Let’s stop talking about getting out of our comfort zone. The reality is that humans get used to discomfort very easily. It’s more a zone of habit and automatism, a zone we know. We don’t leave it, because it’s familiar. Often, comfort lies elsewhere, close at hand, but we don’t know it.
We don’t leave this zone because the unknown scares us. It’s not because we’re comfortable there, it’s because what’s out there scares us more than what’s in. As we say in Shakespeare’s language: better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.
To leave our known zone and begin learning, there’s a limit to cross: the knowledge threshold. As soon as you cross this threshold, you enter the learning zone.
How do you cross the knowledge threshold?
1. Smallest possible step
It’s about getting out just a little, not too far, to test. Like dipping your big toe in the water before diving in. To cross the threshold, you can put one foot in the door and look out of the corner of your eye at what’s on the other side. Once you’ve seen it, it’s already a little less unfamiliar, and it’s easier to open the door wider and take the first step.
That’s what microlearning is all about: any burst of new knowledge, no matter how small. When we get into the habit of recording these microlearnings, we observe two interesting phenomena:
- They accumulate like exponential compound interest to create great learning.
- We become aware of the number of times we cross our threshold of knowledge in a day (without hurting ourselves), which makes the experience of stepping outside the known zone much less threatening.
2. Take the plunge to learn to swim
I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone… There are some intense people who are into all-or-nothing. They need to explore and live an experience completely to make it their own. When someone is like that, it’s a good idea to have someone close by to act as a lifeguard in case of need. So jump in, but not unsupervised.
3. Having a coach to guide us
The role of the kata coach is to get improvers out of their zone of automatisms and into the unknown. The frightening unknown, which can make you anxious, is less frightening with someone you trust at your side. Especially when that person knows all the survival techniques needed to make the journey safely.
Kaizen radical offers these services (the famous survival techniques), there is a complete range :
The other types of coach also work when the reason for stepping out of the known zone is something other than improving the performance of a process.
