The Comfort Zone Tale
A family member of mine has recently told me a story of a lady who used to spend her days in the shop she owned, no matter if it was a Monday, weekend, or public holiday. Until one day she decided to change her life completely. She’d sold the shop, got divorced, and moved to a different country to take care of an elderly man. It wasn’t a year until she was back, working in a shop again. Only this time it’s someone else’s. To me, the point of the story is…
Knowing where your comfort zone is, is more important than going out of it
This may sound like a heresy, but think about it this way – your comfort zone will pull you back the moment things start getting difficult or unmanageable. You need to know what it is that makes you withdraw and where you end up if you let it happen.
The problem with the comfort zone is not, as many people say, that it prevents us from reaching the holy grail of goals we dream about. The problem is that for some of us, it’s not really about the comfort. The comfort zone means living with an abusive spouse or parents, doing a job we hate, having an eating habit that makes us sick, or spending all our money the moment we get it.
A comfort zone doesn’t mean things are comfortable. It only means that we have the coping skills that are necessary to survive from one day to another.
7th life
If you’ve ever tried to change something and ended up in a similar situation you were trying to avoid – this is what your comfort zone is. But even if all you know how to deal with is rejection and failure, there is nothing wrong with you. 🙂 It only means that you had no chance to learn how to behave in other situations. So not all is lost yet.
If you take a look at the woman’s story again, you can probably see now that what happened was that things became too demanding and too difficult, and the necessary coping mechanisms were missing. The lady’s comfort zone acted as a safety belt and simply pulled her back. A completely different job, new country, new language, no family – it was all too much, especially for someone who was used to daily contact with multiple people, helping them, gossiping with them, and simply being their go-to person. This brings me to yet another point…
There is more than one comfort zone
Actually, there are two. The one we are born with and the one we grow up into. The first one is more or less set. The latter is the safety belt, on which we can work.
The one we are born with we can call “temperamental”. In short, it’s a set of elements we can’t do much about. Like introversion and extraversion. There is no way an introvert can learn to thrive on being the centre of attention just by practising it. And there is no way an extravert, needing daily contact, can survive talking only to an old grumpy man once a week.
Knowing yourself means knowing what your temperamental and personality preferences are since they are not something you should change (or at least not too much). If you stay too far for too long from your personal defaults, it will cost you a lot of energy, and the time to recharge may turn out to be longer than the actual break between tasks. For example:
- Having a job that exposes you to difficult situations and expects you to calm others (think paramedics, police, etc) may not be right for a highly neurotic and highly emotionally reactive person, no matter how many years in training.
- Same as an accountant role will never work for someone who needs to stay surrounded by people and needs their acclamation
So there is the set part in us, the default we probably need to accept and the part we can work on. Only that work needs to be smart.
Going out of your comfort zone is not a one-time event
Have you seen a child learning to separate itself from its mother? It goes away a few meters and then comes back to her to make sure it’s safe. Then goes a bit further next time and goes back again. This is exactly how we learn – young or old. We need to explore what is outside of our comfort zones and then go back to a safe place to take some rest and recharge. Otherwise, our depleted batteries will prevent us next time from doing something that is perceived as “risky” by the brain, and exploring the unknown is by default risky.
Learning is key here. No matter how long you stay in a situation that is outside of your comfort zone won’t make your comfort zone expand on its own. Surviving something a single time is not tantamount to learning. Surviving doesn’t guarantee that you know how to repeat it next time. In order to add new tasks and situations to our comfort zone, we need to learn new coping skills and mechanisms.
Knowing how we rest and recharge is also crucial, as it helps us to stay in the learning process. The whole thing is a set of controlled and limited exposures to what we need to adjust to, rather than a single deep dive.
So if you take a look at the story again, if all that was done step by step, learning new skills one by one – it might have worked much better than the “all-in-one” approach. Who knows where she would have been by now.
How to get away
So if you’re planning to shift or expand your comfort zone, here is a short high-level plan for it:
- Find out who you are, what you like and dislike, what your strong points are, your skills, and your weaknesses. (I’m planning to write a bit more about this soon, so stay tuned.)
- Analyse your past and find the patterns of similar situations. Try to focus on what happens to you when you get stressed or when things become difficult. Where do you end up when you try to change something in your life?
- Build a safe place for yourself. Not a physical one (though that may also work), but a mental one. A set of rituals that help you get some rest and recharge can be extremely useful.
- Try to figure out where you want to be, how to do it with the respect to your temperamental comfort zone, and what coping skills you may need. Make a plan for how to expose yourself to the right situations where you can learn the skills.
- Go slowly, and give yourself time to learn.
- Repeat 🙂
A comfort zone is not what we are given for life, so change it when you need it. Just make sure you are mindful of your own well-being.
