No Guts, No Glory. Step Outside Your Comfort Zone for True Business Success

Are you stopping yourself from succeeding because you’ve stepped into a comfort zone? There are 6 things that you should try doing at this moment to step outside that comfort zone and to be truly successful. Applicable for Internet Entrepreneurs.

Sameer Panjwani, founder of Mondovo.com, shares 6 areas in which we all fall into the trap of complacency and consequently don’t take the necessary step forward.

Here are the 6 points covered:

1) Procrastination/No Planning
2) One Skill Away
3) Speaking to Customers Personally
4) Building Relationships / Networking
5) Sharing Knowledge / Insights / Experience
6) Have Guts to Introspect on your Failures

Watch the video to know more.

Transcript –

No Guts No Glory, step outside your comfort zone.

Now this is a video of we’re experimenting with. We are doing this on Youtube, on Twitter live, on Facebook. Now, there are certain times in business where we need to do things which are beyond our comfort zone, whether it’s anything whether it’s business or whether you want to succeed in anything that you do. I think, we always need to do things which we are not necessarily comfortable doing.

So, this is an experiment where I am trying to experiment out here how Facebook live works, how Twitter live, Facebook works and we have been experimenting with Youtube videos. So, this is definitely something outside my comfort zone. So, I believe that I am going to talk little bit about some of my experiences of how we all in our businesses or whatever avenues of light that we are dealing with carrier wise or business wise how we can succeed in always take a step ahead by moving outside our area of comfort.

So, the first thing is of course you got to do things. The obvious thing is you got to do things that you are not comfortable doing and I think you got to recognize that. So, like this is an area where I am not, I am hugely introverted, I am not camera friendly. But this is something I am doing which is beyond my comfort zone but this was necessary for building a personal brand. This is something that I am pursuing.

Now, let’s get down to the topic of okay how can you succeed by going beyond your area of comfort. So, let’s say point number 1, I think is that all of us make mistakes is that we procrastinate and we don’t plan enough so what do I mean by that? There are many times I think we all recognize that we just take things too easy.

There was a time in business like 4 years back where I was not doing as well and that complacency has set in because I was doing, I reached a point in success where I was kind of satisfied and then I procrastinated about planning for the future, planning future courses of business. So, I think sometimes we take it too easy and that we step into a bubble, a comfort zone which we need to move beyond. And the first step that we need to do is planning and we all hate planning.

Planning is boring because I think some of us prefer doing rather than planning and some times we got to take a step back and just necessarily take action. So, I think planning is, take that first step of actually planning your next step ahead don’t just jump into things just for the sake of it.

Now, the other area that I want to talk about which is point number 2 is, I think we all are just 1 or 2 skills away and we are too afraid to pickup or learn that skill. So, now I am from the SEO industry and I know that many people that I have trained in SEO, I know that few of them are not as successful because they are afraid to learn html which is necessary or marketers out there they’re afraid to deal with analytics or business owners are afraid to learn a little bit bookkeeping and accounting but all these skills are necessary and it may not be in your comfort zone but I think those skills are essential for your success.

So, I think you should not narrow your bandwidth and narrow your skills to your area of comfort. So, always look at how you can learn how you can push yourself to limits of your learning capacity. We all have capacity to grow to learn so I think we have to do that – constantly push ourselves to the limits.

Now another point that I wanted to talk about which I have been guilty of myself, in business sometimes we get so busy in doing business that we don’t take time to actually speak to our audience, speak to our customers and whether it’s actually speaking to them to understand their requirements and problems. We’re building businesses without actually seeing what are their, are we actually solving their problem?

So, I think sometimes you got to speak to customers, you got to go out there, meet them physically if you have to, and I am in online business and sometimes, I don’t get enough opportunity to do that and I know that’s a mistake and I think it’s an area again, another comfort zone area where many of us are very comfortable just sitting behind our desks and doing things over email. But sometimes, a call is the best way forward. So, I think, if we have to take business to the next level we have got to make calls sometimes, get on Skype, meet customers.

I think that is very very necessary to succeed and a closely related 4th point is anything in business nowadays is specially online is all about if you have heard of influencer marketing there is a lot of you, if you have to get viral online or if you have to get known if you to get people to talk about you, you need certain influencer experts in your industry to talk about you, to validate what you are doing.

So, for that you need to again step outside your comfort zone and you will need to build a relationship. You will need to reach out to them. Many people I have seen, they just wait they just say, build the best product, build the best service or offer what they are offering and then hope that they will get recognized.

But you don’t get recognized just by sitting and doing nothing, you actually got to move out, got to send out emails, build relationship with influencers say, comment on their blogs, go and do what it takes to build a relationship and ya you’ve got to network. For example, you would like to expand to Mexico then you will need to coordinate with maquiladoras in mexico. Even in the offline world, I think there are many opportunities where we can all build relationships and network with people who can help us and I think that’s something we all don’t do and there is a lot of scope to build and grow from there.

Then another thing that I think is necessary is especially in this day and age, I think we all point no. 5 is about sharing your knowledge, sharing your expertise. We all have accumulated a certain level knowledge and expertise in whatever we have done in the last few years. Now I used to have this notion that if I shared my idea, shared my strategies then people would take up them and then beat me at my own game.

But then I realized that I think it doesn’t make sense. In this stage, I think it’s better to build a brand and better to build value by offering your knowledge, offering your expertise because there are 2 points out here – First of all, when your offer stuff for free, when you offer knowledge insights, 99% of people out there are not going to act on it. It’s just a fact of the matter. They are lazy but the second and most important part is they are going to value you for the insight.

They are going to get, some of them are going to get ah ha moments. Forget the fact that they might not act on it but its necessary that okay they recognize you as a brand, they recognize you as an entity who they can look up to. So, I think it’s necessary that we all don’t confine ourselves and confine our knowledge to our team, if we can blog about expertise, blog about our experiences to the world why not, why not share our thoughts share our knowledge to everybody else.

And then the last point which I think is very necessary if you have to step outside of our comfort zone is we have to got the guts to look at our own failures and what do i mean by that is I think sometimes we are going to take time out and introspect.

So, what I do every quarter or every six months I have a word pad and I journal my thoughts. I reflect on what I have done well, what I have not done well and then when I go back and look at okay these are failures and I recognize these are failures. So, sometimes I feel people don’t have the guts to look at their own failures.

When you actually journal your thoughts you actually see that you are not doing as well as you could. So I think sometimes you got to have the guts to just look take the step back and see if you are going wrong take action to improve don’t be satisfied in peanut bubble of yours. Persistence will pay but you got to really step take a step back and look at your own flaws and see where you can improve. So, ya there you go ah step outside your comfort zone and I think you will be in a better position to grow your business and be successful in whatever you do. Thank You.

Awesome, share it: