Comfort Zone

I reunited with my godson this past weekend.  What a pleasure it was to engage him in an adult constructive and mature conversation! No longer am I the sole teacher. We are now both teachers and learners. 

During the conversations, our own learning styles were discussed and clarified. His learning style is predominantly auditory. He listens to podcasts, YouTube, and the like.  While driving, for example, he would listen to e-books etc.  He confesses to reading at college only to pass the courses. On the contrary, my learning style is reading.  I like to read either hard or soft copy stuff. I am fond of highlighting essential points either with a pencil or pen or electronic highlighter. I confess to ignoring the scores of videos received via e-mail or WhatsApp. I also have a penchant for writing to communicate my ideas, instead of doing video or audio recordings. 

However, we recognized the need to challenge ourselves by stepping outside of our own comfort zone of listening and reading, and focus on developing our unpreferred skills. We agreed that this option would make us more versatile and able to communicate with more persons. 

My godson recommended that I utilize the social media professional platform LinkedIn. He believed that it would give me a platform to market my written work and ideas currently on my blog sites, newspapers articles, and books. He remarked that it would offer opportunities to grow my personal brand, and to link with persons in my own field or interested in my writings.  

Well!  Two days later, I googled “LinkedIn” to explore it, and guess what?  There were tons of VIDEOS on how to make a LinkedIn Profile.  My initial emotional reaction? “Oh, no.  I can’t be bothered. I am not inclined to watch these videos.”  Then I remembered the conversation with my godson, and I thought, “I must challenge myself and labour through these videos.” As I laboured with one video, I became frustrated by the purposeful art of making the viewer watch everything, thus failing to get to the point immediately.  So, I abandoned ship, searched for a site that offers the possibility of reading the information, and I was happy to find one. But, feeling sad on the other hand because I failed to challenge myself to leave my comfort zone.

The next challenge?  Challenge myself to jump out of my comfort zone.