“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” Neale Donald Walsch
We are all familiar with our comfort zones, those places that we know well and become very easy to slip into and stay at. It is natural for us to want to feel and stay within what we have become accustomed to and familiar with. The more time we spend there, the more difficult it will be to break free from that space. Many people will spend their entire lives there, never seeking to venture outside to see what they could have, or might be capable of. While it is tempting to spend our lives never venturing outside of our safe, secure worlds, there is a cost for living our lives this way, a price that we end up paying. While staying inside of our offers us instant benefits, we end up sacrificing the potential for much better things down the road.
Here are 7 reasons we need to get out of our comfort zone.
Never knowing what could have been
Those who never venture far will never know what might have been if they had taken risks and tried to do things beyond which they felt they could. Success involves taking risks and all successful people have taken risks, failed, picked themselves up and risked again until they figured it out. Going outside of their comfort zones became a lifestyle for many successful people and they continually do so in their quest for greater achievement.
Learning new habits and developing inner strength
We know that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Yet that is exactly what some people are doing. Doing something new which makes us uncomfortable will help us build out inner strength, which will allow us to continue to push out boundaries. Even if we fail, which often happens, we will have an experience, a learning upon which we can draw upon to help us in the future. Put together, these experiences will act as building blocks upon which to build a more meaningful and fulfilling life.
Builds Confidence
Confidence is not something we are born with, it is built upon setting goals, achieving those goals and setting more goals to achieve. In order to develop confidence, we need to face our fears in order to step up and do something that were not sure we could do. We all know the exhilarating feeling that comes with achieving something that we were not even sure we could do before. This feeling is a huge confidence accelerator and helps us realize that we can do many more things which we may not have thought we were capable of. The more goals we set and achieve, the more our confidence will soar.
Makes us more adaptable to change
The more we stay inside of our comfort zones, the scarier change will appear to be. The accelerating rate of change in the world today will quickly leave those who fear change behind. For people who are already pushing their comfort zone, change will not appear as frightening as they will welcome it as challenge that can open up possibilities for growth and opportunities that were not there before.
Becomes a blueprint for success
If we study the lives of highly successful people we will see that they tried and failed, sometimes many times before they finally reached the level of success that makes them so admired by the rest of us. They would have never gone beyond the starting gate of their success journey had they not been willing to confront their fear and try something new. They learned from their failures and continued to go beyond their comfort levels, knowing that this was what it would take to get to the point they wanted to go to.
Will make us more creative
There is nothing worse for our creativity than never striving from the path of what is tried and true. The longer we are unwilling to entertain new thoughts, ideas and ways of doing the deeper we slip into a rut that keeps us from taking on new challenges. By trying something new we stir up our creativity juices that will awaken our imagination and propel us to continue down the road of exploration and new adventures.
Not having to face regret
While taking the safe and sure route is always very tempting it inevitably results from us paying a high price of regret down the road. In interviews people who were at the end of their lives and facing their death invariably had regret about the things that they wanted to do but didn’t. I have never heard of someone saying on their deathbed that they were comforted by the fact that they took the safe way out and didn’t take any risks. If life is about preparing for our death, as some people claim, avoiding regret is perhaps the most compelling reason that we need to move out of our comfort one.