Month: August 2020

Comfortable being Uncomfortable

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Words by me (Fiona) based on an interview with Drew
Image by me

I asked Drew if he would let me interview him when I heard him talk about being out of his comfort zone a lot, and he said it with joy!

Drew has many examples, but I will share today what he told me about his role as the Executive General Manager of High Performance at Cricket Australia.

Being approached for a role is not a new experience for Drew – winning Olympic gold medals makes you fairly high profile – but this one surprised him “I was called by one of our former athlete management representatives,  he rang me out of the blue and asked ‘What are you doing right now?’ And I said ‘I’m walking around the athletic field watching my son do cross country training’. And he clarified ‘what are you doing workwise”. The answer was rowing and coaching.

“He then asked would you consider another sport? And I said, ‘what sport’ and he goes ‘Cricket’.

“I didn’t know anything about the sport at all!”

Drew had no experience in cricket, none as a performance manager and had lost his job as head coach of the national rowing team just 12 months earlier.

But what he did have was a lifetime of being bold and giving things a go.

Drew credits his dad and his coaches with that approach to life “what I’ve been encouraged always do is stick your hand up have a crack at something, it’s okay to fail. It’s okay to make mistakes.”

Drew is also okay with not knowing and being open about that. “What I’ve worked out is it’s okay to show that you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re not across it. But asking questions and that sort of stuff is what makes me feel more comfortable.”

He took on the role – trusting that the CEO, and athlete manager knew him well enough to be know if he was the right fit – and hope they would not judge his lack of cricket specific knowledge.

An unusual sense of optimism is one of Drew’s personality traits that enables him to take risks. But he also has a lot of self-awareness. Drew knows that he is more comfortable failing in front of strangers than people he knows “To go to a surf beach as a kid, where you don’t know anyone, but there are others surfing I felt relatively okay with giving that a go. But if I came to my local surf beach where I knew everyone on the water, I found my apprehension would go through the roof. And sometimes I would talk myself out of going in the water.

“What I’m suggesting here is we have to get to know ourselves first. Work out the things that either trigger us positively or negatively about a situation.”

Drew is also aware of his motivations – committing to at least one other person is a great way for Drew to not ignore his alarm in the morning!

When it comes to things like public speaking, Drew uses tactics learned as a rower to ground himself. “It didn’t make the nerves any better. But what I generally found was it meant that my mind was less active. And so the thoughts or self talk slowed down.

“The interesting thing about self talk is when your self doubts and your self talk really get magnified, and almost to the point where it’s sort of stopping you and debilitating. When I was rowing if you put your hand in the water, it’s amazing. If you just feel the viscosity, you feel a temperature and all that stuff. It’s like your mind can’t be anywhere else apart from feeling that and so it slows everything down. It just gets you away from the past, present, future dynamic, and also the positive, negative dynamic. It gets you into ‘it’s just water and just the temperature and it’s just the feeling’. It’s the same thing with breathing. I think breathing helps us in that way a lot. And so I find whenever I’ve got to lead a meeting, or do a presentation of any sort just taking a few deep breaths and centring yourself into you what really matters most now. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the anxiety or concern go away, but they go away enough to give you insight.”

Drew’s advice to get more comfortable with being uncomfortable is to start small. Try something new. That small change, being uncomfortable, gives you a new perspective and can be the catalyst for bigger changes. Maybe even a gold medal or three?

Thank you so much Drew!

A bit about Drew:

A life of passion for family, sport and adventures. Working in high performance is a gift and since transitioning as an athlete into my work life it’s been a privilege to engage with great people working to achieving great outcomes. 

The Odds Aren’t Great

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Story and Image (of Mags) by me, Fiona

For the past 6 months or so I have been regularly feeding a female magpie – I call her Mags or Maggie.

We chat, well I chat and she sings.

Some days she comes inside for a wander, others I sit outside while she eats.

She will sometimes come multiple times a day, despite me only feeding her once. For a bit of singing and chatting.

It all started with me learning that a magpie you feed will never swoop you. So I started feeding the ones in my backyard. Mags kept coming back. And to stop her tapping on the glass while I work (to get my attention) I started opening the door. And she started wandering in.

She doesn’t come by every day, but we have built a level of trust.

A trust that may be damaged when my new puppy, Daisy, arrives next week.

I wonder what the odds are of my puppy and magpie becoming friends?

Zero? 0.1%?

I can always hope.

Quietly Powerful

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Words by me (Fiona) based on an interview with Megumi
Image by me

Megumi began stepping out of her comfort zone at age 16 when she went on a foreign exchange from Japan to Canada. In this example and in others she found herself being pulled out of her comfort zone by external influences. But that was not always the case.

Driven by her own experiences as a naturally quiet person and a minority (the only Asian, the only woman, or the only Asian woman was common for Megumi), Megumi began the Quietly Powerful movement.

“Starting the quietly powerful movement was a big deal to me. Because naturally I am quieter, and I don’t particularly like being the centre of attention. I still remember when I first sent out an email to a group of people that I knew saying ‘I’m going to do this would you like to come along to a breakfast’. That’s how I started – just a very small public breakfast. I had 15 people, and it booked up so quickly that I had to organise another two or three straight off. So that was really interesting. But again, completely outside my comfort zone. I was so scared.”

Given this was a huge step outside Megumi’s comfort zone I asked her what motivated her to do it “So probably two or three years before I was heavily influenced by Susan Cain’s ‘quiet’. And I’ve seen some other people write about introversion, but then I thought it’s not just about introversion. I’d be with clients and senior leaders who are typically white men. That also caused me to feel somewhat shy to speak up. There’s my upbringing as well – I was always a quiet kid and being Japanese added to the mix. So there’s lots of different things that added to my quiet nature.

“One of the reasons that drove me was I just kept on hearing stories from people about how they got overlooked and these are very, very talented people. I still remember one situation where I had a colleague who I knew reasonably well, I saw her as a very influential person working with very senior leaders. And I heard secondhand after she went to a leadership assessment centre and she came back and got told she had no leadership potential. She used to work on transformation with 150 senior leaders in our division. And she made things happen. And I thought, you cannot measure that kind of influence over multiple months and years in a one-day assessment and to be told she has no leadership potential was absolutely ridiculous. And so that was one of the catalysts.”

Megumi also shared a personal experience about shifting from having noisy inner critics about being a quieter facilitator to learning firsthand how different facilitation styles can complement each other. She started owning her quieter approach and using it as a strength.

“Combining all those – I wanted to help others who felt like they were overlooked or disempowered to find that strength within. And then as a leadership and culture consultant, I just thought organizations and society at large, we’re missing out on a whole lot of talent if they don’t really understand and appreciate this quieter style of leadership.”

And Quietly Powerful was born!

Every time Megumi stepped out of her comfort zone, she gained confidence. Every time she survived and ‘didn’t fall in a heap’ gave her confidence the next time she was in a new situation.

And for people thinking about stepping out of their comfort zone?

“I would ask them to think about their ‘why’ first. If you’re stepping out of your comfort zone because you’re being told to do so by somebody else, that’s not going to give you the energy or resilience. I think if it’s something that you want to do and you feel pulled towards doing something that is outside your comfort zone, absolutely. Go for it. And give it your best shot. And don’t worry if it fails. Take an experimental approach. Have a go and if it doesn’t work, try something else or try a different approach.

“That was the case for me with the quietly powerful movement. When I sent out that invitation to the breakfast I thought ‘okay, it’s possible nobody would want to come’. I had this thought ‘What if people just think it’s really dumb?’ I thought I can treat it as an experiment. Try it. If it doesn’t work, do something else. I gave myself some room to fail and room to be okay with that. I think that helps when you try and do something.”

Megumi thank you for your words of wisdom, and for stepping out of your comfort zone to start the Quietly Powerful movement!

About Megumi:

Megumi is an author, speaker and consultant in leadership and culture, with a background in strategy, economics and finance. With a client list including Ernst & Young, JBWere, National Australia Bank, Roche, State and Federal Government Departments, smaller for-profit and not-for-profit organisations, Megumi helps leaders and organisations to unlock their hidden talents. She is the author of Quietly Powerful: How your quiet nature is your hidden leadership strength released in November 2019 and Start inspiring, stop driving: Unlock your team’s potential to outperform and grow.

In the uncertain, changing, global and inter-connected world, Megumi believes that the ‘alpha’ or ‘hero’ leadership style alone is outdated and inadequate. Quietly Powerful expands the definition of what good leadership looks, sounds and feels like and empowers quieter professionals and those outside majority groups to fulfil their leadership potential.

Her work has helped people to develop a quietly confident presence to be heard and have impact. Megumi’s ideas and approach have resonated with many (not just introverts) wanting to develop a calm, inner confidence to make the unique contribution they were born to make. Organisations are benefitting from harnessing their hidden talent and lifting their leaders’ effectiveness by using quieter approaches.

Our own version of success

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Words by me (Fiona) based on an interview with Nada
Image by me

Nada talked to me about stepping out of her comfort zone to find a career that aligned more closely to her values. “I think it’s so important to plan your career from the right place and not to be restricted by someone else’s version of success. I think it’s so important to really define our own version of what success means. Create that vision. Often, it’s that lack of clarity and vision that keeps us stuck. So, it’s important to create the vision of the future we want to create, and then to empower ourselves and give ourselves permission to create it.”

And Nada did just that!

“I think the biggest time I stepped out of my comfort zone was leaving the security of a well-established career and corporate role when I decided to start my own business – very much a leap of faith.”

Nada started her career as an accountant, but gradually realised that her interest lay in people not numbers! She was able to move into people and company management roles, but “I realised that companies don’t always have the person’s best interest in mind when it comes to development. I saw poor leadership practices, for example, and wanted to develop these people as leaders. But I was not able to do that. Because as long as they’re bringing in the money, it doesn’t matter if they’re burning people and there is a revolving door of new hires and departures”

Having people’s best interests at the core of what she did was the driver behind Nada’s move to starting her career as a career development and transition consultant.

“One of my passions was also helping people make the transitions from technical roles to leadership roles. It’s not just a simple step of you’ve been really great at your job, well we’re going to reward you now. It doesn’t work that way unless there’s some extra work put in developing the people skills. Helping people to find their alignment because of my long career journey of finding my way from numbers to people.

“And it’s been a long hard road because I didn’t really have that advice available. I didn’t have that support available to help me even develop my self-awareness in terms of what are my strengths? What are my natural preferences? It was really hard to identify what’s the true me versus the ‘shoulds’ of this is a good profession or this is a good organisation.

“Letting go of that security blanket, stepping out of that comfort zone was a really big leap of faith, as I said, but a very rewarding one. Because it has given me the freedom and the ability to do things my way, to pursue what really lights me up, but also to see that reward of lighting other people up and helping them to elevate themselves.”

Some of the benefits (aside from finding alignment between her values and her work) Nada found stepping out of her comfort zone include increased self-belief and also realising the awesome determination to succeed that was a central part of her nature.

Nada also had some great insights into how careers are different in the modern day “Because we just can’t rely on going to uni, learning a set of skills and we’re set for life in our career. We can’t tie our self-identity to that role or to that organisation. Because they’re not guaranteed. So it’s critical we invest this time in self-development and self-awareness, in understanding and even treating ourselves as the CEO of our own careers, not leaving it up to someone else, and not leaving it up to chance where we end up, where we drift.

“I think stepping out of your comfort zone is going to be the new normal.”

You can find out more about Nada’s work at www.elevateme.com.au, or reach out to Nada on www.linkedin.com/in/nadamatijevic if you’re struggling with your own career challenge.

Thank you Nada