Having confidence is a huge advantage in careers, life, and relationships. It’s the key to attracting the right job, the right people, the right decisions from others, and getting what we want.

Like money, everyone wants more confidence. Some people naturally seem to have it; perhaps they were lucky and had the right kind of parenting. In any case, knowing a few strategies for improving our self-confidence will ensure that we can tap into its power.

Everyone has a baseline of confidence. Some people have unshakable confidence built upon strong foundations; others find their confidence level is a bit shaky when faced with mistakes, criticisms and failures.

Confidence is closely tied with our sense of self-esteem. Self-esteem enables us to experience ourselves not only accurately but gladly. It’s a realistic, appreciative opinion; we are able to be honest about our strengths, weaknesses and everything in between, and still feel good about who we are.

There is a difference between the outer appearance of confidence and deeply felt intrinsic self-worth. True self esteem is steady; it doesn’t lead to complacency or overconfidence, but rather is a strong motivator to work hard.

Studies have shown that self-esteem is universal: it is important not only in Western Cultures, but is related to mental health and happiness in diverse cultures including Asia and the Middle East.

Foundations of Self-Esteem

According to Glenn R. Schiraldi, Ph.D, author of 10 Simple Solutions for Building Self-Esteem, self-esteem is built from three factors: unconditional worth, unconditional love and growth.

1. 1.      Unconditional Worth

   This means that one’s worth isn’t increased or diminished by external factors, but is based on our true value as a human being. This can be confusing to people who have learned they must achieve and acquire in order to be considered worthy.

   Once we believe in our intrinsic worth, we are relieved of the need to judge ourselves and others, or compare and compete on external values and factors. We can choose to value our own innate capacities and see the many ways we contribute to the well-being of ourselves and others.

2. 2.      Unconditional Love

   Abraham Maslow noted that psychological health is not possible without love for the essential core. Even those who have not experienced unconditional love from parents can learn to provide love to themselves and others. Love helps us experience our worth, feel satisfaction, and enjoy growth and life.

3. 3.      Growth

We feel better about ourselves when we are living constructively, learning, making decisions, developing and growing. Growing does not change our core worth, but it helps us experience it with greater satisfaction.

In summary, self-esteem is a sense of satisfaction that comes from recognizing and appreciating our intrinsic worth; it encourages us to choose to love and grow. It’s not based upon comparing and competing. We can enhance and enjoy our sense of self worth through learning, growing, achievements and goals. 

How We Lose Confidence

Young children do not appear to experience self-dislike. As we mature, however, we learn to over-think. We judge, compare, criticize, worry, blame, and obsess about faults. We want what we don’t have, and we forget to appreciate what we do have.

We lose patience with ourselves and others, and don’t accept things as they are. As we lose self-compassion, we also lose our compassion for others. As adults we become highly judgmental, and may even prize judgment as the quality of discernment.

As a result, we become overly critical. We apply a negative eye to ourselves and that erodes our sense of intrinsic value and self worth. Unreasonable negative thoughts intrude into our minds and forming background chatter that drowns out appreciation and enjoyment.

Getting Rid of Negativity

Without doubt, our own critical nature eats away at our confidence more than any outside judgment, mistake or failure. Over-active negative mind chatter can cause us to react defensively in neutral situations.

Many of these habits of thinking are learned and can be unlearned. Forget about blaming parents, teachers, and people who didn’t like us when we were growing up. No matter what happened to us or how we ended up with negative reactions, we can learn to disconnect from harmful automatic thoughts.

We can replace negative thoughts with positive ones that will make us more effective, happier, and self-confident. Ultimately we are responsible for the thoughts we choose. We can’t control many things in life, but we can control our thoughts.

Here are a few of the distortions that show up in negative mind chatter:

We lose confidence when we apply negative thinking to ourselves or other people. No one escapes these intrusive thought patterns. The key is to become aware of them. Once we catch ourselves engaging in automatic distortions, we can re-think, reframe, and revise our thoughts.

For example, we might be thinking, “I can’t possibly get this done in time. I’m too slow in the mornings. My brain doesn’t work that way.”

We can reframe the self-talk like this: “I don’t like having to work in a hurry, especially so early. I’m not sure I can finish, but at least I can start.  Maybe my brain will wake up after a few stabs at it.”

By acknowledging the reality, we avoid catastrophizing and assuming, and we agree to do what is possible by starting.

When we look at what we can do, instead of what’s wrong, we give ourselves a chance to succeed and grow from the experience. When we guard against distortions and negativity, our confidence grows instead of withers. Our minds start to acquire more positive thinking habits. We set ourselves up for success and build self-confidence.

Several generations have grown up on the tales of Winnie the Pooh and his friends from the Hundred Acre Wood. Since the loveable Pooh Bear was first introduced to the world in 1924 by writer A.A. Milne, stories of the ragtag gang have captivated the hearts and imaginations of millions.

Rarely does a child—or and adult, for that matter—read or watch a Winnie the Pooh story without coming across a moral lesson. Four of the life lessons that permeate throughout the franchise are:

1. Optimism is better than pessimism.

Contrast the adorable yet morose attitude of Eeyore with the ever-upbeat attitude of Winnie. While Eeyore always focuses intensely on the cloud, Pooh always seems to find the silver lining. Pooh and the others seem to tolerate Eeyore’s pessimism, but it is clear that the better approach to life is the optimistic one.

2. True friends are always loyal, even if it costs.

Winnie and his friends frequently overcome their fears in order to rescue one who is lost or in danger. They are even willing to set aside personal agendas and desires for the sake of the one who is in trouble, such as when Pooh set aside his search for honey in order to rescue Christopher Robin from the dreaded Backson. In so doing, the Hundred Acre Wood residents demonstrate true friendship to us.

3. Expect the best in each other.

Piglet, Winnie’s timid friend, often finds strength in the encouragement he receives from Pooh. Even when the others express doubts about another’s abilities or intentions, Pooh remains positive. Similarly, when we expect the best in someone else, often that person will rise to the occasion. As a bonus, positive expectations can also lead to less stress and fewer interpersonal conflicts.

4. Have an unquenchable hunger for more.

Fans of Winnie know that the one thing that occupies most of Pooh’s time and energy is his never-ending quest for honey. He has an insatiable thirst for the sweet nectar. Likewise, we can have an insatiable desire to grow beyond where we are right now. We can have a healthy hunger to grow personally, professionally, relationally, intellectually, and spiritually.

These and other lessons expressed through the Winnie the Pooh series of books and videos can enrich the life of a young child as well as a seasoned parent. Winnie the Pooh and his friends may reside in a fantasy world, but they teach us valuable lessons for living in the real world.

Lane Resources (c) 2011
Lynn Lane

Four basic drives are common to all human beings, but which ones affect your daily life and behavior? How do they influence the choices you make?

At the start of the 20th century, psychoanalysis pioneer Sigmund Freud proposed that people are driven by sex and power—but there’s much more to it than that. By the 1950s, psychologist Abraham Maslow identified our “hierarchy” of basic needs, which include shelter, food, clothing, ego and belonging. After these needs were met, he said, we’re driven toward self-actualization—a state very few achieve.

In the 1960s, MIT management professor Douglas McGregor applied Maslow’s ideas to the business world. He asserted that once basic salary needs were met, workers had higher drives that weren’t contingent on rewards or punishments. If managers could tap into people’s inner motivations by granting more autonomy and respect, they would spur greater performance.

Harvard psychology professor David McClelland later identified three motivators in leaders: drives to achieve, attain power and affiliate with others.

Despite all of these studies, businesses continue to use monetary incentives instead of tapping into employees’ intrinsic motivations. Perhaps one can chalk this up to fuzzy, anachronistic notions about what motivates people.

A new theory suggests each of us has four basic drives that have existed since our cavemen days. These drives, which have allowed us to survive, are embedded in our DNA and actively chart the course for our daily behaviors.

Acquiring, Bonding, Learning and Defending

In Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices (Jossey Bass, 2001), Harvard Business School professors Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohria draw evidence for their four-drive theory from evolutionary psychology and Charles Darwin’s teachings, as well as the social sciences and organizational life.

Human beings seek ways to fulfill the following drives because our evolutionary heritage compels us to meet basic survival needs:

1. The drive to acquire objects and experiences that improve our status relative to others. We’re driven to seek, take, control, and retain objects and personal experiences. In the course of evolution, humans have been naturally selected to compete for food, water, shelter and sexual fulfillment.

We’re driven to acquire both material and positional goods, as well as social status. But the drive to acquire is rarely satisfied; we always seem to want more and seek even greater status.

1. The drive to bond with others in long-term relationships of mutual care and commitment. Human beings have an innate drive to form social relationships and develop commitments with others—drives that are fulfilled only when the attachment is mutual.

   Groups of individuals who bond to one another have always had a better chance of surviving environmental threats. This drive induces us to cooperate with others.

1. The drive to learn and make sense of the world and of ourselves. Humans have an innate drive to satisfy their curiosity—to know, comprehend, believe, appreciate, and develop understandings or representations of their environment and themselves through a reflective process.

   This drive, without doubt, has enabled mankind to survive the elements and has given us distinct advantages over other creatures.

1. The drive to defend ourselves, our loved ones, our beliefs and our resources. Humans have an innate drive to defend themselves and their valued accomplishments whenever they perceive them to be endangered. The fundamental emotion manifested by this subconscious drive is alarm, which in turn triggers fear and/or anger. This drive has obvious survival value and quite possibly may have been the first drive to have evolved in our earliest ancestors.

In modern life, the drive to defend manifests in many ways. Much of human activity is generated by this drive. It is activated by perceived threats to one’s body, possessions and bonded relationships, as well as by threats to one’s own cognitive representations of our environment and self-identity.

The Balancing Act

The four drives are intrinsic and universal, found in some physical form in our brains. While independent, the drives are highly interactive with each other.

Each drive also has a “dark side,” as when the drive to acquire becomes excessively competitive and diminishes respect for others, or when the drive to defend one’s current thinking diminishes the drive to learn new perspectives.

These four drives exist in each of us; no one is immune. They determine the choices we make.

In some people, one drive will be more developed than others, creating an imbalance. And in some jobs, specific drives will be emphasized over others.

Using Drive to Your Advantage

Understanding how each of these drives manifests in your life can help you understand how and why you make particular choices. Working with a professional coach can help you identify your strongest drives so you can understand yourself better.

You may be relying too much on your drive to acquire or be placing too much emphasis on the drive to bond, while neglecting your drive to learn. Often, the drive to defend can overwhelm other important drives that must be satisfied to achieve and enjoy a well-balanced and successful life.

Which drives are guiding your choices—and which drive do you neglect?

The answers to these questions lie in acknowledging that all four drives are basic to human nature—and that a balanced life must include some satisfaction in all four areas.

As Lawrence and Nohria write: “The challenge is to find a course forward that fulfils all of our basic drives in some creative, balanced way…The way forward must be to use the best side of each drive to check the dark, excessive potential of human nature.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

√ Would you create the life you always wanted?

√ Would you like to be significant,

successful & satisfied?

√ Are you contributing to others?

√ When will you start growing in your personal development?

Get my book on kindle —> Never Ending You!

When you discover your mission, you will feel its demand. It will fill you with enthusiasm and a burning desire to get to work on it. ~ W. Clement Stone

Does your life have a clear sense of purpose?

Most people have a fundamental need to seek and find their calling in life, be it through work, hobbies or volunteer activities. While philosophers have long weighed in on the subject, it has recently come under scrutiny by researchers who seek to understand the science behind human happiness and success.

Psychologist Michael Steger and his colleagues at Colorado State University created the Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ) to measure the presence of meaning in our lives, as well as how much we seek to further our understanding of life’s purpose.

This five-minute test will prompt you to think about these important topics, and it can serve as the foundation for discussions with your significant relationships, mentor or coach.

The Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ)

Take a moment to think about what makes your life and existence feel important.

Using the following scale, respond to the 10 statements on the questionnaire as truthfully and accurately as possible. Keep in mind that each statement is subjective, so there are no right or wrong ratings.

Untrue True
1. Absolutely untrue 4. Can’t say if true or false 5. Somewhat true
2. Mostly untrue 6. Mostly true
3. Somewhat untrue 7. Absolutely true

Statements

1. _____I understand my life’s meaning.
2. _____I am looking for something that makes my life feel meaningful.
3. _____I am always looking to find my life’s purpose.
4. _____My life has a clear sense of purpose.
5. _____I have a good sense of what makes my life meaningful.
6. _____I have discovered a satisfying life purpose.
7. _____I am always searching for something that makes my life feel significant.
8. _____I am seeing a purpose or mission for my life.
9. _____My life has no clear purpose.
10. _____I am searching for meaning in my life.

Scoring

You can create two subscales from this measure: one for the “Presence” of meaning and the other for the “Search” for meaning.

Presence: Statements 1, 4, 5, 6 and 9 (reverse-coded)
Search: 2, 3, 7, 8 and 10

Note: There is no manual for interpreting this questionnaire. To understand it better, please contact Dr. Steger through his website: http://michaelfsteger.com/MLQ.aspx. The quiz is reproduced here solely to stimulate your thinking and facilitate a conversation with your coach or mentor.

There are no definitive methods for discovering what really matters to you, but passion and purpose go hand in hand. When you discover your purpose, you will normally find that it’s something about which you are tremendously passionate. You will be energetic and experience positive emotions.

In reviewing your life, you’ll find that you have already invested considerable time and effort in pursuit of what really matters to you. Responsibilities to others, however, often sidetrack and distract us from focusing on our core purpose, which may evolve over time. Look for recurrent themes and core interests.

The Daily Search… or the Daily Grind

Many people organize their lives to such an extent that they begin to feel like robots after a while. While routines help us conserve energy, they also lead to boredom and disengagement.

As you complete your daily activities, ask yourself these important questions:

1. What is this task’s purpose?
2. How can I bring more meaning to this activity?
3. How will this task bring me closer to my passion(s)?
4. How can I find a way to express my true values?

Finding Meaning at Work

As humans, we require a sense of belonging in the world—a place to make a contribution. For most, this comes through work, which is as much about spirit and passion as it is about salary.

Renowned psychologist Abraham Maslow defined the human “hierarchy of needs” on four main levels:

1. Security
2. Relationships
3. Self-esteem
4. Self-actualization

As our basic security needs for food, clothing and shelter are met, we are free to focus on fulfilling other needs. Depending on your personality and drive, you have opportunities to discover what motivates you and create your own sense of purpose on the job.

Meaning, purpose and passion are often hidden in the little tasks and events that make up each day. It’s up to us to pay attention, find our focus and spend our time on what matters most.

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“Our Mission is to encourage, inspire and educate people to live a life of Success, Achievement and Joy through Purpose, Power and Passion.”

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Send me an email if you want to work one on one! lynn@warriorofsuccess.com

Carl Jung

As we take our journey through life we will at times encounter many obstacles and opportunities.         

 We will learn to stretch our minds and our emotions to overcome and to push forward.

We will learn to incorporate our strength, discipline, and humility.

The journey is a short one, it seems as if it is only a flicker in time.

1.   Accept yesterday

2.   Embrace today

3.   Enjoy the journey

Twelve Steps on the Pathway to Greatness

                     © 1996-2008 All Right Reserved

  Table Of Contents                   

1. Give Thanks For Every New Day. It’s Yours To Live

2. Forgive Yourself And Others

3. Live Moment By Moment

4. Know What You Want And Take Action

5. Have Faith And Belief In Yourself And Your Dreams

6. Stay Away From Negative People. Learn From Your Heroes

7. Be A Go Giver Not Just A Go Getter

8. Learn From Your Mistakes And Change Your Approach

9. Build Relationships – Human And Spiritual

10. Remain Humble With Inner Pride

11. Be Hungry To Learn Every Day!

12. Light The Pathway For Others To Follow

What are you grateful for today?

Thank you for being part of this great journey in my life!

People are often unreasonable, illogical, and selfcentered;

Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish,

ulterior motives; Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false

friends and some true enemies; Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;

Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could

destroy overnight; Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be

jealous; Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget

tomorrow; Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never

be enough; Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and

God; It was never between you and them anyway.

~Mother Teresa

“To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”  —Baruch Spinoza

Most of us have a poor sense of our talents and strengths. Throughout our education and careers, there is a lot of attention paid to our weaknesses. We are acutely aware of our faults and deficits, our so-called “opportunities for development.”

 Parents, teachers and managers are all experts in spotting deficits. In fact, most parents, teachers and managers consider it their responsibility to point out flaws and try to help us correct them.

 We have become experts in our own weaknesses and spend our lives trying to repair our flaws, while our strengths lie dormant and neglected. The research, however, is clear: we grow and develop by putting emphasis on our strengths, rather than trying to correct our deficits.

Most people don’t concern themselves with identifying their talents and strengths. Instead, they choose to study their weaknesses. A Gallup poll investigated this phenomenon by asking Americans, French, British, Canadian, Japanese and Chinese people of all ages and backgrounds the question: “Which do you think will help you improve the most: knowing your strengths or knowing your weaknesses?”

Have you ever noticed how some folks will argue their weaknesses? You can’t pay them a compliment at all.

Action Plan….

Focus on the strong talents you have.

Learn to take a compliment.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure…We ask ourselves, `Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.” —Marianne Williamson

The most responsible — yet most challenging — thing to do is to face up to your natural talents. It is an honor to have such blessings. Do not waste them. Step up to the potential inherent in your talents and find ways to develop your strengths. Be true to yourself by becoming more of who you really are.

This advice is easy to give and difficult to practice. It is easier when working with a trained professional coach. Working with your coach can make it easier for you to identify your talents and strengths. There are also a number of online self-assessments available to help. Once your five top strengths are identified, you can examine how they show up in your life.

It is a process of a few steps back, a few steps forward, and learning as you go. It is not the same as book learning. The only way to learn about your strengths is to act, learn, refine, and then act, learn, refine. Open yourself to feedback. This means you must be strong and courageous. Personal development is not for sissies.

Discovering your true strengths is the path towards improvement and success. When you pay attention to your deficits and try to overcome them, you are placing emphasis on becoming what you are not. You wind up living a second-rate version of someone else’s life rather than a world-class version of your own.

Have a Great Week!

Everyone’s talking about ways to find opportunity amid economic chaos. Yet there’s something right under our noses that’s being overlooked: Times of crisis present unprecedented opportunities to stretch and develop real leadership capabilities.

What’s needed, specifically?

Hire more executive coaches, step up sessions, and implement more training and development programs.

In tough times, you cannot rely on talent and luck. Even when you have a talented team at the top, people need help in stretching their capabilities to meet the economy’s overwhelming demands. Your leaders can’t go it alone. You can’t, either.

Scientific research on great performance has persuasively shown that key abilities are developed. They don’t occur naturally. In fact, there may be no such thing as natural talent. It’s certainly not something you want to rely upon to help solve current problems.

Great leaders aren’t born; they’re made—and the research to support this is overwhelming. What we previously thought of as innate can often be taught. Leadership capabilities are acquired through constructive practice and developmental opportunities, and today’s business volatility calls for both.

“The key to this development is pushing people—or people pushing themselves—just beyond their current abilities, forcing them to do things that they can’t quite do,” according to Fortune Senior  Editor Geoff Colvin, author of Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else (Portfolio, 2008).

Crisis or Opportunity?

The upside of a financial crisis and recession is that they offer all of us the opportunity to stretch our skills in our current jobs—and I mean everyone. That means you. But you already know you’re being stretched, don’t you? You feel it. The question is, how are you going to welcome your own particular crises and use them to benefit your personal and professional development?

According to Colvin, managers often redirect people’s careers based on slender evidence that they have talent (or lack thereof). Unfortunately, we don’t give ourselves the same opportunity. We’ll try something new, and if it doesn’t come naturally or we don’t immediately excel, we conclude we have no talent for it.

We abandon pursuit. We never give ourselves the chance to practice and make progress. We don’t like the feeling of discomfort that comes from doing something poorly, so we don’t hang in there. Scientific evidence, however, is beginning to show that our definition of talent is wrong. In fact, “talent” may not mean anything at all.

In studies of accomplished individuals, researchers have found few signs of precocious achievement before their subjects began intensive training. Similar findings have turned up in studies of musicians, tennis players, artists, swimmers, mathematicians and chess players.

Is Talent Irrelevant?

Such findings do not prove that talent doesn’t exist, but they do suggest it may be irrelevant.

The concept of talent is especially troublesome in business. We label people and then assign expectations, some of which are unrealistic. When people are fast-tracked or deemed executive material, we assume they have special gifts. Worse, we fail to adequately emphasize the importance of  continuous training and coaching. Instead, we rely on their “natural gifts.”

Identifying these gifts has been extremely elusive. In fact, some business giants actually gave little early indication that they would become great.

Jack Welch, named by Fortune as the 20th century’s manager of the century, showed no particular passion for business, even into his mid-20s.

Steve Ballmer and Jeffrey Immelt were average employees at Procter & Gamble in the 1970s, with little evidence they would go on to become CEOs of Microsoft and GE before age 50.

In this age of genomic research, there should no longer be any question as to what is—and isn’t—innate. If a talent is innate, scientists should be able to identify the gene for it, and no progress has been made on this front.

Talent or Hard Work?

We can safely draw the conclusion that there’s plenty of opportunity for everyone. Many high-performing executives will tell you they don’t rely on their innate talents as much as their hard-earned skills. 

CEOs like A.G. Lafley of P&G and GE’s Immelt have said that being forced to manage through crises early in their careers enhanced their abilities in ways that were critical to becoming CEOs. They wouldn’t have achieved their status without surviving the storms that gave them hands-on practice.

Certain practices can make our experiences especially productive:

• Coaching helps.
• Receiving feedback allows us to fine-tune our skills.
• Working in a safe learning environment is essential.

Workplaces encourage practice and development, and mistakes should be viewed as learning opportunities. You also need to clearly define and develop a plan for achieving the abilities you wish to hone, including a measurable time frame. This will turbo-charge your performance and improve your chances of success.

10,000 Hours or 10 Years

Malcolm Gladwell makes the case for 10,000 hours of practice to attain expertise in his book Outliers (Little, Brown & Co., 2008):

“The 10,000-hours rule says that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex field, from playing chess to being a neurosurgeon, we see this incredibly consistent pattern that you cannot be good at that unless you practice for 10,000 hours, which is roughly 10 years, if you think about four hours a day.”

Almost all child prodigies in music, sports, chess and the arts seem to put in 10,000 hours before they attain expertise and produce significant results.

The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, edited by Anders Ericsson, Charness and Feltovich, et al, compiles scientific studies to prove the point in a wide variety of fields. The trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers “whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming” are nearly always made, not born.

Many of us have already put in more than a decade of doing what we do. The question is whether we’re practicing the right things, in the right way. Are we designing deliberate practice that actually develops the specific skills we need to make progress toward specific results? Or, to use a golf analogy, are you going to the driving range and hitting a bucket of balls the wrong way, for hours at a time?

What Is Deliberate Practice?

Anders Ericsson and his scientific colleagues emphasize the importance of deliberate practice, which isn’t what most of us think of when applying the term to sports or music education. In fact, our habitual use of the term in these domains may prevent us from applying it correctly to the business realm.

Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements:

• It is an activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with the help of a teacher, coach or expert.
• It can be repeated frequently.
• Feedback on results is continuously available.
• It’s highly demanding mentally.
• It isn’t much fun and entails hard work.

If you think you’ve outgrown the need for a teacher or coach, it’s time to challenge this assumption. A business coach can see things a manager cannot and is trained to deliver feedback in a way that’s inaccessible to most managers.

Without a clear, unbiased view of your performance, you cannot choose the best practice activities.  Most of us lack the knowledge we need to design our own practice programs, and we cannot realistically provide objective observations and feedback to ourselves. As stunt people like to say, “don’t try this at home.” Hire a coach who can properly stretch you beyond your current abilities and help you move out of your comfort zones. Otherwise, human nature dictates that you’re likely to spend your time practicing what you already know how to do.

According to Noel Tichy, PhD, a professor of organizational behavior and human resources management at the University of Michigan School of Business, our progress depends on leaving our comfort zone to enter the learning zone, where skills and abilities are just out of reach. We must force ourselves to stay in the latter, even as we make changes.

Why We Avoid Hard Work

Deliberate practice is, above all else, an effort to focus and concentrate. Recognizing unsatisfactory elements of performance is difficult and uncomfortable. When you try your hardest to perform better, you place enormous strain on your mental abilities.

Deliberate practice, in fact, can be viewed as an antonym to fun. Instead of doing something at which we excel, we intentionally work on areas where we have deficits—over and over again. After each repetition, a coach can tell us exactly where to focus so we can repeat these skills yet again.

Obviously, if the activities that require practice were easy and fun, everyone would do them. But in reality, most people won’t practice or persist long enough to improve. This is good news if you’re willing to do what most people won’t. It’s the reason you’re more likely to keep your job and thrive in this recession.

What About Passion?

Talent is not what determines success at developing high-level capacities. Rather, those who care the most will rise to the top. Exceptional performance depends on what we decide to do with our lives and the passion that drives us.

One of the most purchased articles from the Harvard Business Review is a 1968 piece on motivation that explains our three main drives:

1. Achievement
2. Power
3. A sense of community and desire to help others

No matter your driving force, you have to care deeply enough to work hard to become exceptional.

Nothing can make you endure the pain and sacrifice of deliberate practice for decades unless you’re  carried by an intrinsic compulsion to do so.

But allowing people to follow their intrinsic drives and work on projects of their own choosing is not something most organizations tolerate. In their fervent application of solely extrinsic motivations, organizations may actually prevent people from developing their passionate abilities.

Talent Is Never Enough

In Talent Is Never Enough: Discover the Choices That Will Take You Beyond Your Talent, (Thomas Nelson, 2007), leadership expert John C. Maxwell suggests talent is “often overrated and frequently misunderstood.” He  advises readers to build their strengths to become a “talent-plus person,” defined by the following tenets:

• Belief lifts your talent.
• Initiative activates your talent.
• Focus directs your talent.
• Preparation positions your talent.
• Practice sharpens your talent.
• Perseverance sustains your talent.
• Character protects your talent.

Even if you hold onto the notion that you’ll always survive because of your innate talent, you must still prepare, practice and persist. The scientific research is in, and it’s conclusive. Hard work—not talent—contributes to high performance.