If you want to grow and do better in life, you have to step out of your comfort zone. This is one piece of advice that you must have heard several times.
But to step out of your comfort zone, you first have to understand what it means to be in this zone.
Only then can you possibly think of stepping out and embracing what’s outside of it.
So what exactly is your comfort zone?
Everything you have today that makes you feel homely, safe, and secure falls within your comfort zone. This can be your financial state, your physical condition, your social circle, your parenting style, or anything that you have in your current state.
What you don’t have now but you want to achieve in life falls outside of this zone. But to attain them, you have to do something new and different.
This can make you feel uncomfortable but what you’ll have by the end of this experience is something that can make you feel more fulfilled, satisfied, and contended both at a personal and a professional level.
In other words, it can help you create a better version of yourself that you’ve always wanted to become.
So let’s find out how stepping out of your comfort zone can help you do that and why it’s so important.
1. Personal Transformation
It’s said that children are natural learners. Most kids are enthusiastically engaged in learning new things without the fear of failure.
For example, they know that they might hurt themselves by falling off an unbalanced bike. But this doesn’t stop them from trying unless they can successfully balance it off.
But as we grow older, we learn the fear of failure and stop taking risks. So we hold ourselves back from exploring new ideas and experimenting with things that aren’t familiar to us. This narrows down our personalities and limits our growth.
If you don’t want that to happen to you, always try doing things that aren’t in your daily routine. You don’t have to go out of your way and do something extraordinary. Take small steps instead.
For example, if your routine is to wake up in the morning, take a shower, and leave for work, try changing it a bit. You can do that by setting up an early alarm and then going for a run or doing some yoga before you continue doing what you usually do.
You can also make efforts to reconnect with friends and family that you’ve lost touch with. These are small steps that may make you feel uncomfortable in the beginning but can help you transform yourself into a better version of yourself.
2. Professional Growth
Stepping out of your comfort zone can have great benefits at a professional level too. You may be doing great in your career. But unless you try something new, you won’t even know that you’re capable of doing it.
So step up for tasks and projects that you haven’t tried out earlier. Make sure you don’t settle for mediocre results. This will encourage you to venture outside your own familiar world and open up for new learning experiences.
In doing so, you will end up discovering your hidden talents that you never thought you actually have. It’s a great way to improve your skills, discover new talents, boost your creativity, and empower yourself on a professional front.
3. Building Confidence
It feels safer to be in your comfort zone because you know that you’re in a safe environment that doesn’t randomly throw challenges at you.
But the bad news is that by not allowing yourself to be occasionally uncomfortable, you’re only preventing yourself from changing, improving, and growing as an individual.
Pushing yourself to new surroundings teaches you how to adapt to difficult and new environments. It might feel intimidating and scary in the beginning, but by the end of the process, you end up learning many new things that you would never learn by staying in your comfort zone.
For example, say you’re afraid of public speaking. Although it can make you uncomfortable, you can sign up for such an event, just to see how you deal with it. By doing so, you’re pushing yourself to accomplish something new irrespective of how scared or intimidated you are. So there’s no way but to prepare yourself for it.
You may not do great on your first attempt. But after a few times, you’ll realize that you have overcome your fear and mastered public speaking with great confidence.
Stepping out of your comfort zone can be daunting. But it can help you learn how to take risks, overcome boundaries, deal with your fears, discover new skills, and do so much more to make yourself a more confident, strong, and happy individual.