10 lb weights. Within a few days we see our muscles growing and we’re soon be comfortable lifting 15 lbs. If we keep on lifting 10 lb for ever (Comfort Zone), the muscle will stop growing after a few days. In order for us to continue the muscle growth, we must continuously increase the weights.

We have to push our limits and keep on changing the weights every few days for us to keep growing.

Once out of the comfort zone, things may seem painful and impossible at first, will become easy and it becomes our new comfort zone. We again have to push ourselves to enter the next zone levels.

The growth cycle should never halt.

If it halts, we will never be able to know our true potential.

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