Stretching your Comfort Zone or Adding Undue Stress?

A friend of mine jumped out of an airplane last week.

She’s not the kind of person I would typically tend to think of as one who would do that. As a life coach, she’s always stretching herself but she’s also reserved and lives a relatively simple life.

So, it was intriguing to me that she decided to do this.

I learned from her Facebook page (she documented the entire journey) that this was for a fundraising event for cancer. The event sponsors promoted the event with the tagline “Want to conquer your fears?”

She signed up because she believed the tagline. Doing this would help her conquer her fears. Something like: “If I can do this …. what else is possible for me.”

That got me thinking. Am I someone doomed to live a life of fear because I’m not willing to jump out of an airplane? Is my life somehow resigned to boring and predictable because I am not volunteering to be pushed me out into the wild blue sky at 13,000 feet?

I have many friends who would answer unequivocably ‘yes’ to my rhetorical questions.

And, I can feel bad about that if I want to.

Marketing messages do this all the time. They imply that if you’re not willing to cough up the thousands of dollars for their program - you’re somehow less-than or not willing to commit to yourself and your dreams.

Well, I’m not buying it.

I believe we all have levels of discomfort. What’s uncomfortable for me may not be uncomfortable for you and vice versa. Furthermore, I believe that within what’s uncomfortable for any of us that there are stages. When we stretch by stages we expand our worlds. It’s like stretching yourself out of your comfort zone, and when you do you get a new comfort zone. Do this often enough and you become a whole new person.

But, if you try to leapfrog too many stages at once, it can have the opposite effect. It results in undue anxiety and over-the-top stress. When that happens you’re not only putting yourself in such an out-of-body experience that you’re not even present to the experience at hand, you become reluctant to ever try again.

I watched my friend through her entire skydiving journey. There was never a moment where she looked or said anything like, “yes I’m scared shitless, but I’m weirdly excited too.” It was only ever sheer terror from the moment she said yes — with the one and only thing she was looking forward to, was it being over.

That’s not stretching your comfort zone.

That’s too much too fast.

She did jump. But when they threw the mic at her after she landed and asked her what the best part was, the look on her face said what the words did not (“being here on the ground, being done”).

Yes, she got bragging rights. Yes, it was for a great cause.

But at the end of the day, I’ll take a real stretch out of my comfort zone over a huge leap into anxiety-land any day of the week.