How to take the first step out of your comfort zone

How to take the first step out of your comfort zone

One small step…

When I talk about embracing change and chaos and the transformation of your life, people ask me “But, Chris, how do I take that first step? How do I get started?”  I’m going to talk today about why that can be so hard.

If you want to change something about yourself it means moving away from your current state.

Sometimes this moving away from the current state is easy because the current state causes you pain and stress.  If you have a job that you hate, that gives you no fulfillment, that is populated by people you don’t respect, that is a 2 hour drive in traffic…well, in that case there may be enough pain associated with that current state to make it easy for you to take steps to do something else.

The majority of the time there is not this acute pain. There may be some pain like “Gee, I’m a little overweight, I should do something about that.” But not, “The Doctor told me that if I didn’t lose 100 pounds I’d be dead in 6 months!”  When there is no acute pain you are in that place we call “The Comfort Zone.”

Just because you’re in the comfort zone doesn’t mean you’re entirely comfortable.  It means you have a routine.  This routine is known to you.  This routine is associated with less stress and fear.  That’s why you can’t take that first step out of the comfort zone, because when you do you are trading a known, comfortable, low-stress situation for an unknown other situation.

You might ask me, but Chris, “why would I want to leave my comfortable routine and step into the unknown?”  Very simply it is because when you are in your comfort zone you are not getting the most out of yourself and your life.  It takes a dose of positive stress to bring out the best in us.  Positive stress is a key element of peak performance.

You know this because you can point to times in your life when you really challenged yourself or were challenged by some other or some situation and it drove you to strive, compete and succeed in ways you didn’t think possible.   On the other hand, too much stress for too long will burn you out.

Humans tend to revert to states and situations of low anxiety.  That’s why you need to be the captain of your ship and introduce changes that nudge you out of your comfort zone.  Unless you do something you will revert to a routine – it is human nature.

You may, in your big brain, know this, but are still afraid to diverge from your comfortable routine into a scary unknown.  The magnitude of your fear will be partly determined by your personality type.  I have a large ‘adventure’ need in my personality and would be miserable trapped n a cubicle so it is easier for me to take risks.  I have to balance the trade off of my adventure drive with my need to be secure.

We all have to balance these competing needs in our personalities.  Your need for security may be much bigger than your need for adventure and it’s perfectly ok for you.  When you are trying to decide how to step out of your comfort zone you have to understand your personality drivers so you can rationally balance the trade off between risk and security that your actions will require.

Returning to our original question: How do you take that first step out of your comfort zone?

After you have digested the rational, big brain imperatives for change we just reviewed you can look for small steps out of your comfort zone.  Giant leaps out of your comfort zone are scary.  Find a small step that you can make in the direction of your ultimate change.

Maybe you sit down and write up what your perfect job would be.  Maybe you search for companies within a 20 mile radius of your house on LinkedIn.  Maybe you take just one sugar in your coffee instead of 2 or 3.  Maybe you start with one push up or a 5 minute walk in the fresh air at lunch.

Take some small steps in the direction you want and see if you can stick to them for a month or so.  Don’t beat yourself up for not making big changes out of the comfort zone.  Instead find a way to celebrate the small changes. To reinforce them.

A benefit of the ‘small steps’ strategy is that it makes you build up your ‘change’ muscle incrementally.  With each change, each step outside the boundaries of your routine makes the next step easier.  You can learn how to make the change itself a habit and it becomes one of your life skills.  The negative to this approach is that the changes may not be all that impactful until they pile up.  The pace of change may not have enough magnitude to outrun the inertia of your routine and comfort zone.

Another strategy might be to stop thinking about it and just do it.  Some people do better with taking leaps into the unknown to jump start their changes.  This is the “Burn the canoes” philosophy.  SunTzu said when generals want their troops to fight with urgency; they put their backs up against a river and burn the boats and the cooking pots.  The only way out is forward.

This is a rather precipitous strategy and I think if you were the type of person to leap into the unknown we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.  But, you can isolate select areas of your life and make leaps in those areas.  These shocks to the system can be unpredictable in the initial outcome but one thing is for sure, there will be change, and you will be out of your comfort zone!

Why leave the comfort zone?  It is peaceful, routine and stress free.  Why give that up to tilt at windmills and chase water spouts?  Because you will never know how good you can be, how much you can achieve until you break the terracotta mold that holds you in your routine.  By not braving the change you are sacrificing an infinity of potential futures and adventures and relationships.  You are sacrificing the gift.

However you decide to step out of your comfort zone, once you do, it never stops.  Once you break the bottle your tendency, because you are human, will be to fall back into routine and comfort.  For long term success, achievement and fulfillment you have to reinvent yourself as part of your habit and skill. To reinvent yourself you have to break your old self and that is the innovator’s dilemna.

If you are terrified by this discussion I would suggest that maybe you need to first spend some time on self discovery.  One of the only ways to truly, confidentially navigate continuous change, to be comfortable with the innate chaos in life is to be comfortable with your self.  Once you figure out what is important to you it’s easy to align change and get comfortable with stepping out of your comfort zone.  Because, no matter where you go or what you change, your core self value will be there as your anchor.

Alas, that’s a different topic.

Cheers,