Many of you will know that Alex Honnold (pictured above) is an American rock climber, best known for his free solo ascents of big walls, in particular his free soloing of El Capitan, in Yosemite National Park in 2017. Free solo climbing, or free soloing, is a form of technical ice or rock climbing where the climbers climb alone without ropes, harnesses or other protective equipment, forcing them to rely entirely on their own individual preparation, strength and skill.
Not surprisingly, Alex Honnold knows a thing or two about "Comfort Zones". He said, “My comfort zone is like a little bubble around me, and I’ve pushed it in different directions and made it bigger and bigger until these objectives that seemed totally crazy eventually fall within the realm of the possible”.
Honnold is of course an extreme example of someone who regularly pushes incredible "Comfort Zone" boundaries. The quote above shows you how he manages to keep edging his way forward to achieve his full potential. While this is pretty crazy to most of us, it illustrates just how we can achieve things we never imagined possible, if we just lean into the discomfort as often as possible, taking small steps instead of giant leaps. It is all relative and what can seem totally unachievable to some people, can in fact be within the realm of possibility to others. It is up to each of us to know our own limits and push the boundaries accordingly, without putting ourselves off for life in the process.
If you are "sitting comfortably" and have been doing so for a while now, it may be time to shake things up a little! When was the last time you pushed yourself out of your comfort zone and do you remember how it felt before, during and afterwards? What emotions did you experience? How did it work out for you? What result were you hoping for? How often would you like to do this ideally? What do you think is holding you back? If you could wave a magic wand, what would the future look like for you? How might you break this down so you can make the first small steps out of your comfort zone?
These are some of the questions I ask my clients when we are setting goals at the beginning of a coaching Programme. It tends to help them move steadily forward, remove past frustrations and avoid the stumbling blocks they may have encountered in the past with certain goals and aspirations. This leads to successful outcomes they did not believe were possible.
We all enjoy being really comfortable and feeling content and good about ourselves. When we are in a state of low or neutral anxiety, not being overly challenged in the absence of risk, we tend to achieve a steady level of performance. However, we can quickly get bored and restless, feel unstimulated, less alive and ultimately don’t achieve our full potential. Some of us might not even recognise this and live in a permanent state of un-tapped potential and underachievement.
I recently started practicing Ashtanga inspired yoga. (Sadly the super-flexible model in the photo above is not me!) I love the freedom and simplicity of running and swimming, the structure of Pilates and routine of going to the gym. Yoga has always seemed to be a challenging, complicated and a rather mystifying form of exercise. I feared it would make me feel out of my depth, unconfident and I would not succeed at it. I am pretty stiff and inflexible and so I knew yoga would be difficult and uncomfortable, to start with at least. However, I was determined to push myself out of my "Comfort Zone" because I knew deep down that flexibility, strength and balance were what I really wanted and needed. I knew yoga would undoubtedly improve my overall health, wellbeing and enable me to enjoy the other exercise I do even more.
Old habits die hard and it was to difficult to change my established exercise routine and carve out time for yoga. It is harder still to learn a completely new discipline, for which I did not think I had a natural affinity or flair. All last year, I came up with so many excuses why I should not start yoga, which made it so hard to take this step. However, my motivation was crystal clear and I was convinced that despite some inevitable set-backs and challenges along the way, I would gradually, start to improve and feel more confident. I had learnt other new things in the past after all.
I have not been disappointed and thanks to my amazing yoga teacher, Victoria Dare, at www.victoriadareyoga.com, I am starting to feel a little less of a beginner and am already feeling the physical and mental benefits. Victoria has taught and shown me that “we are as young as our spine is flexible”. I am so inspired by this! It really motivates me to keep practicing, improving and making time for this in my life.
This step out of my "Comfort Zone", which felt uncomfortable and daunting, is improving my health, fitness and general wellbeing so much. It has reminded me of the need to keep moving forward and pushing those "Comfort Zone" boundaries often. It just makes my life so much more rewarding, interesting and fulfilling.
Tom Bilyeu, Co-Founder of “Quest Nutrition" said, "The level of effort you tolerate from yourself will define your life”. This is inspiring, but just how do I achieve that for myself?
It is always helpful to understand a concept properly in order to put it into practice. In 1907 Robert Yerkes and John Dodson created Yerkes-Dodson Law through a series of experiments which showed a strong link between anxiety and performance. They discovered that when faced with anxiety provoking stimuli we either:
Fight
Run away
Freeze
The key concept here is that our nervous system reacts accordingly, depending on the stimuli. If there is not enough stimulus, we remain in our comfort zone, get bored and often under-achieve. If we are very over-stimulated, we enter a "Danger Zone" (as shown below) and this stops any kind of progress dead in its tracks. The ideal scenario is to be stimulated just enough to be in between our ”Comfort and Danger Zones”, in the "Warning Zone".
It can be challenging to motivate ourselves to move out of our "Comfort Zone" unless we have some clear goals to motivate us. This is why at the start of my Nutritional Health Coaching Programme, I spend a significant amount of time making sure my clients are very clear about their goals. This way they know why they have to take those hard first steps out into what the diagram below calls the "Fear Zone”. This is where our progress could be affected by other people’s opinions or our lack of confidence and we may well find all sorts of excuses not to move out of our “Comfort Zone”. If we manage to stay the course we will move on into the so-called “Learning Zone” where we will have to deal with challenges and problems, acquire new skills and extend our “Comfort Zone”. If we make it through this stage we finally move into our “Growth Zone” where we find purpose, live our dreams and realise our aspirations.
We have to remember that everyone is different and so the content of all the different zones will be very unique to each person. It is very useful to be aware of just what your limits are, at any given time, so that you do not either over or under challenge yourself and hamper your progress. Knowing your strengths is also very useful because you can use this to encourage yourself to keep challenging yourself, particularly in areas where you may be less confident. For example, I am bit of an outward-bound, adrenalin junky and have the confidence and enthusiasm (or madness!) to try sports such as abseiling, skydiving, climbing and off-piste skiing. However, I have always been less confident with maths and anything involving numbers, but my ability to push myself out of my comfort zone in adrenalin sports gives me the confidence to persevere with maths challenges. I tend to tell myself that if I can jump out of an airplane then I can certainly get my head around a maths challenge, as long as I get help, persist and take small steps.
Sometimes our path from “Comfort” to “Growth Zone” is not always straightforward. It can often be a case of having some ups and downs and a bit of back and forth, in order to make progress and this is fine. This is where having a coach to help keep you on track and set you back on course can be really effective and enable you to realise your goals. If we are facing challenges alone, it can be easier to give up when it gets really tough.
Once my clients are crystal clear on their goals and understand why they really want and need to move out of their comfort zone, I encourage them to break these goals down into small, manageable steps. This makes the process so much less daunting and steadily the larger goals are achieved, and lasting change occurs.
Even if you don’t have a coach, there are a few simple things you can try to encourage yourself to venture regularly out of your "Comfort Zone":
Get a partner or friend to hold you accountable for challenges you set yourself and explain in detail why you are setting them.
Try doing everyday things differently
Expand your professional skill set
Try a new diet or way of eating
Move your exercise workouts to the next level
Be creative in any way you like (it does not have to be with traditional pencils, paints and paper)
Challenge your beliefs and read things you would not normally
Practice honesty with colleagues and good friends
I hope this month’s blog and this inspiring text below from “Warriors of the Heart” by Danaan Parry will encourage you to take a step out of your “Comfort Zone” soon:
“Sometimes I feel that my life is a series of trapeze swings. I’m either hanging on to a trapeze bar swinging along or, for a few moments in my life, I’m hurtling across space in between trapeze bars.
Most of the time, I spend my life hanging on for dear life to the trapeze bar-of-the-moment. It carries me along at a certain steady rate of swing and I have the feeling that I’m in control of my life. I know most of the right questions and even some of the answers.
But, every once in a while, as I’m merrily (or even not-so-merrily) swinging along, I look out ahead of me into the distance and what do I see? I see another trapeze bar swinging toward me. It’s empty and I know, in that place in me that knows, that this new trapeze bar has my name on it. It is my next step, my growth, my aliveness coming to get me. In my heart-of-hearts I know that, for me to grow, I must release my grip on this present, well-known bar and move to the new one.
Each time it happens to me I hope (no, I pray) that I won’t have to let go of my old bar completely before I grab the new one. But in my knowing place, I know that I must totally release my grasp on my old bar and, for some moment in time, I must hurtle across space before I can grab onto the new bar.
Each time, I am filled with terror. It doesn’t matter that in all my previous hurtles across the void of unknowing I have always made it. I am each time afraid that I will miss, that I will be crushed on unseen rocks in the bottomless chasm between bars. I do it anyway. Perhaps this is the essence of what the mystics call the faith experience. No guarantees, no net, no insurance policy, but you do it anyway because somehow to keep hanging on to that old bar is no longer on the list 3 of alternatives. So, for an eternity that can last a microsecond or a thousand lifetimes, I soar across the dark void of ‘the past is gone, the future is not yet here.’ It’s called ‘transition.’ I have come to believe that this transition is the only place where real change occurs. I mean real change, not the pseudo-change that only lasts until the next time my old buttons get punched....I have a sneaking suspicion that the transition zone is the only real thing and the bars are illusions we dream up to avoid the void where the real change, the real growth, occurs for us....Yes, with all the pain and fear and feelings of being out of control that can (but not necessarily) accompany transitions, they are still the most alive, most growth-filled, passionate, expansive moments in our lives.
So, transformation of fear may have nothing to do with making fear go away but rather with giving ourselves permission to ‘hang-out’ in the transition between trapezes. Transforming our need to grab that new bar, any bar, is allowing ourselves to dwell in the only place where change really happens.
It can be terrifying.
It can also be enlightening in the true sense of the word.
Hurtling through the void, we just may learn how to fly.”
Sources: www.positivepsychology.com
Extract from "Warriors of the Heart" by Danaan Parry
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