Comfort Zone: Get Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable
This does not mean sit on a chair awkwardly or turn the heat extra high in your room, it means pushing the barriers of your comfort zone. We all get that feeling from time to time. The feeling of ‘should I or shouldn’t I do this?’. We get a feeling of anxiety. Fear kicks in and we become hesitant. It could be to go into an office to ask your boss for a raise or to approach a girl that you have a crush on. We know we want to go for it, but we hesitate because this is something we may have not done before, so we have a fear of not knowing the outcome.
Comfort Zone: Push Yourself To Overcome New Challenges
Instinctively, we like to know the outcome of a situation before we go in to it, because we want to make sure there is no chance of us getting fired or slapped in the face. We want to play it safe, so a lot of us spend time playing around in our comfort zone. We feel comfortable doing the tasks that we know we can do easily, because we have already done them before. There is no growth here, just stagnation and repetition. We are not learning anything.
Comfort Zone: Fight The Fear And Do It Anyway
The key is to fight that fear and when you feel that anxiety kick in, embrace it and do it anyway. If you never did this, you would have never learned to walk, ride a bike or asked that girl for her phone number. It would have seemed too scary and you had never done it before. But you did it anyway. Imagine what else you can do if you embraced that fear every time, pushed your comfort zones and never settled.
Beyond these barriers are yet more barriers and the farther you go and the happier you become. Humans are happier when they are in a state of constant improvement which can not be done without confronting fear and moving out of your comfort zone.
This speech by Steve Jobs illustrates what his philosophy was. He believed that we should not get comfortable and settle for something we are not completely satisfied with but instead he advocates following your dreams and aspirations before its too late.
