Maximise You - Comfort Zone and Ambitious Friends

Necessity is the mother of invention as we're spurred to come up with a solution to a pressing problem. That combination of a pressing necessity makes us act and is an incredibly valuable resource to have. If you are in a situation where there is nothing motivating you and you're relying on being a self-starter you are likely to fall behind the curve in term of personal development.


Diagnosing if you are comfortable:
Understanding if your developing can be hard to know. You can work nine to five and operate stress free while developing or work fourteen hour days and have trouble sleeping with stress but be repeating the same tasks and therefore not growing. In this sense when I use comfortable I'm referring to the tasks you are completing are not pushing your technical ability, negotiating prowess etc and therefore not adding to your skillset.
Take a note of what you think you are good at and what you want to be good at then match that to the current activities you're doing. Once you understand how your current work aligns with your skills and ambitions, compare that to what you were doing twelve months previous. If you're not seeing growth or tasks that will lead to it, you can assume your current daily activities are not challenging you and you can describe your work as comfortable. Ignore the volume of work and hours taken, you are comfortable with the tasks.

Diagnosing your peers and colleagues as motivators or enablers?:
Lunch time conversations can often follow a pattern to stay in safe topics. However you must make the effort to challenge your friends or colleagues with an ambitious thought and see how they respond. When I was working with a group of top consultants, I found their self-confidence grating and their ambitions unlikely when we had lunch. But hearing them think they could get their Harvard MBA and $150k job by 26, made me ask the question "Why not me?". If you then find yourself as the most ambitious person in your group, you need to think about adding someone who might expand your horizon in terms of ambitions.

Finding your balance:
Make the assumption that there is only so much of you to give and then realising there is a finite amount you can ever achieve start to prioritise. If you are comfortable with work but unsatisfied with your family relationships, friend engagement or health and fitness it may not be best to focus on trying to redefine your job to a more challenging set up. If your life is in relative balance and work is comfortable, you should really focus on breaking your routine and requesting or simply taking new responsibilities that will help you to develop skills that you've neglected....