When you pass a threshold, that mentally becomes your new normal. That's Scalability of Effort. It's an endurance phenomenon you can use to your professional advantage.
To illustrate with an athletic example, each new mile distance tells your mind, "I can handle this, so, no sweat!" -- even if you've only done it once. I can keenly remember the first day I made it 22 miles from home, a huge accomplishment or so it felt. Once I'd done it once - 22 miles, no sweat! I can remember the scalability leaps later, the first time I broke 30, then 50, then 75, then 80, 90, and finally, I remember exactly where I was riding when I saw the Garmin mileage tick over, showing my first official 100-mile ride. At that point, 100 became my new normal.
Scalability of effort is useful because it shows how growing incrementally yields big results in your mental concepts of hard and easy. Once you hit 35 miles, 30 miles is no longer far. It's just 30 miles. Your mind simply resets. Your concept of effort has scaled up, and 35 is the new normal. Now it's your next threshold. You will not hit it every time as you train, but eventually it will become commonplace. And then a new distance will replace it as you go even farther.
How can you use that to gain a professional edge? This way: once you know what you want to do, you know that getting there is only a matter of scaling into it - just GETTING to each successive growth step, because once you do, it begins to be your new normal. So just keep reaching for greater and greater size of effort, and let your mental endurance adapt along the way.
Your concept of scale on a project or endeavor, once stretched by a larger experience, accepts that larger scale as the new boundary. Use this to your advantage when you wish to expand or improve what you can do.
How to Scale Up
Pick something you've wanted to do that seems "far" or "hard", perhaps speaking in front of a large audience.
Identify your current ideas of scale. If you've never spoken in front of an audience, you've probably spoken in front of a meeting or your team, so take that as your scale of effort, perhaps 5 people.
Pick another number that represents a distant but reachable goal point. For my athletic example, it was 100 miles of riding. For you, speaking, it could be an auditorium of 200 engaged and interested people, all watching your presentation intently. Does that sound fun? Doable? Impossible? Petrifying? It’s all in the scale, and your concept of how it fits into your scheme of "normal" or "possible".
Realize that as soon as you speak in front of 10 people, your previous 5 will seem small, and 10 will be your new normal. As soon as you speak in front of 20, 10 will be old hat. And on and on as you build up to greater and greater scale.
The Journey Grows You Along The Way
Along the way, you will realize that the journey of Scalability of Effort involves much more than mere scale. There are lessons you'll learn as you grow that involve learning to support the scale you’re at, whatever it is. A 20-mile ride requires different strategy, planning and preparation than a 100-mile ride. A 5-person presentation requires different levels of presence, equipment use, and skill than a 200-person auditorium speech. But that’s just part of the journey, and it’s one reason that the gradualness of scalability is so valuable. You’ll develope the required skills along the way as you adapt to each new level of venue.
The well-known quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson states, “The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.” Similarly, your concept of scale on a project or endeavor, once stretched by a larger experience, accepts that larger scale as the new boundary. Things that seemed impossible or difficult just become part of your Mental Endurance mindset. Use this to your advantage when you wish to expand on what you can do. It works in the reverse too, if you want to streamline and be more agile.
Try it - especially with things you've been reluctant on or feared to do. It's only a matter of increasing the scale bit by bit and learning along the way. Where will you use scalability to reach a new level of effort today?
Keep Growing,
Katherine Lieber coaches and trains on self-leadership, limitlessness, energy health, inner power, and healing the wounded professional to recover core vision, joy, and high-powered performance in the workplace. She is the founder of TitaniumBlue Leadership. Be limitless - be the hero in a world that needs you.
© 2019 Katherine R. Lieber & TitaniumBlue Leadership
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