As we begin to set goals, we're going to have to balance the difficulty of the goal against our ability to accomplish the goal. We're reminded of the classic expression, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. That's one way to approach managing the challenge of the goal. But there are some consequences of that that you have to be aware of, we can only eat elephant for so long. Let's look, then, at how we might chart the types of goals that we would like to set for ourselves, such that they are appropriately challenging and interesting. If the challenge is not matched well against ability, in other words, low challenge, not requiring a lot of ability, these are typically the goals that we get not very excited about. I'm reminded of the video gamer who doesn't play certain games because they're too easy, they're not challenging enough. However, when the goal gets super-challenging and exceeds our ability to execute it, we end up in a place where high stress is called, resulting in anxiety. Conversely, if our ability is high but the challenge is low, we can get easily bored with that particular goal. So what we would like to do is match, appropriately, the challenge with our abilities, and push ourselves to the upper right-hand portion of this box where we get high performance, using challenging goals, matched against high ability. We can look at this another way by thinking about this representation of our comfort zone. This is a place where we can operate easily, accomplish tasks, with a minimum amount of stress or difficulty. However, there is a region outside of that comfort zone where we call this the stretch. I had a very good mentor early in my career, who told me that all real learning occurs when you operate outside of your comfort zone. This is the region where we should be looking to set our goals. These are the challenging goals. However, there is a limit. We have to watch out that we don't exceed the edge, and end up in what we refer to as the panic zone. As you set your goals, be conscious of where these regions are and aware of what your limits might be, so that we can effectively set the challenging goals that you're going to need to improve your performance as a leader.
