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The value of working while being uncomfortable.

Transcription

Stuck, comfort, corollary.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I love talking about the psychology behind what makes us do things or not do things because it seems to be a big piece of my life up until now. It seems to also be a big piece of other people’s lives that I work with.

I’m a Business investor, I work with a lot of different types of businesses.

Over time I both look into purchasing businesses and also come in as a partial investor. I work on situations of equity a lot of times, and this is a thing I run into over and over and over again with business owners.

Most business owners that are either looking to sell their business or are looking to take their business to the next level, so to speak, break it free from where it’s at.

It’s because of this concept of they’re stuck and if you feel like you’re stuck at any point, I’m going to bring up something that always and I haven’t found. I have not found an exception to this quite yet.

If you’re stuck in your business, you can’t get it to grow any further. You can’t get it, you can’t feel like it’s doing anything more for you.

If you’re in that zone, you’re also stuck so to speak, in comfort, or in the comfort zone.

You’re comfortable, almost guaranteed.

So just give you an idea of how little graph here and I found this, this is part of being a packrat, I just found this in my office, I don’t remember where it came from.

This is actually a Sharpie, but it’s a mini Sharpie, I don’t know, quite the use of having a mini Sharpie other than maybe putting it on your keychain. These people walk around with a big ball of keys and, and knickknacks.

I imagine this is what a person would use this for, I don’t know if they still sell these things but this was the only Sharpie I could find. So probably gonna throw it away after this because it’s not that not all that useful to me.

Here’s the idea over time. If you’re talking if we were to talk about comfort level. So as you get started, let’s use business as an example.

This can happen anywhere but business is a great place to start. So if when you start your business, you’re really uncomfortable and it takes really a long while to break free of to get any type of comfortability and then you start getting good at it, and you start feeling more and more comfortable.

Then you’re and then pretty soon you’re it’s it gets really, really easy. And that’s a good thing. That’s kind of what you want, right?

That’s what you want out of business. But here’s the other thing that that occurs at the same time, is it’s when you’re the least comfortable, you also feel the least stuck because you’ve got nowhere else to go but up.

You’re uncomfortable. And so if you were to take it the other way, when you’re talking, when you’re talking being stuck, and what will the opposite of stuck be kind of momentum. You’re really at your own momentum, I can’t think of another word to use right now. But you’ve got a movement going right here.

You and your idealism is at its highest, the more comfortable you get, the lower that gets. It’s a strange thing. They’re inversely related. So, comfort and, and a happy momentum.

They go against each other. And the more comfortable you get, the less momentum you get and somewhere down here you get stuck. Your comfort is all over high.

It’s funny, it’s not that you’re necessarily feel good about being comfortable. Comfort isn’t necessarily a good feeling. It’s just a stable feeling. And the idea that you don’t want to rock the boat and you don’t want to go back to this time when you were uncomfortable right it’s necessary to be a little uncomfortable.

Now, that doesn’t mean that if you get into the situation, here’s a, it’s based on a conversation I was having earlier today with my friend Beverly, who we’re working on working on a business project together.

I think I’ve mentioned her before, she’s looking at selling a business. And she’s at this point to where she is, she knows she’s going to hit this comfort wall. And she doesn’t want to be there.

I said, the only way out of that is is discomfort, right?

You have to put yourself in a situation, not where you are dreading it, or that you feel horrible, or that you’re hating life. That’s not directly related to the comfort concept that comfort is not by happiness.

Some people confuse these, they think if they’re comfortable, they’ll be happy. If they’re uncomfortable, they’ll be unhappy. It’s also something that’s slightly inversely related, being a little uncomfortable, is very healthy and it leads you in a positive direction.

So if you’ve, if you feel stuck in your business, look at where the comfort level is, and find a way out of it. Sometimes that means selling a business. That’s okay because someone else might be able to use that business better, you may have already taken it as far as it can go for you.

So you might want to look at that you may want to look at bringing on another partner, somebody that can challenge you a little bit with your ideas and add a little bit of spice to your business, maybe switch it up a little bit, change it up, maybe a consultant investor like myself, someone like that.

A third thing that you may want to do is just in the thing and not sell it, maybe it’s not gonna be worth it to anybody else. I mean, it’s, it’s honestly, it can happen.

All these things, these are things you really ought to consider.

Maybe you ought to consider having another business if your business already runs on its own.

Maybe you just need to step away, have it continue to run on its own, or do whatever you can to have it run on its own, start a new business, start a new hobby, start a new process over here, something that’s new, something that’s different, something that’s uncomfortable or will add a different element into your life. That will make sense. It’s tough.

It’s really easy to see in other people, but it’s tough to see in ourselves. It’s tough to acknowledge.

There’s a part of us that doesn’t want to acknowledge that we’re comfortable. But comfort slows everything down. And it really does keep you in a in a mellow hole. If you I’m not quite sure how else to explain it.

But a friend of mine used to work in government. And he had kind of risen to the top and had built, it had kind of built things up to where he didn’t really have to do much of anything. If anybody’s ever worked in government, you can get into these spaces where they pay you to just drink coffee. So he was paid to just drink coffee.

He said it was really at a point where he just he had to make sure he got into work just so he can make sure that everyone else was sitting around and drinking coffee. And he explained it as golden handcuffs.

He said they were paying him just enough that he couldn’t walk away and move and go and do something else. But at the same time he felt trapped he felt completely trapped. And that these are the situations that comfort does to us so don’t fall for it move on find a way out of it. If you’d like to chat about it, go check out my website, BrianJPombo.com.

There are three choices there.

At least at this point, which I’m video videoing and putting out the audio podcast for this. There are three options there might be more by the time you look at this or less and you go pick one of those and find a way to talk to me and I can help you kind of pick your brain and figure out what the issue is and maybe help you out.

Go check out my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business if you wanted to kind of do it yourself and kind of get a feel for this type of thing and shake up your business a little bit. Maybe that’s all it needs. Get a Free copy at AmazonProofBook.com.

That is all I have for tonight. It was a long one, but you have a good one. We’ll be back here tomorrow.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.