Do you swim one millimeter beyond your professional comfort level? Continuously? Or are you content to follow someone else’s lead?
Perhaps you are in a current professional role that you find unfulfilling. You have a nagging sense that you are capable of contributing far more to the workplace than your current position requires. Have you short-sold yourself, professionally? Then again, your cross-functional colleagues are uncomfortable leading and would rather hunker down in their comfortable silos. So, they shut you down when you propose new ways of collaborating across the organization. Do you retreat or advance?
You have a One Millimeter Mindset™ and it is high time to move forward from the people, legacy mindset and business models which hold you back.
Professional development, leading to professional innovation, is rooted in your own entrepreneurial self-motivation. Swim through that sentence, once or twice.
You constantly seek new information about yesterday’s and today’s issues. As a result, you adapt, adopt and apply what you learn, to better serve your colleagues and customers. In addition, in working with you, those customers and colleagues become better and better, themselves. Consequently, you expand the boundaries of your own professional comfort level. And you create more value for your organization’s human capital strategy.
You are undaunted about opportunities requiring you to swim outside your professional comfort level.
Yes, professional change is professionally uncomfortable. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it and the world might become a far better place. That is why your pursuit of professional innovation involves weighing the impact of changing your mindset, skillsets and habits on the nature and quality of your professional output. You have unfulfilled contributions to make and it is time to make them. When you consciously swim into uncharted waters Today, you increase your professional collaboration bandwidth Tomorrow. Why remain as good as you are, Today, when you can become better and better, Tomorrow and in the Future?
As you swim one millimeter beyond your current professional comfort level, you chart your own course.
Initially, the thought of swimming into a leadership role moves you one millimeter outside your professional comfort level, doesn’t it? At first, you may try to copy the actions of others whom you perceive as being successful. However, are your copy-catting actions sustainable, over the long haul? Because, the voice that defines Who You Are as a Professional of Worth is talking to you. As you pay attention, you realize that wearing someone else’s leadership style is just as uncomfortable as swimming into that leadership pathway.
So, why not learn how to chart your own unique course and deliver the type of extraordinary, client-focused outcomes that only you can?
Are you read to swim one millimeter outside your current professional comfort level?
- Read these related posts on professional innovation, workforce engagement and customer retention.
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Babette Ten Haken, Founder & President of One Millimeter Mindset™ serves organizations as a corporate catalyst and innovative speaker, strategist, coach and storyteller. Babette’s One Millimeter Mindset™ Workshops and Speaking programs leverage collaboration to catalyze professional innovation, workforce engagement and customer retention, especially in challenging Industrial Internet of Things environments. Babette’s playbook of IIoT team collaboration hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon. She is a member of SME, ASQ, SHRM and the National Speakers Association.
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