Leave me and my comfort zone alone!
Getting out of your comfort zone — but not at any cost
Following any life coach or even management handbook one almost always stumbles across the mantra that you have to leave your comfort zone to achieve great things in life. While there is a certain truth to this I would very much argue that no one feels comfortable walking a tight rope between two skyscrapers night and day.
Granted, doing the same routine over and over again, not being able to change a single thing in one’s life and wondering why there is no visible progress, is not the answer.
The shortcomings of many of the “leave your comfort zone” theories is however that they suggest an endless challenge in life. Of course, you should have ambitions and goals which might not be easily achievable and hence motivate you to get out of bed every morning but it does not mean that you have to fight against windmills just for the sake of the action.
Running constantly in override mode causes stress (the distress not the motivating eustress) which will ultimately trigger our oldest parts of the brain and lead our body to switch to survival stage mode. Our bodies are not used to keep this mode for long — it was originally meant for cavemen to escape great dangers but not for the everyday setup. Hence, if we are set to test our boundaries with new challenges just to leave our comfort zone, the result will be constant high blood pressure, increased adrenalin level and a nervous stomach.
There is an interesting quote saying “Don’t confuse movement with progress!”
I couldn’t agree more.
Many of us watch or read about successful people who struggled in life, were in almost hopeless situations — bankrupt or homeless — and got back on their feet not giving up their dreams and succeeding such as Oprah Winfrey or Steve Harvey.
They are remarkable personas and their way is outstanding and inspiring — but we are talking extremes here. For these people there was no comfort zone left at all they would have had to leave.
In most of our daily lives there are different challenges and decisions to leave our comfort zone but I dare to say that many of them are more like “finally making it to the gym for the first time” or “deciding to quit an annoying job without already having a new one as a backup”.
Don’t get me wrong: yes, these are significant decisions and yes, to follow through you will have to leave your comfort zone but it doesn’t mean that your entire life will turn into a hustle overnight.
Nevertheless, any of these decisions will put us into unknown territory and we will have to prepare ourselves for an eventual bumpy ride.
Our body and our brain have a level of resilience we constantly underestimate because most of us never had to go to the very limit — which is good.
Once we get into a highly critical situation we will experience that level of resilience and we will manage the challenge.
In order to save our mental and physical resources for these “moments of truth” we should however also allow ourselves to stick to certain (dull) routines. For example, driving to and from the workplace we sometimes do not even remember how we got there or what happened along the way. We feel as we have been hypnotized along the way — which is good because the brain had a chance to reduce its activity to a necessary minimum and hence recover and save “energy” for upcoming tasks.
Leaving a routine path is always challenging and exhausting. Misinterpreting the call to leave your comfort zone for any and all actions you do in your daily life will cause a system overload and might even lead to burnout or depression. Only when we find the right balance between challenges and routines we can ensure that stepping out of our comfort zone will ultimately result in a rewarding scenario.
Here are 3 steps out of your comfort zone:
1. Carefully select the most pressing areas in life you’d like to change and pick one at a time
2. Make a plan and envision what will change after you took the step
3. Have someone support you in the first weeks to reduce the risk of giving up too easily
Sometimes you don’t have the chance to select the areas but they come right at your face not leaving you time to prepare for them. In this very moment any advise which involves time for preparation or consideration feels useless.
But: unless you’re not dangling from a rope in 30.000 feet you should still take some time to take a step back and look at the situation from a kind of “outside view”.
This sounds easy and is very hard to do once the famous “s*** hits the fan”, but it is essential to at least consider and weigh between alternatives.
I was confronted with dreadful situations with far reaching implications which hit me right in the face. My adrenalin level was super-high, my brain spun like crazy and I wasn’t able to sit still and concentrate on what was happening. I can definitely say that I was miles away from my comfort zone.
Still, I followed the advise of taking a deep breath and weighing the odds of my next move.
Once you’ve overcome the challenge — chosen or imposed — you will experience a feeling of rest, satisfaction and comfort. Don’t get too cozy or complacent because the next test is just around the corner…
