How I’m going out of my comfort zone

Size of your success is a size of your comfort zone.

Human’s subconscious doesn’t like any change. It naturally tries to keep homeostasis status. That means that your mind will find hundred of reasons to convince you to not change anything.

However, that place outside of our comfort zone is a place where real magic happens. Most of the achievements in your life could have happen because you pushed yourself, or you was pushed to do that change. Maybe you couldn’t work any longer in that company, maybe you couldn’t stay in that relationship, maybe you wanted something so hard.

No matter what is your motivation, if you feel that you cannot stand that situation or pain any longer or you dream about something day and night, if you expect results you have never got before, you have to do things you have never done before.

What I’m doing to step out of my comfort zone?

Blog

So, I started blogging :) You can find it here: kkempin.pl. I also put together few reasons why I’m doing this in that blog post: “Blogowanie — wyjście ze strefy komfortu”. Sorry, it’s in Polish. But to give you an overview: it’s something new that I always wanted to do and besides that I want to interact more with people, teach them. I have 12 years of experience as a programmer so now it’s the time to give something back to the community.

YouTube channel

Something that was probably the toughest think amongst all of the points I’m sharing with you here — my own YouTube channel. It’s a mix of technical screencasts and vlog that I do twice a week (Monday and Friday) just before my morning run.

Running

Before my son was born (almost 3 years ago) I used to jogging occasionally. Every parent knows that first few years with a baby is a challenging time so I had a break. Because of few reasons, I’ve described in my article “Best diet for developers”, I wanted to improve my health. Few weeks before we moved to Malta (I wrote an article about that — “Przeprowadzka na Maltę”), I got back to running again. You can track my progress on Strava — https://www.strava.com/athletes/19677332.

Pushups challenge

I try to do 100 pushups per day from Monday to Friday. I started with 20 pushups 5 times a day. Now I’m doing 33 pushups 3 times a day 💪🏻.

36 hour fast each week

I wasn’t eating good for last two years. Result — highest weight ever and being uncomfortable with myself. I did a lot of things to change it. One of it was to try fasting. There is a lot of benefits of fasting but that is a topic for a next article. I tried Intermittent Fasting (IF) eating 8 hours a day and fasting 16 hours but that didn’t work for me. When I became keto adapted (next point) I noticed that fasting whole day is much better. I don’t feel hunger and I have a lot of energy. Now I have a routine that I fast each Monday for 36 hours. That means my last meal is on Sunday at 7pm, then I do not eat whole Monday (only drinking water and coffee) and my next meal is at 7am on Tuesday.

Keto diet

I’ve described a lot of benefits of ketogenic diet in my article “Best diet for developers”. At the beginning it’s a bit hard and your body needs to adopt to a new fuel — fat. But once you are adapted, you have very stable level of energy for whole day. I’ve been trying many diets in my life, but so far, that diet works for me very good.

Getting up early in the morning

I think that is a key to a personal productivity. When you start doing this, it’s definitely not pleasant and you have to go out of your comfort zone. But from the other hand you have a time for yourself, for reading, writing, doing most important things for yourself. Everybody is sleeping so you are not distracted by emails, phones. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are quite, so you can really commit to the important things. And when everybody else is starting they day, you have that satisfaction that you already did and achieve so many things that day.
I wake up at about 4am from Monday to Friday, but you should not try to follow me immediately. Try to do this in few steps, so your body can get use to it. Try with waking up 30 minutes earlier than usual and spend that time doing most important things for yourself. When you feel that your are comfortable with it — add next 30 minutes. But remember that sleep is very, very important. For me 6 hours is enough, but medical recommendation is 7–8 hours.
Small tip: when you starting doing this: set alarm in your phone and leave that phone away from your bed, then drink two glasses of water before going to bed. In the morning, phone will make you to wake up, and water will make you go to toilet, so there will be a high chance that you will not get back to bed :)

Reading books

I see your face now. Reading books as a way to get out of a comfort zone, you may ask? And I say yes. Before, I was reading only technical books, sometimes nice fantasy story. But I switched my paradigm and attitude to books. I treat them as a source of knowledge and experience of other people. I prefer to learn using that wisdom than learning on my own failures.
Warren Buffett is famous for reading more than 5 hours a day, Bill Gates, one book per week, Mark Cuban and Oprah, 3 hours a day. Do you see any pattern here? Successful people learning new things every single day. But it’s not about reading in general. It’s about reading right books. Bill Gates was once asked which superpower he would like to have. He asked that he would like to have an ability to read books faster.
So I started to read much more and right books. You can find what I already read, reading and what I have in plans in my log about Books.

Podcast (coming soon)

I always wanted to attract and influence people. For a long time I had that hidden thought that I don’t have anything to say. I was thinking that other people have wider knowledge and are more experienced than I. And that’s probably true. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t have my own opinions, knowledge or experience. I’m working on a concept of a new podcast, probably in Polish from beginning. I want to talk about IT in general. About specific technologies, but also about “soft skills”, marketing, business and personal development. Stay tuned …

Moving to Malta

Actually I should start with that point. My stepping out of a comfort zone begun with that one dream — moving for a longer period of time to Malta. We went to Malta a year before and loved that small island. After coming back to Poland I started thinking about going back. I had a lots of doubts and that was a lot of topics to organize. But finally we did it :)
I wrote an article about my feelings, observations and funny situations about moving to Malta — “Przeprowadzka na Maltę”.

Started meditation

Starting with meditation was not easy in my case. I always thought that this is something about yoga, spirituality and other boring stuff. When I started listening to the podcasts about personal development and business, I’ve noticed that a lot of very successful people practicing this. I wasn’t sure why, so I decided to try. After small research, I downloaded Headspace app and just started. I was surprised how powerful tool that is. I’m still new and discovering that world. I’m trying to meditate 5 times a week for 10 minutes with that app. It gives me that feeling of peace and I’m discovering my feelings trying to observe them and be aware of how my mind works.

Cold showers

There is a lot of benefits of cold showers, like building strong power, reducing stress, improving skin and hair, stimulate weight loss and increasing testosterone. I started doing this few weeks ago and I have to say that the feeling after is really amazing! You have to convince yourself to do this but after you have that satisfaction.

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