I am so excited to present this guest post from Jay Perry and Don Maruska, authors of “Take Charge of Your Talent”. I love their idea that life becomes fulfilling where we stretch ourselves – challenging our abilities and expectations of ourselves.
All too often, we get in a comfort zone and just roll along, dazed and uninspired. At the other end of the spectrum, if we let things overwhelm us, we lose control of our situation. Jay and Don make a compelling case – that a “healthy stretch” helps keep us focused, energized and in charge of ourown growth trajectory.
Please enjoy.
Special thanks go out to Jay, Don and the extremely fabulous team at Weaving Influence for contributing this post.
Have you noticed how your brain comes alive when faced with just the right amount of challenge? Life without any challenge can leave us bored and disengaged. At its worst, it leaves us creating problems just to make life interesting. At the other side of the spectrum, we can find ourselves faced with challenges that are so daunting and unrelenting that we feel constantly frazzled, short tempered, and exhausted. We like to think of the perfect challenge as a healthy stretch. A healthy stretch helps to keep us focused, energized, and creative. When we feel ourselves stretching, we know that we are growing.
A simple metaphor that we use is how a rubber band stretches. With little or no stretch, the rubber band doesn’t fulfill its task. When stretched too far, the rubber band breaks. The same holds true for people.
Do you need a bigger stretch?
Sometimes we get a little too comfortable and complacent, settling into a scenario that serves us superficially but doesn’t inspire or engage us.
That’s where Dan found himself. He’d been a production specialist for more than 10 years and wanted more from his work. Dan saw that he was on autopilot and decided to engage in a Talent Catalyst Conversation. Through that process he rediscovered the passion that led him into working in production. He became determined to invigorate his career. His plan? He challenged himself to formulate a state-of-the-art application that would track how to make effective products from the sometimes less-than-useful plans designers developed. He worked with his peers to detail their creative process so that coworkers and supervisors would understand and value their work more highly.
So where was the stretch? When he began the project, Dan didn’t know how to get it done. It took a healthy stretch to get him into action, to acquire new sets of knowledge, to make bold requests of the people he worked with and risk looking like a fool if he failed.
Not all healthy stretches are about doing more. For some people the stretch may be in the arena of self care: eating healthy, exercise, meditation or think time, leaving the office earlier, or turning off the computer at certain times of the week.
A healthy stretch can make you come alive and provide huge payoffs for yourself and others.
What’s the perfect stretch for you?
Don Maruska and Jay Perry, co-authors of Take Charge of Your Talent, are Master Certified Coaches who help people take advantage of business and personal challenges in unique and powerful ways. To learn more about the Take Charge community, visit their website, or follow them on Twitter and Facebook. Take Charge of Your Talentis available at Amazon and can be found in bookstores nationwide.
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