Reasons to Step Outside Your Comfort Zone

The “comfort zone” is a psychological concept that helps you to embrace the risk and make changes which lead to personal growth. It’s a behavioral space which minimizes risk and stress. There’s always a sense of familiarity, certainty and security in it. While stepping outside your comfort zone, you take risks which may lead to anxiety and stress. Though stress is always considered as bad but little bit of healthy stress can act as a catalyst which provides a powerful motivation to act and hence you lead to growth.

Stepping out of comfort zone can lead to the creation of the conditions for an optimal performance, whereas staying in it only results in steady and consistent performance. Those who step out of their comfort zone and are willing to take risks will reap the biggest rewards in this increasingly competitive, accelerated and cautious world. Here’s why you need to step outside our comfort zones.

It’s hard to let it go because you’re wired to seek out for comfort

Staying in your comfort zone isn’t wrong unless you’re too comfortable in it and don’t want to challenge yourself to grow, earn and try new things. Your comfort zone is your neutral state- where anxiety and stress are minimal and you know what’s coming next. Sometime to achieve goals, you have to push ourselves out of your comfort zones whether you want it or not. Stepping out is as good as being able to get back in. 

Challenges help you to perform at your peak

For one’s personal growth, stepping outside of comfort zone is an almost universal and important factor. How can you expect to evolve in your careers and lives if you keep on sticking to your normal routine and habits? A little anxiety and involvement of risks can help you to perform better than you usually do- or you can say, challenging yourselves, tends to your rise to the occasion.

Risk taking tendency helps you to grow

Children, the natural risk-takes, learn the fear of failure with time and hence stops attempting different things when become old, leading to the tremendous potential loss in their growth and transformation. Fear of failure is a powerful obstacle to growth. It prevents experimentation and exploration assuring progressive narrowing of the personality. It’s a simple logic: Keep Learning = Keep Risking Failure.

Trying something new makes you creative

Trying something new or different changes your perspective. You see things which you previously ignored or missed, which creates new possibilities. It helps you to break the monotony of your routine and changes your biorhythm- stimulating and jolting you emotionally, physically and intellectually. You can progress by maintaining the habit of trying something new and can learn to be open to new experiences, change and possibilities. Increased confidence, appreciation for yourself, progress, openness to experience are some of the results of trying new things.

But don’t push yourself too far

To grow you need fear, that’s human nature. To grow constantly you need to push yourself constantly to the brink of hurt, exhaustion and fatigue. If you are always in a process of trying to grow, you are equally as afraid as someone who afraid to start. You push yourself to grow only because you are afraid of fear of failure and want to get rid of it. The main purpose is to expand our comfort zone. Comfort to C-O-M-F-O-R-T. There’s no purpose of it if you can’t sit and enjoy the growth you have gathered so far. That’s why if you can’t be grateful right now, you must stop focusing on making future plans. So, sit look around, look at yourself and your thoughts. This is how you laugh with it, live with it and laugh at it. And it will ask you to transcend yourself once again.