Self-Improvement

Here’s How to Thrive in Two Optimal Zones.

Live with joy despite the most challenging situations.

Producing with passion and sustained energy

Do you want to be an eminent leader by changing a simple mental habit? I share a powerful mental tip from my personal experience that you can immediately apply to your life to boost leadership capabilities. Moreover, we don’t have to spend money or time implementing it.

My purpose in this article is to share a hard-learned lesson that made a life-changing impact on my success and sanity. The approach I share in this article helped me stay calm and composed during critical situations. It helped me enjoy my personal and professional challenges. It is not a quick fix, though! Paradoxically, it is simple but not easy.

In the earlier years of my career, my stress level was 99% on my perceived scale. I was almost in a detrimental crisis mode. However, gratefully, a wise mentor taught me to re-frame my thoughts and change my perspectives based on a simple technique. I rigorously applied this technique and turned it into a lifetime habit.

Let me explain this simple and metaphorical technique that can help us enjoy life in difficult situations, be more productive and innovative, lead with more confidence, and consistently create new opportunities.

At a conceptual level, the technique requires visualizing four distinct zones in your life. We frame them as:

Comfort Zone

Stretch Zone

Risk Zone

Danger Zone

We can define and customize these zones based on our character, capabilities, and values. Let me briefly share how I did it as an example.

1 — Comfort Zone

In my life, my comfort zone represented the behavioral elements that originated partially from my reptilian brain and mainly from the limbic system.

Some behavior patterns in this zone were enjoying only comfortable work, wanting to stay in bed long hours, eating comfort food, drinking sugary beverages, not exercising, not being exposed to cold, being distracted from little interruption, getting upset if challenged for minor matters, talked with only the familiar people.

This zone was all about my most basic survival mode behavior.

2 — Stretch Zone

The stretch zone was taking the next step, getting up on time, studying to pass an exam, earning a new degree, finding a better job, reducing the clutter at home and in the office, having cold showers, exercising regularly, refraining from comforts foods, and enjoying outdoor activities.

This was the zone I started growing and gradually reducing my stress level. These activities help me rewire my brain by changing its biochemical composition.

When I was in this zone, I felt a substantial increase in my dopamine level. My muscles became more robust, flexible, and agile.

3 — Risk Zone

The real difference and the game changer in my life were moving to the risk zone. When I learned and adapted to this zone, I started taking calculated risks starting with simple actions.

For example, I started to talk to strangers in the street and engaged with people during train or plane trips by exchanging business cards and following up to create synergies.

In this zone, I invested in new revenue streams, conducted research to learn difficult subjects, invented, published, spoke at international conferences, became fat-adapted, and constantly grew as my heart desired.

This transformation happened by learning how to turn my risk zone into my comfort zone; hence my risk zone never bothered me again. In other words, I redefined my comfort zone. Magically and gratefully, my body and mind collaborated for this success.

The optimal approach for me was to swing between the stretch and the risk zone related to my life goals. The comfort zone made me sick, unhappy, stressed, and even depressed. I also tried the danger zone a couple of times and noticed that it was not fun to operate in that zone. I found it unnatural and did not want to compromise my values in life.

As the risk zone provided me with the optimal values, I’d like to touch on the mindset shift that I applied briefly. We know that uncertainty is in the very fabric of life. We all experience it but give a different meaning to it. Uncertainty can be seen as a reality in dealing with future events. However, the future is unknown to us. There can be many hidden causes beyond our control, which may affect the outcomes.

How does uncertainty relate to operating at the risk zone?

Learning to tolerate uncertainty is an indication that you operate in the risk zone. Therefore, uncertainty is part of the risk management discipline. Taking calculated risks is one of the requirements and the most fundamental characteristics of entrepreneurs to create successful business outcomes and a balanced lifestyle. Risk and opportunity are like inseparable yin and yang.

At the most fundamental level, we can even simplify that, no risk, no opportunity in life, equating the proverbial “no pain no gain”. However, once we learn how to operate in the risk zone, we become capable of turning the perceived pain into pleasure in a magical position. This behavior is evident and observable from the success of high achievers such as elite athletes, successful investors, and eminent professionals who contribute and influence our society. Successful leaders know that opportunities are created by taking risks on a consistent basis.

There may be different approaches to consistently managing risk and operating in the risk zone. You may develop your own style.

My risk management approach included four primary focus areas covering my major brain areas: applying logic, leveraging prior learning, tapping into my emotional intelligence, distinguishing between reality and fantasy, and listening to my intuition.

The three broad approaches helped me to deal with uncertain situations both in a creative and methodical manner by taking full responsibility for my life.

At a personal level, one of the common techniques I used was to learn from past failures and transfer them into valuable learning experiences in my risk-requiring engagements. This is a qualitative approach and can be embedded in our lives as a habit. However, we need to focus on the quantitative aspect as well.

From a quantitative perspective, I use data effectively in my life. As data-driven entrepreneurs, we can use available data from various sources related to the risks that we take and mitigate. In my future articles here, I plan to provide details on using publicly available data sources and their importance.

In addition, we can create our own data by constantly recording our observations, personal experience, and results, particularly when dealing with considerable risks. In my opinion, our risk zone should be documented as the most precious book of our life.

Create optimal options with innovative thinking.

In the workplace, dealing with uncertainties, especially in complex transformation initiatives, was critical to creating new options and choices leading to desired innovation.

We experienced that innovation did not happen in our comfort zone. Innovation can only thrive by being fed with nutritious risks. Why does innovation matter in this context?

Innovation is an effective way to create more options in our personal and business lives, have a joyful life, generate new business, and transform our current business.

We can thrive by creating new transforming solutions in our lives by linking optimal options, enabled by innovation, in creative, smart, and integrated ways. Therefore, risk and innovation are tightly related.

Conclusions

As part of a cognitive study, my recorded observations revealed that the transformational leaders went out of their comfort zones, operated in the risk zone, and passionately embraced uncertainty to become change catalysts for generating insights, new business, and transforming their stagnant business.

With the constant challenge from uncertain situations, these master transformers created immunity towards uncertainties, developed strong risk-handling muscles, and turned their risk zones into enjoyable comfort zones.

Successful entrepreneurs, who operate in the risk zone by taking the magical pills of uncertainty consistently, keep dancing with joy and smiling and seem to be not working at all.

Oddly enough, they depict no stress signs and keep enjoying life even amid critical situations. This unusual behavioral pattern surprises their colleagues, peers, and customers, as they usually think that these people are wealthy. Therefore they are so stress-free and happy in life.

However, the secret to this optimal lifestyle has nothing to do with wealth. It is about moving out of our comfort zone, extending it to the stretch zone, and then consistently operating on the risk zone. As an optimist, I believe we may even come across euphoria along the way. Please let me know when you reach that state, as it is my next goal in my journey.

I don’t want to leave this optimistic article with a pessimistic conclusion. However, it is my call of duty to raise a caveat. Moving to the danger zone is undesirable because, based on my observations, some ambitious entrepreneurs tried to operate in this zone, and they failed in life by losing their health, passion, family, and other values.

In my opinion, it looks healthier to keep dancing between stretch and risk zone to reap the optimal benefits in life, as evident in the lives of many successful high achievers around us.

Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.

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