At work, you are often advised to ‘move out of the comfort zone’ and accept stretch jobs to develop new skills. How do you identify these stretch assignments? Any assignment that presents new experiences and challenges and gives scope for you to learn new skills is a stretch assignment. In an ever-changing world, if you stand still, you lag behind in the success race. You must therefore be always on the look out for assignments that will expose you to new areas and fuel your growth. If you sincerely try, it is not difficult to find opportunities that will allow you to stretch and grow your capabilities.

Here are some pointers in this regard:

Choose assignments: Quite often you are forced to add development activities such as attending trainings, workshops and seminars to your routine daily responsibilities. This will naturally increase your workload and lead to higher stress levels. But if you exercise little care you can choose a stretch assignment that helps you to grow along the way.

Sit with your boss to identify assignments that will use your existing strengths well but at the same time stretch you in new areas. However, see that the stretch is good enough to motivate you to learn new skills and develop yourself. If you are too comfortable you are unlikely to stretch yourself any further. You will stick to old ways of doing things and no meaningful progress takes place. On the contrary, if you are far too outside your comfort zone, you will stress yourself too much. Then again no significant development happens. The best assignments are those that allow you to confidently carry out the job while letting you to experiment in untested areas and helping you to expand your skills.

Higher purpose: Identify what you want to achieve in your career. A strong purpose will motivate you to take up new challenges and stretch yourself beyond your current capabilities. Networking is essential for self-development and progress. You will get to know about new possibilities through the people in your network. The diverse perspectives serve well to stretch your thinking. It is important to find and include in your network, people who can be most helpful. Bosses both former and current, mentors, role models and other wellwishers can provide you with necessary insights, feedback, support, inspiration and encouragement to step into unknown territories.

Right attitude: You require a right attitude to venture into new areas and conquer them. People who successfully navigate through new territories do not get perturbed by the unknown. They understand what they can control and what they cannot, in any given situation. They put in their best efforts into areas they can influence and ultimately achieve success. Developing the right attitude towards unknown challenges gives you the ability to understand where to focus and what to let go.

Learning mindset: To achieve continuous development, you must focus on learning from every thing you do.

A learning mindset helps you to learn as you do and get better over time. To progress in your job learning orientation is absolutely essential more so in case of stretch assignments as they offer lot of scope to explore new areas and experiment in new ways.

Be open: Stretch assignments require you to use new skills or existing skills at a higher level. They require you to face new challenges and move in new directions. You must learn to view the challenges as opportunities and not as problems. Being open to new possibilities helps you to quickly embrace new ways and expand your capabilities.

In the current economic scenario more organisations are asking their employees to either grow or go. Since you cannot afford to stagnate start focussing on getting out of your comfort zone as frequently as you can. Concentrate on finding out where you can stretch and challenge yourself in your current role itself. Assess your strengths and find out how you can leverage them even more.

Study the trends that are emerging in your industry. Also take a closer at your company’s strategies and seek out jobs that will lead to the development of increasingly important competencies. Given that stretching yourself is the only way to develop and expand your capabilities, go ahead now!