Embrace Failure to Expand Your Comfort Zone

It’s the national Ballroom & Latin dance finals in Blackpool. 2000 pairs of eyes in the audience and those of the professional judges watch us intently as my partner and I make our way onto the dance floor for our solo showcase. We are in the final, one of the top 6 couples in the UK and it’s our opportunity to show everybody we deserve to be there. The music starts, I lock eyes on a member of the audience, and we begin to dance.

Rewind years earlier and I struggled to even be in the audience. You see I suffer from Enochlophobia, a fear of crowds. I also used to suffer from Atychiphobia, a very common fear of failing. Not the screaming, rocking back and forth type of phobias, but feelings of deep unease and stress that would force me to avoid those situations. The prospect of combining the two and failing in front of a crowd would invoke a sense of fear that made that scenario more likely.

So how did I go from avoiding crowds to revelling in the sole attention of one? The simple answer is I failed. I failed a lot. I’d be on the dance floor, hundreds of hours of training and repetition forgotten, out there, with everybody watching.

The interesting thing about failure is that I got better at it. At first it was crushing, as I learnt to accept failure as part of life, I became less afraid of it. I learnt to laugh it off, to not hold myself to such a high standard. Competition by competition I grew more resilient to it.

Judith Bardwick defined the comfort zone it in her book ‘Danger in the Comfort Zone’ as:

“The comfort zone is a behavioural state within which a person operates in an anxiety-neutral condition, using a limited set of behaviours to deliver a steady level of performance, usually without a sense of risk.”

Judith Bardwick

In other words, we feel most comfortable doing what we have always done because there is no sense of risk. That risk could be physical or psychological, such as a blow to self-esteem. In part its comfortable because it’s a predictable outcome. When I do this particular action, I get this particular result. It’s why many of us head to our favourite branded restaurant when in a new city. It’s a safe choice.

All that is fine, if we are happy and performing at the level we want to. Why change a winning formula? But what if we aren’t? How do we expand our comfort zone to achieve self-actualisation?

To expand our comfort zone, we must push at its boundaries with a series of challenges that force them to stretch and grow. Expanding our comfort zone is about doing. By doing we force new connections between actions and predictable outcomes. It’s a conscious decision to grow our own experience.

The more we do, the more we will fail. We need to learn to embrace that failure because working through those setbacks and learning from that process is what builds our mental resilience. It’s also helpful to remember that in the absence of an external measure such as budget or time we never really fail until we choose to quit. Thomas Edison, often cited as the inventor of the modern lightbulb famously once said:

“I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have

succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have

eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will

work.”

Thomas Edison

It’s also important to understand that our comfort zone is elastic, without regular challenge it can contract. Have you ever gone to do something you used to do years earlier and suddenly realised you have ‘lost your bottle’? This is a result of failing to continually push at the boundaries of your comfort zone.

We must keep going to keep growing. As I became less afraid of failing, I found myself taking on new challenges in work. At first it was baby steps, putting myself out there in meetings, bringing my ideas, trying new things. Then I was presenting at meetings, then in front of large groups. I took on more responsibility within projects and when the opportunity came, I applied for a leadership role responsible for 27 members of staff.

It would have been easier to maintain the status quo, but I chose to reshape that team, splitting it into two technology areas and fundamentally changing how we engaged with the rest of the business. It felt uncomfortable but proved the right thing to do. It wasn’t all plain sailing. Some actions I could have executed with more finesse and that’s OK, I learnt from that.

Sometimes that discomfort you feel is simply alerting you to risk. You need to acknowledge it, but then rationalise it. What is the real risk here? Can I undo that action or reverse that decision if it proves to be wrong? What is the cost and does the potential benefit outweigh it?

We all need to acknowledge that we are very unlikely to reach the optimal solution in work without a little trial and error. Developers do that everyday with lines of code that never make it into the final edit. The only difference is some choices are like putting your unpublished code out there for the world to see.

There are benefits in publicising failures. On one team I worked in we operated a voluntary ‘Rubber Chicken Leader board’. When a participant was found to have made a mistake worthy of a Rubber Chicken, they would proudly wear it on their monitor for the day. The impact of this was that everybody would ask what the team member had done. Suddenly, the whole team was learning through each other’s mistakes. We embraced failure and through understanding everybody makes mistakes, we allowed ourselves to take the risk of making one in trying something new.

Perhaps you are afraid to take the next step in your career, to learn a new skill or put yourself forward because of a fear of failing. If you don’t do anything about those you are less likely to fail, but you will remain trapped in your comfort zone and not reach your full potential.

My advice is if you want to do something, don’t let fear hold you back. Learn that skill, go for that promotion or ask that person you have admired from afar out for a drink. A life lived in fear is a life half lived.