The number one thing preventing you from having the things you want is yourself.
You’ve likely heard people saying you should get out of your comfort zone hundreds of times, from many different teachers over the years. It’s not new information.
“Get out of your comfort zone!”
“Get uncomfortable!”
“Be ready to do anything for what you want!”
“You have to make sacrifices!”
The funny thing is, we underestimate the power of comfort to our lizard-brains. We usually trick ourselves that we are venturing out when we are not.
Here’s the kicker: if you feel comfortable doing it, you’re not doing it. You’re still in your comfort zone.
Intuition vs fear.
Have you ever had something come across your path that you’ve been wanting for a while? And instead of being excited, you get scared? You say, “Oh, but this isn’t a good time for me,” or “I need to save up money first,” or “I’m not ready to make that leap right now?” Or something similar?
Girl, know the difference between your fears and your intuition in these moments. They wear the same costume, even have the same voice, but they are vastly different. Most importantly, they work for vastly different masters.
Your lizard-brain likes to keep you safe and comfortable. It loves the familiar, and hates the unfamiliar. This is where many of your fears originate. Your intuition, however, knows what’s best for you, regardless of your comfort level. It’s your higher, wiser self.
What are you resistant to?
If you’re reading this, chances are you have come across these feelings. Maybe you’ve decided to start a fitness program, quit drinking or start a blog. Maybe all at once! (Not a bad idea for a blog, actually!) Fitness is by nature uncomfortable, pushing you to the point of what we call “failure.” Starting a blog means you’re putting yourself out there, open to criticism. And as for quitting drinking, like any addiction, it milks that comfort zone for allllll its worth. It pitches a tent and stays. Better yet, it builds a home, then a street, then a whole community within that comfort zone. Then it runs for office and gains enough power until you are convinced that the comfort zone and the addiction are one and the same.
(SPOILER ALERT: They’re not. In fact, the comfort zone and the addiction couldn’t be further apart. But that is the power of addiction.)
If this is the case, by the way, please check out my own posts on drinking here and here.
We often are resistant to the things we want the most.
The things we want the most define us. Even if it’s a secret desire, we’ll hold ourselves in that vision as the ultimate version of ourselves. Simultaneously, every moment we aren’t that person, we pile shame on ourselves.
Hold on there, bucko. Don’t do away with the comfort zone altogether.
Let me just stop right here and make note: the comfort zone is a beautiful, wonderful place. We come from the comfort zone, safe in our mother’s arms. It’s what makes us feel safe after we’ve had a bad day, whether from sources trivial or profound. It’s the model by which we define a lot of good things in our lives. For instance, Christmas, watching Netflix in bed, and hot cocoa are all firmly and happily inside my personal comfort zone.
But you don’t grow inside your comfort zone. It’s the land of the familiar. Like you strive for a healthy balance between being at home and venturing outside, you need a balance. Yin and yang and all that.
“I want it to happen when I’m ready for it.”
So, I had this thing just happen to me.
I have been trying to get into this class for months now. I had to apply, which involved an audition, then an orientation in person and a payment to join the institution to even be eligible to take classes. This one class comes around once a month, and it fills up in 60 seconds.
Yes, 60 seconds.
The school told me this would happen, but also, I’ve come across this in practice twice now. I’m on the waiting list for the class, and the moment the email comes in, I go to the site, log on, and…it’s sold out. Within one minute from when that email came into my inbox.
So when I got an email today saying new classes were opening up, I said, “Oh OK, let’s try!” It took a while to log on, so I thought, “Wow, I’m NEVER getting in now!”
But the button was actually active. I could add it to my cart. My first thought was, “Well, that’s nice, but I can’t do this. It’s in two weeks!” But then I realized how advantageous the schedule was for me. It overlapped days I was already taking off, and I had nothing major scheduled.
So I went back and tried adding that class into my cart. It still let me do it! I emailed my husband, “Should I do it???!!!” I wasn’t thinking, “he will help me decide.” I was thinking, “This will stall me some time so the class will fill up and I don’t have to decide.
Of course, my husband says “Yes!!!!” and then I think, “But I don’t have the money right now.” I then remembered I was expecting a check in the mail for a freelance gig for almost this exact amount.
Then I thought, “Well, I’ve been so busy, and I was really looking forward to relaxing that weekend, and…”
Girl. Stop. Just STAAAHHHP.
Recognize your self-sabotage.
Do you see what I was doing? I was sabotaging myself. I had an opportunity handed to me and I was not open to receiving it. It’s like that parable where some guy is in a flood and he’s on top of a roof. Someone comes by in a rowboat to save him, and he rejects the help and says he’s praying to God, and that God will save him. So another comes by in a motorboat, and he says the same thing, and then a helicopter, and he says the same thing. So he drowns. When he meets God in heaven, he asks him why he didn’t save him, and God says, “I sent you a rowboat, a motorboat and a helicopter! What more did you want?”
I was finally able to zone in on whether it was my fear or my intuition. When I thought about the reasons I had for delaying action, they were all variations of “I don’t feel this is convenient.” But what is convenient? In my life right now, this couldn’t be happening at a more convenient time, with more convenient means. That is, unless I won the lottery, inherited a million dollars or found buried treasure.
You can always imagine a more convenient time to act. If most of your circumstances are present, don’t wait.
Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Because it’s all imaginary anyway.
I still feel anxious about this, by the way. I know it’s the right thing, but I do feel a little bit flung outside of where I want to be. And then I remember, oh, right. THAT’s the “comfort zone” everyone talks about. It literally feels like it’s a place, and I’m not in it. But all I have to do is relax, get present and realize that my right now is exactly the same. The comfort zone is an imaginary place made up of expectations and remembrances. In other words, everything that is not right now.
It’s easy to struggle with this. We are taught as children, as people living in the right now, to think of the future, to plan, and to know the past. We learn to override our love of play with other things—things our authority figures tell us are important: studies, chores, preparation, and so on. This isn’t a bad thing, of course—we do need to learn these things to be functioning adults. However, it means that we have a tendency to clasp on to security, or the hope of security, rather than our own happiness.
That security is just a comfort zone. And it’s not a very good one—anyone who’s been laid off knows that. Security is an illusion, and it can be gone in a moment.
Don’t invest in the feeling of security.
That isn’t to say you shouldn’t bother investing in actual security. It just means you shouldn’t sacrifice everything for the sake of a feeling of security. And keep it in perspective.
Know the difference between tangible security and the illusion of it, with the understanding that even then, nothing is tangible. Keeping a job you hate and abiding by its rules above your own interests is usually in the interests of the illusion of security. Doing away with a mid-day $6 latte to save a little? Actual security. Quitting smoking, thereby saving thousands of dollars and maybe your life? Actual security.
Carve your own destiny. Because otherwise, destiny will carve you.
On top of the resistance to making the changes we want in life, there’s also a resistance to making a decision about it. This is what I was doing when I kept stalling, hoping the class would fill up. We do it when someone asks us for help on the streets and we pretend we don’t hear them. We do it when we “forget” to respond to emails with possibly exciting opportunities.
Don’t be afraid of making decisions. The only reason you’re afraid is because you’re afraid of failure, and if you make a decision and it fails, it’s your fault. If you don’t make a decision, you won’t fail or succeed. You’ll still be in your comfort zone, and your successes will be in another place—a place of “if only” and “I could have done” or “maybe someday.”
Every day, a new lesson. And when the lessons run out, we learn them over again.
When this happened to me, I knew I was staring straight in the face of my own fears. I could see the stark difference between what I say I want to do and what I actually do.
No matter how much work we do on ourselves or how open we try to be, we always have these old patterns to work though.
And that’s okay. It’s funny, actually, and it’s a blessing in disguise. Sometimes these old lessons come back at us and we say, “Oh yeah, I know that. I went over that years ago,” and it comes back, and it comes back again. We say, “What are you still doing here?”
Thinking you’ve learned a lesson and don’t need to revisit it? That’s another resistance. That’s another element of your comfort zone. It’s natural to think that way, but life and its lessons aren’t things to check off a list. They come back. Life is cyclical, not linear.
Don’t make a big deal out of it. Just laugh, and say, “Hello, old friend.” And then take a deep breath, and lean in to your future.
Lean in.
This has been my motto lately: Lean in. Life doesn’t come in bite-sized pieces; it comes in tidal waves or in a desert. Don’t resist the tidal wave any more than you have to. Make sure you have good boundaries in place, and you can say “no” to those things that you don’t need right now. But don’t say “no” for dumb reasons. You know what the dumb reasons are. Don’t do that.
By the way, not wanting to do something that provides you no benefits is not a dumb reason. Saying no to a client that doesn’t pay on time and provides endless stress is not a dumb reason. Saying you’re busy when an old but toxic friend wants to stay with you isn’t a dumb reason. Turning down a gig you feel holds you back isn’t a dumb reason.
But when a friend wants to spend time with you and you’ve gotten into a comfortable rhythm with Netflix and your cat? Dumb reason. When you get an interview for a job that sounds fantastic but you’d have to skip out on your current terrible job? Dumb reason.
You get the picture. It takes intuition to learn the difference, and you might not get it right all the time. That’s also okay. It will help you next time. Keep learning.
Great. You still haven’t told me HOW.
There’s no easy answer to how to get out of your comfort zone. The thing is, like I said before, if you’re feeling comfortable, you’re still in there. I don’t have a one-size-fits-all “hack” for this.
You’ll still need to feel uncomfortable, which is, um…uncomfortable, but you can at least get accustomed that feeling, which is different. Here are some tools I’ve found that help, and if you know of any, please comment below:
Practice.
The biggest thing is to recognize your own patterns of resistance, develop your intuition, and practice. Start small and build up.
There’s a great podcast episode of You Are Not That Smart called Overcoming our irrational and sometimes crippling fear of rejection with Jia Jiang. Jiang wrote a book, in which he talks about how he set out to get rejected for 100 days straight. He wanted to become immune to rejection. In the end, he found out that the biggest rejection comes from ourselves, because we never bother to ask. When he asked for these crazy things, expecting rejection, he got many more yes’s than he ever expected.
Trick your brain.
Marisa Peer is a therapist whose videos on Youtube are some of the most inspiring out there. Check out this one and this one especially. One of her main points is how the brain loves the familiar and hates the unfamiliar. A simple way to bypass this is by telling yourself that you love things you actually hate.
Stay present and balanced.
By keeping yourself present, you are much more able to assess the present situation calmly and rationally. You’re also more in touch with your intuition. Meditation is a great practice for this. Building up a daily practice primes your brain for the rest of the day when such challenges pop up. There are other ways to get present, of course: walks in nature, yoga, exercise (hellooooo!), appreciating art, playing with children, and so on.
To stay balanced, keep a good work-life balance, eat well, stay healthy, see friends, family and loved ones, and treat yourself well. That way, when challenges of any type come up, you’ll be better equipped to understand and handle them.
Visualization.
There’s a fantastic book called The Tools, in which Dr. Phil Stutz outlines one tool I find immensely helpful in dealing with discomfort. It’s called The Reversal of Desire, and it involves imagining the issue as a cloud in front of you, and shouting “Bring it On!” to the pain cloud. I know, it sounds silly, but it’s helpful and it works. You can get the book here, or read about this tool, and other tools, here on The Tools website.
Use the 5-second rule.
Mel Robbins came up with this wonderful and almost stupidly simple rule: count to 5 and just do it. Go, “5-4-3-2-1.”
Don’t take my word for it. I first saw this on a video on YouTube here, but there are several videos of her talking about it, including a more condensed one here. If reading is your thing, read about it on her website, but I strongly suggest watching her. She’s a joy to listen to—matter-of-fact, down-to-earth and inspiring.
Discomfort is necessary for growth.
Discomfort is necessary for growth. Literally. Think of exercise, especially building muscle. In order to build the muscles, you must push them beyond the comfort zone, to the point that they actually break down. Once the workout is over, the muscle rebuilds, hopefully a little bit stronger, maybe bigger (if that’s what you’re after).
This is an apt analogy for all of life. You won’t get a better job if you don’t put yourself out there. You’ll never meet your ideal partner if you don’t try to meet people. All of this is and can be uncomfortable, but the flip side of that is excitement. It’s exciting to take a risk, even if it doesn’t turn out the way you thought it would. Thrill and discomfort are two sides of the same coin.
But be good to yourself, too.
Know your boundaries, and don’t do something if you don’t feel excited about it. Some people believe any action is better than no action; I disagree. Don’t force yourself to do something you really don’t feel good about or ready for. And don’t let anyone else force you into something you’re not ready for. It can be a fine line, but as I mention above, know the difference between fear and intuition.
If you subscribe to the Law of Attraction (I do), you also know that action without inspiration is pointless. Get your desires in line, get the resistance out of the way, and then you’ll feel inspired to act at some point. Inspired action can move mountains.
If you’re not ready to take action in exactly the direction you want, take some action that can inspire you or is in a similar direction. For instance, if you want to act but are afraid to audition, maybe make a point to take a class, see more theatre and film, or just buy or rent an acting book. Take a dance class, or something in the realm of performance. Talk to someone in the business and ask them questions about their acting career.
You’ll never change your life if you keep doing the same things. Know that success and personal fulfillment are best prized after taking personal risks.