Page 47 - Leadership Secrets of Hillary Clinton

LEADERSHIP SECRETS OF HILLARY CLINTON

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YOUR COMFORT ZONE

Have you ever heard the term prudent risk? I remember
learning long ago about “blue rules” and “red rules”—blue
rules are things that you know you can or should do, and
red rules are things that you know you can’t or shouldn’t do.
When I was a kid, a red rule in a hospital used to be that
no one could smoke around an oxygen tank—never
(because it could blow up). There were no exceptions to
this rule. That was a red rule. But a nurse could decide that
a patient shouldn’t be awakened at 7 a.m. for breakfast if he
had not slept well that night. And she could make this
decision any time, at her discretion. That was a blue rule.
But what about the purple zone? Those are the choices that
in business we call “challenges” and “opportunities”—situ-
ations where we don’t have the security of clear guidelines
or reasonable expectations to fall back on when making
decisions. I call these “prudent risks,” and because we don’t
know the outcome, they take us out of our comfort zone.
When I’m talking or coaching leaders about this, I often
ask them to think about a time in their lives when they
learned one of their greatest lessons or had one of their
greatest breakthroughs. Then I ask them to describe those
situations, and just about every story I hear involves an
experience in which they took a prudent risk. Some of
these situations have happy endings and some don’t. It

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