Comfort Zone
People often say that you should take yourself out of your comfort zone. Just do it! Go and chat up that girl, start that business, travel the world, perform stand-up at an open mic, apply for the promotion. Go for it! Just do it! Get out of your comfort zone.
The problem for me with this is that the discomfort often seems too great so whatever anyone says, whatever positive aphorisms I relay in my mind, I’m just not going to do it. My tagline would be ‘just don’t do it.’ The negative aphorisms relayed in my subconscious are far more powerful than anything that my conscious mind can try to conjure up to counter them.
The second problem is that if I do finally pluck up the courage to take on the challenge, I will probably do it so badly that you’ll never see my face around here again. I’ll go back to hiding in my little cubby hole. I have zero doubt that I would perform the task abjectly. Call it manifestation, but if the reality is even close to the pictures playing in my mind, then the outcome will not be favourable.
The third problem is that even if I do come back for more, say with the stand-up comedy gigs, or the new managerial position, I’ll be left with an imposter syndrome that never departs. I’m the world’s worst actor. If I try to fake it until I make it, I will forever be faking it.
If you wanted to learn to swim you are unlikely to take the route of jumping straight into the deep end of the pool (getting out of your comfort zone). If you end up nearly drowning you might find that you never want to set foot near a body of water again. The steadier approach of weekly swimming lessons might be the better way to go. You will still be taking yourself towards the outer edges of your comfort zone both physically and psychologically, but you will be doing it with a more measured, layering approach, with each lesson and experience building on the last.
I have a very sensitive fight/flight/freeze response. The slightest thing can set it off. That’s why I don’t like social settings. It’s why I didn’t like school and the work environment. For fifty years I’ve lived in a semi-permanent state of fight/flight/freeze, the only respite coming from the refuge of my bedroom (OK I’m hamming it up a bit here, but you get the gist). At school when the teacher was searching for a victim to answer their question I froze. My body, my mind froze. 5 + 5, please don’t ask me. My brain went into meltdown. I might just as soon answer ‘banana’ as 10. In work meetings I was borderline catatonic. I credit myself with some degree of creativity, but in meetings my flow of ideas ran drier than the Gobi Desert.
Leaping far outside of my comfort zone would definitely trigger my fight/flight/freeze response, which in turn would make such a response more likely, not less likely, the next time I attempted to make the leap.
Another approach worth considering is rather than stepping far outside of your comfort zone, simply expand your comfort zone. Meditation, journalling, healthy eating have all massively increased my confidence levels and in turn the breadth of challenges that now fall within my comfort zone. My fight/flight/freeze response has become somewhat tempered. My thought patterns have changed. I used to pre-play any challenge in my mind, always performing terribly in my imagination. Now I hardly think these things through at all. It’s not my thoughts that tell me I’m ready, it’s the chemical response in my body. My mind is pretty much empty, and I just rock up and see what happens.