AT LAST
Zoning Out
The time has come for you to escape your comfort zone (even it’s for just a short time).
by Ronn Levine
|
 |
I remember reading an article about Denzel Washington, how for so long he mostly played good guys – Easy Rawlins in "Devil in a Blue Dress," the football coach in "Remember the Titans." He was talking about leaving your comfort zone, doing something different.
So he took the role in "Training Day" of one of the most despicable men you’d ever not want to meet. And what happened? He won an Oscar® for Best Actor.
This story came back to me recently, when I was rereading a column in Quill, the magazine published by the Society of Professional Journalists. Larry Timbs, an associate professor of mass communications at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C., writes about his friend, Benjy Hamm, managing editor of The Herald-Journal in Spartanburg, S.C., who “tries his best to make sure his staff gets out of their skins and comfort zones.”
“He has a checklist for journalists ‘to help us remember that our audience is not exclusively made up of college graduates with ever-present career goals who work in white-collar jobs and live in comfortable subdivisions,’ ” Timbs writes.
In that checklist, Hamm asks his staff to consider whether they:
- Know people who had a job, but not a career path.
- Had taken a ride on the city bus.
- Had ever talked to a prisoner or former prisoner.
- Knew someone with less than a 10th grade education.
- Had spent a night or more in a mobile home.
- Understood the appeal of NASCAR races and WWE [wrestling] events.
- Had visited a church/temple outside of their religious denomination.
Wanting to bring this question “home,” I asked a few colleagues what they thought.
Gretchen Letterman, the NIE manager at the St. Petersburg Times, proved to be a perfect respondent, having moved to NIE manager in circulation after 20 years in the newsroom. “I was tremendously excited about the opportunity,” she writes in an e-mail. “But it's almost like being in another galaxy for a journalism major/words person, what with DEDs, POP, volume budgets, weekly average – ‘oh that's actually a daily number; did you remember to divide by 6 YOY Year to Date?’
“Now after a year in this wonderful job, the word ‘circulator’ is still not second nature, but I'm not so panicky when the GL hits my desk. I used to think the abbreviation for general ledger was actually something addressed personally to me using my initials. I'm finding my comfort zone to be ‘comfortably’ in both news and circulation camps, a bridge that is helping me more fully understand this complex and challenging business and, I hope, is helping us take NIE to the next level at the St. Petersburg Times.”
Candace Perkins Bowens, scholastic media program coordinator at Kent State University in Ohio, recalls a similar happy ending after escaping her comfort zone.
“Definitely teaching for five weeks in Prague and Bratislava did that for me!” she e-mails. “Imagine teaching teens ‘fact-based’ U.S. journalism through an interpreter! The best was producing their paper. PageMaker's menu bar was in Czech.
I asked the interpreter, ‘Can you find anything up there that says, big letter or capital letter or anything like that?’ We did find it!”
What’s probably toughest about pursuing alternate comfort zones – sounds a bit Star Trekish – is finding the time. This will, of course, be alleviated when you read our time management tips on page 7. But Jose Alves, manager of educational services at Newsday in Melville, N.Y., emphasizes that it may not be as hard you think.
“As simple as it may be, what works for me is to try something different,” he writes. “I have found that in order to maintain growth both professionally and personally, do something totally different. [Of course,] taking the first couple of steps is always challenging. I will give you a few examples.
- “Take a couple of courses offered at a college or within your workplace.
- Sit in on meetings in departments other than yours.
- Go on a sales call.”
Getting out of your comfort zone may not be number one on your need-to-hit parade, with sponsorships, classrooms or your section to worry about. But with a little extra effort, the results can be, if not Oscar® worthy, full of glory and inspiration all the same.
|