The Power of Discomfort – Do You Live in Your Comfort Zone?

Family businesses, small businesses need to get their teams out of their comfort zone. View the comfort zone not as a shelter but a prison.

View the comfort zone not as a shelter but a prison.

Family businesses need to manage the comfort zone.

With the NCAA tournament in full swing we wanted to take advantage of a query, a postulate put forth a few years ago by Malcolm Gladwell.

In January of 1971, the Fordham University Rams played a basketball game against the University of Massachusetts Redmen. The game was in Amherst, at the legendary arena known as the Cage, where the Redmen hadn’t lost since December of 1969. Their record was 11–1. The Reedmen’s star was none other than Julius Erving — Dr. J. The UMass team was very, very good. Fordham, by contrast, was a team of scrappy kids from the Bronx and Brooklyn.

Their center had torn up his knee the first week of the season, which meant that their tallest player was six feet five. Their starting forward—and forwards are typically almost as tall as centers—was Charlie Yelverton, who was six feet two. But from the opening buzzer the Rams launched a full-court press, and never let up. “We jumped out to a thirteen-to-six lead, and it was a war the rest of the way,” Digger Phelps, the Fordham coach at the time, recalls.

“These were tough city kids. We played you ninety-four feet. We knew that sooner or later we were going to make you crack.” Phelps sent in one indefatigable Irish or Italian kid from the Bronx after another to guard Erving, and, one by one, the indefatigable Irish and Italian kids fouled out. None of them were as good as Erving. It didn’t matter. Fordham won, 87–79.

“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.”
― Neale Donald Walsch

This “Press all the time” strategy was not used again that season by Fordham or their Coach “Digger Phelps”. This tactic, up tempo, get them out of their comfort level approach was not lost. A freshman on that U.Mass team, Rick Pitino captured it and has won 73% of all his games. Pitino became the head coach at Boston University in 1978, when he was twenty-five years old, and used the press to take the school to its first N.C.A.A. tournament appearance in twenty-four years.

At his next head-coaching stop, Providence College, Pitino took over a team that had gone 11–20 the year before. The players were short and almost entirely devoid of talent—a carbon copy of the Fordham Rams. They pressed, and ended up one game away from playing for the national championship. Since then his pressure, up tempo, RUN AND TRAP – has won a number of National Championships.

Family businesses, small businesses need to get their teams out of their comfort zone. Get your team to change their frame of mind. View the comfort zone not as a shelter but a prison. Embrace constructive discomfort. Don’t take the safe, known path. Choose challenge over comfort, and set goals that force you to get out of your comfort zone.

Learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.