Welcome to my blog, Harmony Shift. Here I help shift workers live happier, healthier lives. This is achieved through positivity, meditation, exercise, diet, and journaling. I want you to become the best version of yourself with more energy and positivity! Today’s topic is on getting out of your comfort zone. We’ve all been prone to living in our own little world and not rocking the boat too much. But every now and then we need to get out of our comfort zone and live a little. That’s where life begins! Let’s dive in and find out what a comfort zone is, how you can leave it and the reasons why you should.
What is a Comfort Zone?
A comfort zone is the area of your life in which you feel like everything is in the right place, or in Harmony. It’s the behaviors, habits, and even the places you turn to when you’re on autopilot. It’s almost like you’re just going through the motions. It’s a metaphorical place where there’s little risk and a place where you never have to face your fears. And I’m not talking about the fear of clowns or something, I’m talking about maybe public speaking, learning to play a new instrument kind of fear.
Staying in your comfort zone can manifest in a variety of ways. For example, let’s say you go out to eat at the same place each Friday rather than trying that new restaurant across town. Maybe you stay at a stable job rather than striking out to pursue a long-held dream or desire.
Now there’s nothing wrong with having a comfort zone; but to evolve as human beings, we must step out of our comfort zones periodically and challenge ourselves and explore new things. Without leaving our comfort zone to enter this new sort of growth zone, we will remain stagnant in both our personal life and our professional growth (life).
Why Do We Need to Get Out of Our Comfort Zones?
We must leave our comfort zones to live up to our full potential. Disrupting your daily routine and getting out of your comfort zone is important because of a few reasons I have listed below.
- To achieve your dreams: Psychologist Abraham Maslow placed self-actualization at the apex of his hierarchy of needs. He thought becoming the full-fledged version of your unique self is the most important thing you can ever do. To reach your full potential, however, you must leave your mundane and ordinary comfort zone.
- To build confidence: To develop and build self-confidence, you need to challenge yourself. When you take small steps to acquire new skills, you will soon realize there is no difference between the successful people you admire and yourself. Each time you achieve a new goal, you’ll gain a new level of confidence.
- To conquer your fears: When you get to the end of your comfort zone, you’ll have to act with courage. Human beings are hardwired to stay in their comfort zones so, you have to go against your innate biological programming to try new and scary things. But when you do so, you might find out you had nothing to worry about in the first place.
Why It’s Difficult to Step Outside Your Comfort Zone
It’s very easy for people to operate within a fixed mindset. They want to believe things can remain how they are, for better or for worse, often out of fear or they don’t like change. These self-imposed limitations provide a great deal of comfort and predictability, but they don’t allow you to grow as a human being.
It’s interesting that what I have found is setting goals, facing your fear of failure, and getting out of your comfort zone might feel like a threat to your well-being when in reality, doing these things will enable you to maximize your sense of personal fulfillment and allow you to live the life you want to live.
How to Get Out of Your Comfort Zone
Learning to grow takes courage, and a willingness to take risks. Take my 6 steps to get out of your comfort zone:
1. Adopt a growth mindset. Leave behind your fixed mindset about how life is or should be and believe anything is possible. For things to be better than they are now, personal development takes trial and error. Still, it’s the only way to get out of a rut and achieve your full potential.
2. Seek out new challenges. The same path will take you to the same destination, you’ll need to take different routes to achieve different results. Your options and the possibilities to challenge yourself are endless. You could try public speaking for the first time, learn a musical instrument, get a new job, or even go skydiving. As you take on these new challenges, keep in mind the Yerkes–Dodson Law, which states you are capable of performing at your highest level in scenarios that test you or stress you out a little.
3. Set manageable goals. Break down each goal into baby steps. You run the risk of becoming discouraged and overwhelmed if you try to do too much at once. Always remember a single step forward is a one hundred percent improvement over taking zero steps at all!
4. Ask what you want out of life. Define what you are looking for in life. Ask yourself where you want to be in one year, five years, or even ten years. Plot out the skill set necessary to make it to a goal you set in the timeframe you prescribe. Maybe your goals are even simpler.
5. Look for support. Reach out to friends, family members, and coworkers for support on this new challenge of stepping out of your comfort zone. They might be able to offer you new perspectives on how to build confidence. Also, you never know, you might be able to face some of your fears together.
6. Reframe your fears. When you think of your fears as something negative, you’re less likely to want to face them. Instead, try to think of the things that scare you as opportunities. Every time you overcome one of them, you’ll prove to yourself you can do far more than you anticipated. The worst-case scenario you have in your mind is nothing compared to a life spent without ever challenging yourself to become the best version of yourself.
I hope this helps you to get out of your comfort zone and take some risks. This is the only way to grow as a human, a society, and a country. You’re worth it and you need to build the self-confidence, ability and mind-set that you can achieve great things in your life. Not only think about the achievement, but about the ways in which you grew as a person by pushing yourself outside your comfort zone during the process. If you know more about your comfort zone and what it means to step outside of it, it will help you face new goals, projects, and adventures head on. And knowing that a little added stress can actually help you grow, expand your world, and increase your self-confidence will help you become more adaptable and even be open to change as well.
Until next time,
Darren
Harmony Shift 