Re-Examine Your Personal and Professional Comfort Zones to See If You Need to Step Out of Them  

You’ve likely heard many times that in order to achieve something, you need to break boundaries and get out of your comfort zone. Is that statement true? And, if so, how far should you push yourself in that pursuit? What is the balance between comfort and lofty achievement? Is it possible to accept comfort in certain areas, but also maintain constant progress toward your goals without feeling painful discomfort?

Absolutely! However, the techniques to achieve this need to be adjusted to your personal lifestyle and, more importantly, to your own sense of self-perception of your comfort zone. So, stop for a moment and think: how comfortable do you feel about your life? Are you now in your comfort zone? Do you feel confident and content about it? The most important part is knowing that if you want to get out of your comfort zone, to aim for a higher goal in a certain aspect in your life, then you first need to understand what your comfort zones are.

In other words, before setting out to achieve an ambitious goal, review every part of your life, and honestly assess how comfortable each part is — without any negative judgment or criticizing — and decide if you’re content with that comfort or you want to push yourself to achieve something greater in that aspect of your life. The problem is that in modern society the word “comfort” has accrued some negative shade of meaning — something like if you’re in your comfort zone, then it means you’re un-adventurous, or even accepting second place. The flip side is that everybody is anxious about having a comfortable life (for positive and negative reasons), but nobody understands what that really means.

So, here are some questions to help examine important aspects in your life, decide how you feel about them, and determine if you even need to fix any of these facets:

Questions:

• • • How do you feel about your relationships with friends and loved ones?
    • How do you feel about your relationships with your family?
    • How do you feel about your body?
    • How do you feel about your career?
    • How do you feel about your social life?
    • What is your attitude to, and relationship with, money?

Then, consider some of these aspects and see how you can build comfort zone around each of them: 

Relationships: If you have relationships with friends or family that are conflict-ridden, either stop fighting and fully accept , or re-build them in the most comfortable way for all parties involved. Do baby steps. Start with yourself. Try to examine the most problematic areas and analyze them from your perspective. Always ask yourself: is that what you really cannot stand, or it is just baggage you have brought from your own background? Relationships are a key element in emotional stability, since they are capable of making us stronger or dragging us down. To use a metaphor: when they launch a space vehicle, what do they build first? Right, a launching pad and infrastructure. That’s what relationships are all about: they are your solid launching-pad and infrastructure. Keep them comfortable, and it will help to switch more energy to whatever you’d like to achieve.

Body:  You don’t have to have a supermodel’s body. The pressure from media, celebrities and the entertainment industry is tremendous, but unrealistic for most. If you feel comfortable about where you are now — great, but if not, dig deeper. If there’s a part of your body that you’d prefer to change, try to fix it – tweak it, through diet, exercise, confidence-building or other means. Start with small changes and the confidence will build.

Career: Feel like you’re not achieving everything you can in your career? Or wondering if you’re even in the right career? Is that really the truth, just your opinion, or simply a reflection of someone’s expectations? What if you feel truly comfortable sitting all day long coding, or doing accounting, while others feel comfortable performing live presentations or leading classes from 9-5?  The key in all of this is to first fix major and then minor discomforts. So, go through this list:

• • • Do you like your job, but the commute is painful? Consider moving closer.
    • Want to have better visibility in the office? Start by updating your corporate profile with a picture — not a random, irrelevant userpic, but a good photo of your face that somehow reflects your personality.
    • Lastly, this may sound inconsequential, but please also check where you wear your badge. Most people have a terrible memory for names. So help them to memorize or restore yours by pinning your badge to your collar, chest pocket, or pull up the lanyard to have the badge closer to your face and be visible

Social Life: Do you really need it all the time? Do you need to push yourself to go to hangouts and parties and conduct small talk with strangers? It’s great to have good chit-chat ability, communication skills are important, but you don’t need to say yes to every social event if you don’t want to. Understand which aspects of your social life you’re most comfortable with and then, occasionally say yes to events you might typically say no to. Use baby steps. It’ll extend your horizons. 

Money: Money does not buy inner comfort. But it is your responsibility to build healthy relationships with your finances.  As with any other relationship, analyze and fix the most complex issues. For example, pay out debts, or save for a rainy day fund. A “baby steps” strategy in this area is also very helpful.

All of this inward thinking and review is for the end purpose of discovering if you’re comfortable about your life and yourself; if you are, that will give more space for achieving your goals and the power for pushing forward. Build your emotional stability, get into your comfort zone and, then, you feel much less fear when you need to step out of it!