How to Escape Your Comfort Zone

All human beings desire comfort and safety. We want to feel secure and protected. While this is understandable, it can be devastating. The desire to cling to your comfort zone can impact your life in ways you don't realize. Staying in your comfort zone will confine and paralyze you. If you want to live a fulfilling life, it is vital to understand how your comfort zone works. But more importantly, you need to know how to free yourself from it.

The Comfort Zone Explained

Your comfort zone is made up of your daily routine. The only way to stay in your comfort zone is to keep doing what you have always done. Humans fear the unknown at an instinctive level. But the only way to grow and improve yourself is to consistently keep trying new things. You have to embrace and accept the unknown. This creates a problem and backs you into a corner, so you have to make a choice; you have to decide if you want comfort or fulfillment. In other words, you must abandon your comfort zone and embrace the unknown if you ever wish to achieve anything worthwhile.

Interestingly enough, it takes more than willpower to escape your comfort zone. If the comfort zone were easy to evade, more people would have done it. The key is in learning how the human mind works and using it to your advantage. If you don't learn how your mind works, you will be fighting an uphill battle. You will be excreting a lot of effort without seeing many results.  But if you learn how your mind works and how to use it to your advantage, you will be able to escape from your comfort zone. 

Importance of Leaving Your Comfort Zone

 You might be wondering why you should care about leaving your comfort zone in the first place. Leaving your comfort zone is important because it will hold your prisoner if you don't. You will be a prisoner of your mind. If you have ever wanted to introduce yourself to a stranger but felt paralyzed, you have been a victim your comfort zone. If you ever failed to take an opportunity because of fear, you have been a victim of your comfort zone. 

Any time you take a chance or aspire to do something new, you have to step outside your comfort zone. Fun, adventure, and success do not exist inside in the zone in which you feel comfortable. Therefore, embracing fear has to be a way of life if you want success in any area. This process is challenging and frightening, but it is also rewarding. 

The Escape Strategy

When you want to escape your comfort zone, you must avoid the mistake most people make. Most people make the mistake of facing their biggest fears from the start. While this might work for some people, it does not work for everyone. If you try to take on too much at once, you will quickly become discouraged. You will greatly reduce the odds of breaking out of your comfort zone and living the life you really want.

The key is to take small steps. You want to leave your comfort zone one step at a time. To do this, find where your comfort zone is and go just beyond it. For example, if you are terrified to talk to strangers, go to a public place and practice making eye contact with other people. The fear should not be crippling, but it should be enough to get your adrenaline going. When you find the edge of your comfort zone, stay there as long as you can. By pushing yourself, you are improving your courage and willpower. 

When you push yourself outside your comfort zone, you will notice that you start to get accustom to the feeling of fear. You will become comfortable with it. As you push yourself out of your past your fears, you gain more courage and willpower. After you become comfortable with each situation, it is time to take the next step. Find something that is a little further out of your comfort zone and repeat the process. By repeating this process on a regular basis, you can escape and expand your comfort zone. 

As you can see, escaping your comfort zone is difficult and challenging. However, leaving your comfort zone is necessary if you want to live a fulfilling life. When you leave your comfort zone, you allow yourself to grow and improve. However, you will need a strategy. While the wrong strategy will keep you trapped, you can escape your comfort zone by taking small, consistent steps in the right direction. When you escape your comfort zone, a whole new world of opportunities will open up.