4 Tips For Leaving Your Comfort Zone
Photo by Sage Friedman on Unsplash
Have you ever found yourself stuck in the same routine, where your days, weeks, months, or even years may start to look similar? That could be because you’ve found yourself stuck in your comfort zone. Our comfort zones are warm, cozy, familiar, and for lack of a better word, comforting. They can look like anything from a role we’ve had for a long time, a routine we’ve fallen into, or an activity we consistently do. And while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to feel comfortable, comfort zones can lack one major thing: growth.
At the centre of most comfort zones, you’ll typically find repeated behaviours or actions, which allows your brain to autofill what is happening next. This could look like waking up at the same time every day, eating the same breakfast, and taking the same route to the same job you’ve held for decades. It makes your days predictable, which for many people, aids in a sense of stability. However, our comfort zones typically lack when it comes to trying new things. It can keep us from wanting to change our jobs, stop us from trying new foods or prevent us from trying a new hobby.
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Sometimes, to get the things we want out of life, we need to do the things that scare us, the things that challenge us, or the things we don’t want to do. For example, if you’re wanting to embark on a new fitness journey, you may need to start waking up earlier, eating new food, or moving your body in new ways. If you’re wanting to change your career path, you may need to speak with a career counsellor, attend networking events, or further your education.
Whatever you desire, changing up an area of your life typically involves leaving your comfort zone. Here are four tips for doing so.
4 Tips For Leaving Your Comfort Zone
1. Establish Your Goals
Before you figure out what you need to do, you first need to determine what your goals are. Get as specific as possible. Are you looking to lose a specific amount of weight? Are you wanting to make a certain amount of money? Are you wanting to make new friends? Are you wanting to stop drinking? These are things you need to get clear about. Only after you've decided what you want can you figure out what you need to do to get there.
2. Reevaluate Your Social Spaces
The people you spend your time with influence your thoughts, opinions, goals, values, and social norms. Take some time to evaluate who you spend time with, how you spend your time with them, and how you feel when you leave. Do they align with your values and goals? Are they positively or negatively impacting you? Do they encourage you to feel your best? Do they push you to do better? Do they encourage you to settle?
If the people in your life don’t align with your values, or actively contribute to your negative habits, you have a couple of options:
You can set limits around your relationships: how often you see them, where you see them, what you do together, etc.
You can speak with them about your goals: unfortunately, sometimes it's for the best to not share our goals with people who are unsupportive.
Walk away from your relationships: it's okay to walk away from relationships with people who are actively bringing us down or harming our growth.
3. Get Comfortable With Being New
Every expert started as a beginner. In fact, there are things you do in your life now effortlessly that you were once new at. With time and practice, things will get easier, you just need to give yourself time to get there.
4. Remember that discomfort is okay
Leaving your comfort zone is hard, it involves leaving what you know to do something new. But likewise, staying where you are and not growing can be hard, too. There’s an expression that goes, “pick your hard,” which essentially is telling you that both choices are hard, so you need to decide if you’d rather deal with the discomfort of trying something new, or if you’d rather live with the hard of staying put. When you make a shift, things will probably feel pretty hard for a bit, but over time, your tolerance will change, and things will get easier.