When it comes to pursuing success and personal growth, one of the most powerful strategies is stepping outside your comfort zone. That's because high performers understand that real progress happens beyond the boundaries of familiarity. It's where the magic of learning, innovation, and transformation unfolds! In this article, let's see why stepping outside your comfort zone is essential for high performance and talk about practical tips on how to embrace discomfort to achieve results.

Why Step Outside Your Comfort Zone?

Your comfort zone is a cozy space where routines and familiar activities reside. While it's comforting, it can also be a stagnant pool that prevents you from reaching your full potential! Stepping outside this zone brings a ton of benefits:

1. Learning and Growth: Pushing boundaries exposes you to new experiences, knowledge, and skills. This continual learning fuels personal and professional growth.
2. Innovation: Breaking free from routine...

As high performers, our journey towards excellence and success can be all-consuming. It's all too easy to find ourselves engrossed in the relentless drive to achieve our goals, leaving little time for anything else!

While ambition is admirable, maintaining a healthy work-life balance is essential for long-term success and well-being. Honestly, it's more than just balance (thankfully, since balance can feel impossible), it's about integration.

Integration, in the context of balancing work and life, is the blending of your professional and personal responsibilities in a way that allows you to fulfill both aspects without experiencing excessive conflict or stress. Instead of strictly segregating work and personal life into separate compartments, integration promotes a more flexible approach where the two spheres complement and support each other.

Rather than striving to achieve a strict balance where work and personal life are given equal time and attention,...

We live in a digital world, where paper and pen is often considered “old school.” If you aren’t naturally a person who loves to write things down and check them off (guilty!) then the thought of using a paper planner may not appeal to you or may even sound like one extra task you need to check off every day.

However, using this kind of tool can help you be more intentional and strategic in meeting your goals. Not only that, it can provide an outlet for your creativity, memory keeping, and at the very least, your daily scheduling.

Once you’ve taken the plunge into paper planning, the next step involves deciding which one. A quick Google search can provide overwhelming results. I’m going to save you the trouble and share my favorite planning tool, The Highest Potential Planner.

As someone who went through a period of time where I was trying all.the.planners. I can tell you from experience that this one is the best!...

Have you become so busy that you have neglected the practice of using a planner? If you’re like most of the clients I coach, you’ve fallen into a rut of clicking “accept” on every event that passes through your inbox, from Zoom meeting invitations and party invites. You likely send your daily routine straight to your Google calendar and rely on its notifications to manage your days and weeks. 

You are flying through life living from one Google notification to the other. 

Do you ever feel like your schedule is running your life and wonder if you’ll ever get to be in charge again? 

If this sounds like your current rhythm, I want to express how deeply I understand. Being a busy business owner, wife of an entrepreneur, and mom of four young children who still need help with their homework and a ride to EVERY activity, I couldn’t relate more. That’s why I am so passionate about something that has become so useful and...

Have you ever looked up from your phone and found that the time on the clock was way past what you expected? Time flew but you felt like it was standing still as you mindlessly scrolled. You find yourself feeling guilty about how much time you spent, or overwhelmed by how much you have to get done in (now) a limited amount of time. You lament over the time that just vanished! 

You’re suddenly a victim, a victim of your own self sabotage and buffering. 

You got sucked into the “scroll."

I want to say, “It’s okay, you're not alone, it happens!'' But the truth is, I’m just as disappointed in myself as you are when this happens. Not for being on my phone. But for BUFFERING with my phone. The bigger truth is, I can’t honestly say that I believe this form of time wasting IS healthy when used for unhealthy reasons.

I’m convinced we can do better. But how? 

Scrolling is like a long, dark,...

Are you feeling stuck in a cycle of knowing what you want but always coming up short or not sustaining what you want  once you get there?

Do you feel like you’ve tried so many different things but nothing seems to stick? Nothing seems to move you forward the way you WANT to move forward?

When this happens, I ask this question to all the High Performers that I coach...so let me ask you.

How are your habits? 

Have you been paying attention to your habits at all?

Are you CONSISTENT with your habits?

You should know that your habits are the exact place to start if you want to get unstuck!

What’s the most common hang up on this subject? I think you already know, and that is why you clicked on this blog. In fact, the above few questions may have caused you to shift in your chair feeling uncomfortable because you may think that habits constrict your freedom.

If you don’t believe this…I’m sure...

Do you ever feel like you’ve spent your whole day warding off distraction rather than “winning the day?”

I have felt this on many occasions. 

For me, I know I’ve won the day when I’ve successfully planned ahead, connected with my people and when I know I showed up to the best of my abilities. But some days, distractions limit me from accomplishing that winning plan. 

Some days giving into distractions has a domino effect and, soon enough, the end of the day feels like a bust. When I do this, I look back on the day and realize, I basically gave up by giving in! (Let me be clear - giving up IS okay if you’re not going in the direction you want to go! Maybe you need to re-route! But giving up on something you love in order to avoid the discomfort of discipline, that’s another thing entirely and I’m here to tell you… as a High Performer, which I know you are...we don’t give up on the things that...

Have you ever felt like your motives, passions, interests and work just weren’t lining up? 

If you find yourself feeling more discouragement than delight with your current work reality, it could mean that you haven’t found your “Zone of Genius” yet (or maybe you have, but you aren’t currently operating in that zone.

I’ll explain. 

In his book, The Big Leap, Gay Hendricks describes how operating in the wrong “zone” can be detrimental to your creativity and completely life-sucking. He even details several cases that led to physical illness as a result of someone living in a state of misaligned passions and work. 

How your day-to-day tasks and responsibilities align with your passions and intentions is SO important for you as a High Performer to understand. Why? Because in order to reach new heights both personally and professionally, you need to be bringing your highest and best self forward!

...

James Clear once said, “change your habits, change your life.” As a big proponent of the power of healthy habits, I couldn’t agree more!

We all want some sort of transformation in our life. Whether it’s making small changes in our personal life, becoming a better parent or taking our business to the next level, most everyone wants to better themself in some way or another.

Many people believe that in order to transform, they have to completely overhaul their life. But I want to share a nugget of truth: it’s the small habits that transform.

When you think about it, it makes total sense. When you commit to following through with small habits, they add up over time: resulting in big change!

Making sweeping changes can also have a big effect, of course. However, as humans it can be super easy to drop those big changes when they become overwhelming. Admit it, you’ve let go of a New Year’s Resolution or two because it...

If you’ve spent any amount of time with me, you know that I love a good discussion about habits. Whether good or bad, we all have them. If you’ve clicked on this post today though, you know we are talking about habits you want to break...habits that are no longer serving the person you want to become.

Bad habits are something that have evolved within our life that usually have some sort of pay off that we find rewarding. Maybe it’s the feeling of a lazy day spent on the couch avoiding chores, or avoiding that sense of anxiety by procrastinating on a big work project. Either way, the immediate gratification of embracing that bad habit is so enticing that we find ourselves doing it over and over.

But news flash! All those bad habits don’t offer any rewards! They continue to just bring short term “happiness,” causing you to miss out on all the goodness that is otherwise out there.

So how do you break bad habits? It’s not as...