Comfort Zone to Growth Zone
“You have calibrated life when most of what you fear has the titillating prospect of adventure.” Nassim Taleb (author of “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder")
Recently, I watched a video on you tube by a young woman about getting out of your comfort zone and how she herself was doing this in her own life. I thought it was such a useful topic to cover as it is one with which we are all confronted.
Several years ago, I gave a talk at the Toastmasters’ group I belonged to about fear. I was very surprised when afterwards several people came to me and confided their own dealings with this universal phenomenon. Most of us try to cover up the fact that we ever experience it. (By the way, Toastmasters is a great way to step out of your comfort zone with public speaking, if this is an issue for you.)
Everybody has their comfort zone. Habitual repetition of activities and lifestyle create this as well as what you will and will not allow yourself to experience. The trouble with comfort zones is that after a while, they become stifling. They create boredom; they lead to stasis. Stepping out of our comfort zone and challenging ourselves to new experiences contributes to growth - growth in abilities, growth in our sense of achievement, growth in our esteem of ourselves. Stepping out of your comfort zone, particularly if you make a habit of it, leads to an increase in size of that zone. It equips you to handle change and ambiguity more easily.
In the video, the young woman gives many examples of ways she has confronted her fears and the graduated steps she has taken to deal with such issues as doing activities on her own, and that is one very powerful way of creating these kinds of changes that gives immediate feedback.
What if though you feel unable to take small steps to do something that you would feel good about if you ’conquered’ it? I once helped a woman with hypnotherapy who had failed her driving test many times. She felt she needed to be able to drive because she was now on her own and felt her life would be enhanced if she could get around more easily. The issue wasn’t the taking of the test in this instance but rather that she was scared of driving generally and particularly the prospect of doing so on her own. In the course of treatment, we discovered a traumatic incident that involved a car. Once we had cleared that up, she passed her test easily. The fear had been swirling around in the background trying to keep her from having a similar experience again.
Just recently I worked with a young woman who would shortly be giving a presentation she felt anxious about. In the course of the sessions, it emerged that there were several less than helpful experiences she had had at school and university that were feeding this, which we were able to neutralise.
Sometimes, we need help to step out of our comfort zones and hypnotherapy is able to use a range of tools to help you do just that. We can harness suitable resources. You have in fact stepped out of your comfort zone many times in your life, for example when you started a new job. We can harness the aptitudes you demonstrated in those experiences and bring those resources where they are now needed. I can teach you how to mentally rehearse doing the thing you want to do so that it feels good. And of course, old events that gave you a message to be wary about taking ’chances’ (or should we call that ‘opportunities’)can be worked with to take the negative charge out of them.
Abraham Maslow, famous for his hierarchy of needs, said “what a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualisation.” Don’t let some fear that is too overwhelming for the small steps approach hold you back any longer.