Why Your Comfort Zone Is Not Your Friend

Leaving Your Comfort Zone

In a little over a week, I will be doing my first ever talk in French when I speak at TedX Belfort in France in front of 400 people.

Am I nervous about this?

You bet I am. In fact, I am beginning to ask myself why on earth I signed up to do this, especially at a TedX event with such a large audience.

But in my heart, I know why I did it. I wanted to push myself. I wanted to get outside of my comfort zone. To open myself to new experiences and new opportunities.

You can never meet your full potential if you never leave your comfort zone. All of the big goals, ambitions, and achievements that we seek are on outside of it.

But it can be difficult to go after them, because our comfort zone, is ye definition comfortable. We feel safe there. We feel at home. We feel relaxed and we feel comforted by all of this.

Your Comfort Zone Is Not Your Friend

But in truth your comfort zone is not your friend.

You comfort zone is holding you back, and by holding you there it is keeping your dreams and ambitions as prisoners.

You need to see your comfort zone for what it is, a Zone of Mediocrity. A zone that stops you from achieving your true potential, and that maintains the status quo.

I know that leaving your comfort zone can be hard. But you have to push the boundaries you have to look to step outside if you want to improve, to get better and to achieve the things you dream of.

But sometimes we have to jump and that’s why I approached this event because I knew it would challenge me. I knew it would require me to learn new skills, to be a little more vulnerable. But that’s how we improve, that’s how we open the door to new possibilities.

Do What Scares You

You don’t need to take a big leap outside of your comfort zone, you can start small, doing the little things that scare, as Elenor Rosevelt says.

This is something that I do try to do, although I am not always successful. But just trying helps you to challenge the barriers of your comfort zone, and when you do that you will realize that these are not solid. You will learn that you can extend your comfort zone, because one outside it, once you become comfortable with this new skill, or task, you have now expanded your zone.

Sometimes You Just Have To A Big Leap

Whilst it’s good to get do the small things that scare you sometimes you just have to leap. And for me, that was what TedX Belfort was. I speak French at home with my wife and have done for 20 years, so my French is pretty good. And I have been talking about doing something in French for a while, but never got into action.

That’s why I needed that big leap, and why I signed up. To be fair though I did give myself 6 months to prepare, so this leap has had a long run up, but sometimes that’s what we need to do. If we give ourselves enough time to prepare it can help us overcome the fear of leaving the comfort zone.