If you’ve ever found yourself approaching your day in a fairly routine fashion where
your behavior and activities allow you to keep stress at bay, there is a sense of control
and safety that you tend to lean into. This space that you operate in may be helpful at
times to keep you in an anxiety free state.
Regardless of what this actually looks like in your case, getting trapped in your comfort
zone usually means that you stop advancing, at first professionally, and then personally,
because of your aversion to doing new things. But, what happens when you wake up one day
and realize that you aren’t making the real personal growth that you feel you need to.
I’ve been meaning to make this video for a while because there have been phases in
my life where I’ve felt deeply unfulfilled because I wasn’t growing in the way that
I wanted to. I wasn’t able to face the fact that in order to find your purpose, you have
to expose yourself to challenges that you can learn from and become better at dealing
with. This manifests itself on a micro level with you first saying no to new possibilities
instead of walking through the door that a new opportunity presents. On a macro level,
this can be a deep rooted dissatisfaction with your life due to unrealized potential
and purpose. One of the things I have done recently is attempt to take cold showers more
frequently because the idea of it makes me uncomfortable, but the more I seek out this
discomfort, the more I develop a resilience to it. It’s not fun. You don’t have to
do it. But attempting to step out of your comfort zone is necessary so that you can
reach your zone of growth in order to become the person that you want to be.
Now, before you can reach your growth zone, there are a few other steps that are worth
highlighting.
Once you have made the decision to leave your comfort zone, you will stumble upon a decent
amount of uncertainty and fear. This is called the Fear Zone. In the Fear Zone, you will
find it challenging to maintain your self-confidence. You tend to listen to outside opinions a lot
more than you normally do and they can weigh you down if they’re not always positive.
It might even be tempting for you to find excuses and tell yourself that whatever you’re
doing is not worth the effort. But it is at this point where you have to realize more
than ever, that failure and doubt will serve as your stepping stones to success.
The Fear Zone is the hardest part and can last for a little while, but with some perseverance,
you will be able to make it through it and move on to The Learning Zone. The Learning
Zone is where you begin to develop a greater awareness of the opportunities around you.
You start to understand that challenges are part of the process and the skills that you
are acquiring will make you better equipped to deal with them. This is the part where
you start to gain clarity on whether the changes that you are making have brought you a greater
sense of fulfilment. As you progress through The Learning Zone, your old fears and concerns
about leaving the comfort zone start to wither away because your comfort zone has now been
expanded.
By continuing to push through challenges and developing newer skills that previously seemed
daunting to you, you ultimately approach the Growth Zone. You will know that you have reached
the Growth Zone once you’ve conquered the objectives that you set out for yourself.
This will be reflected in a newfound self-confidence with regard to what you can achieve when you
step out of your comfort zone and set out to achieve goals that initially daunted you.
Trying new things is difficult. If it weren’t, breaking out of your comfort zone would be
easy and we’d do it all the time. The best part about all of this is that when you see
the progress that you are making in one aspect of your life because you sought out a little
bit of stress and productive discomfort, you may become more open to pushing yourself in
other areas that you may want to improve as well.
The relationship between stress and the comfort zone can be traced back to a 1908 model called
the Yerkes-Dodson Law which explains that in order to maximize performance, we need
a state of relative anxiety - a space where our stress levels are slightly higher than
normal. This space is called Optimal Anxiety, which exists just outside the comfort zone.
If we experience too much anxiety, then we are too stressed to be productive and our
performance drops sharply. Look, one of the things that is stressing me out is I haven’t
been able to get a haircut in far too long because everything is closed and having a
camera on me with my hair like this is giving me anxiety like you can’t even imagine but
Make no mistake that staying in your comfort zone can provide you with the consistent,
steady performance that you’ve been experiencing for some time, but exposing yourself to newer
challenges can be the catalyst for growth that you never knew you needed. So try to
be comfortable with seeking discomfort because that may end up being the secret to the growth
that you’ve always wanted for yourself.
If you liked this video, drop a like below and share it with somebody who you think is
kind of stuck in that comfort zone and needs to get out or somebody who might just find
this helpful. Thank you so much for watching. My name is Vihan Chelliah. I’ll see you
next week.