Leave Your Comfort Zone and Enter Your Growth Zone

Cover photo: Curtis Thornton on Unsplash

I dare myself to do new things every single day, on purpose. Doing any activity that scares me the most emboldens me. However, when I sail on strange tides, I stay near the coast at the beginning. Once accustomed, I go all the way in. 

Allow me to explain the reason behind this.  

Over the course of our lives, we create our comfort zone, a nice place to be, hence the name. Nevertheless, such a haven doesn’t let us grow, explore, nor live the experiences the world offers. 

Every week we go to our schools or to our jobs, doing what we must do. When done, we pamper ourselves with social media, TV series, food, and sleep. 

Although nothing is wrong with any of these activities, it is a cycle. The flow of life slows down when you don’t consider other alternatives. The sails just follow the gusts of wind. 

You might say, “Yes, but if I’m okay, why should I put myself, voluntarily, in discomfort?” Because the drawback of your comfort zone is that it’s invariably shrinking itself, eventually leaving no space even for air and, in the end, suffocating you. Things that were comfortable have become less comfortable. It’s hell with no way out; been there. 

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Take the case of your circle of friends. You hang out with the same people, go to the same places, talk about the same issues, and play the same games. Getting other folks is not your plan. If, for some reason, you start spending less time with your friends, that comfort zone becomes smaller.

Your comfort zone, once a big house with four bedrooms, a living room, and a garden, is now one room and a bathroom – barely enough to live.

In light of that, you need to build other areas to broaden your horizons. By doing something unusual every single day, you see the world differently; you gain more knowledge, meet new people, breathe clean air, smell other scents.  

An efficient approach to advancing is to challenge yourself a bit daily. It is weird at the onset, but you’ll be attuned. Going to the gym and repeating basic routines won’t yield satisfactory results. As with learning another language or a different craft, reading the same pages will not give you extra knowledge. 

“Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new.” Brian Tracy.

3 ways to get to the Growth Zone

As a matter of fact, you don’t have a single comfort zone; you have several. Maybe you choose to escape from one of them, but you’re stuck in others.

To illustrate the point, you could be moving backwards in your social skills but pushing yourself to the limit at the gym. Some areas require more effort. 

Anyhow, for any field, you can follow these three ways to arrive successfully at your growth zone. I have driven on all of them and they all worked for me. 

1- Work more consistently in the area you wish to upgrade.

2- Intensify your efforts.

3- Work for longer periods of time. 

Here’s an example:

Instead of running twice a week, expand to three, making it more demanding aside from increasing the possibilities to add more days in the future. 

As for the second road, increase the intensity from 50% to 70%. This will include some variety.

In the third path, jump from 7 to 10 minutes. 

Any of the three ways helps you boost the level of difficulty of whatever you want to improve from working out to learning anything. But remember that every change must be implemented step by step, baby steps, so to speak. 

The great thing about baby steps is that any minor accomplishment comes with a quick reward, making you notice you are indeed improving. 

Be Aware of the Danger Zone

If leaving the comfort zone is obviously beneficial, why most people don’t leave it? Well, because there’s a place where a myriad have gone and returned defeated – the Danger Zone. 

Visualise a circle as your comfort zone. Outside of it, in a wider circle, is the growth zone. Passing that region, one even bigger appears, the Danger Zone. 

In most cases, people reach that risk territory when they push themselves to the extreme.

It turns out that if you work out in excess, you might injure yourself, or if you work without control, you burn out. That suffering is what many try to avoid as they have already gone through it. Hence, they believe change is painful and dangerous, so they decide to remain in their safe place. 

This results from taking on too much too quickly. The urge to leave their comfort zone as fast as possible made them aim too high and since they couldn’t reach the peak of the Everest, they ended up in failure, frustrated and afraid. They will never try again. 

What’s the Solution?

Rome was not built in one day. 

The best method to be out of your comfort zone, flourish in the growth zone, but avoid the danger one, is by taking small and practical targets. 

Consider this. If a man is sedentary, he shouldn’t, at a single stroke, go to the gym and work out 6 times a week, lifting weights and cardio. That bloke will faint in ten minutes. He crossed to the Danger Zone. 

Conversely, if this man walks a few minutes a day, gently increasing the time, intensity, and frequency, then he’ll be prepared for the next level. No risk here. 

From my view, the best benefit of changing in stages is the creation of sustained instant positive feedback, because every little goal reached appears with a prize. Plus, you give yourself evidence of the outcomes, bringing about more confidence. 

When you get favourable feedback in one area, it spreads to other spaces of your life. Success begets success. 

Treat your Comfort Zone as a Place to Rest and Recover

It’s a temporary shelter, not a permanent residence. 

After feeling overwhelmed due to something demanding, lower the difficulty a bit, and pull back slightly above where your comfort zone was before. Rinse and repeat in any other field.  

Every time you consider an activity as too hard, retract somewhat above the previous point. 

This move allows you to acclimatise yourself to your new normal.  

What you are doing here is in essence challenging yourself wilfully, going back for air when it gets tough. 

The purpose of this article is to prove that after you constantly thrust yourself away from your comfort zone, you perceive the sweetness of living that can only be grasped if and only if you are out of your cocoon.  

Do something daring and scary today. Hit the gym and take a different machine, leaf through a rare book, strike a conversation with a stranger, learn a weird craft – then return to your refuge. But never limit yourself. 

Fresh experiences and actions will make you breathe new air and smell new scents. I’ve experienced it myself. 

“The best things in life are often waiting for you at the exit ramp of your comfort zone.” Karen Salmansohn.