Success begins at the end of your comfort zone
By TRISOFT team
We all enjoy comfort. Whether it’s our home, our city, our work, our daily routines, comfort will lure us in and we seem to be bound to move towards it like a moth to a flame. And the trickiest part is that it’s hard to fight it since it’s, well, so… comfortable. But comfort can be indeed dangerous, some might consider it even as an insidious enemy; so if you feel like it’s too easy and just a bit of a slack, it’s time to shake things up and escape your comfort zone. The goal is to enter the ’strenght zone’, where you embrace challenges, you take risks and achieve extraordinary life experience and, why not, success.
Take the risk
So when you feel like boredom and quiet have taken over your life, it’s time to turn to the best antidote there is and that is taking risks. It’s true that sticking to what you are already familiar with feels simple and safe, but you know what they say — nothing ventured, nothing gained. Without risks there is no reward and you know what we mean if you’ve ever felt like your efforts have no echo. Wondering what could have been, who you could have become if only… may easily turn into an inner struggle that you won’t know how to fight anymore. Leaving your comfort zone behind will wipe away all regrets and false moments of happiness and it will give you a more fulfilling sense of accomplishment.
Shake things up
What you can do at first is analyze yourself, be honest and identify what is causing your unhappiness, which of your activities have become routine and why, and once you know which is which you can start shaking things up. It doesn’t have to be big steps, just start with going somewhere new, talk to someone you’ve never talked to, eat something you’ve never tried. Small steps like these will give you a taste of the adventures you can embark upon if you stretch far enough. You will rapidly become addicted to the rush and will wish for more moments of newness, thus stepping out of your comfort zone for good.
In our experience, it seems that the toughest part about giving up the comfort zone is taking the first step, but once you’ve done that you will discover all the wonderful things that come with it. Here are a few:
1. You can discover you know more that you think
There was once a Math teacher who, after years and years of only dealing with numbers, started writing poetry. He enjoyed it very much and he was really good at it. Thus, it became liberating. For as long as you do what you’ve learnt to do and what you’re best at, your success is theoretically guaranteed and your skills are perfected to the point where you can feel like you have nothingmore to learn. However, if you gain a little perspective, you will see that exercising just one muscle isn’t going to make you strong overall. Moreover, you could lose balance at some point. Since you’ve been ignoring all your other strengths and abilities, you run the risk to let pass some great opportunities. So take a moment to think about what you could do more, how you could vary your professional activities and find new areas of expertise. You might discover you know more than you think.
2. You can find new passions
One thing is certain when you dive deep into your routine — you never know what you could have done better if you don’t try it. You never know what new rush could arise from just trying something new and what kind of excitement you would feel if you let go of your comfort zone and be more creative in your work. Listen to you inner you, trust your instincts and follow the call for feeling and believing. Who knows what new passions you could end up discovering if only you dare trying…
3. You can rediscover your daily activities
Or even fall back in love with your old job, who knows?! :) When you give yourself the chance to experiment new areas in your professional life, you might also rediscover what you loved about your previous activities and to some degree this revelations can help you grow and improve your skills and knowledge. You might find new, shiny sides in your old, rusty activities.
4. You will grow personally and professionally
Stepping out of your comfort zone is intimidating, but once you’ve done it you will see that the positives outweigh the negatives. When you shake up the routine and monotony you will get a fresh, brand new perspective on your job and personal life as well. And from the point of view of a business owner, we have concluded that people who have had experience in various areas are a bit more interesting than those who have done the same job for years. The explanation is simple — one who has tried more than one thing professionally is likely to adapt more easily to any new challenge and to a different environment as well. So playing it safe is not always the winning card.
Once we’ve acknowledged the benefits of leaving our comfort zone for good, how do we actually get started? Let’s find a few tips on this one too.
1. Acknowledge what lies outside of your comfort zone
Maybe the first thing you could do is look closely at your daily activities and imagine what you would do if you had total freedom. You could just picture it like a circle inside of which lie all the usual things you do and then outside the circle you can draw all the challenges you want to take. This way you will not only identify your discomforts more clearly, but also your comforts. You will end up knowing eventually what are the things worth doing and what are the potential disappointments.
2. Get comfortable with discomfort
About your discomforts — they might start to become less and less threatening with each of your attempts to widen the circle a little more. Let’s say you are not very comfortable with speaking in public. Well, if you expose yourself to longer and longer sessions of public talks, stretching just a bit more every time, you might find that you can overcome even this dreadful fear. If you do it long enough and practice often enough, nothing will be as difficult as it used to be.
3. Accept mistakes as ways to learn
The fear of failing is one of the most common in our professional and personal lives. So bad we fear not succeeding to do what we had planned that we would even rather back off and do nothing at all. But our dreams won’t wait for us to buckle up forever — there is indeed a good time to do some things. So you might as well start perceiving failure as a teacher. Think about what you’ve learned from each experience, think about how those lessons can help you become a better professional, a better person.
4. Find the fun in the game
Just like we teach our kids to like studying by considering it just a form of play, we can start seeing the process of running away from our comfort zone fun and enjoyable. So try to find something pleasurable in the discovery of new stuff and newer things about yourselves. You might be surprised of how unaware you used to be of your possibilities.
Conclusion
Indeed there is no room for adventure and excitement in your comfort zone, and as much as you wish it to be an ideal place, in the end, it is not about comfort, but about fear. You need to break the chains and release your inner courage, or else you will sooner or later become overwhelmed and trapped by boredom and a lesser version of yourself.
At TRISOFT, we too realized that for a long time we have been following the path of comfort, the one that told us we needed to do that or that, and to be some way or another. However, these ‘rules’ we had made for ourselves did only but fence us in and away from our most important goals. So we’ve started shaking things up and not only did our business become more exciting, but we’ve also built more confidence and improved our luck. So World, here we come! :)
