The more confining your comfort zone, the less you can accomplish. You’re more limited than you need to be.
By expanding your comfort zone, you can increase your successes significantly. You’ll have more options and enjoy life to a greater extent. Your resistance to stress is increased. You can experience a greater level of comfort while accomplishing more.
Expand your comfort zone and watch your results skyrocket with these techniques
1. Identify the ways that your comfort zone is limiting your progress. What does it stop you from doing? How does that harm you?
◦ For example, are you uncomfortable with meeting strangers? This limit can narrow your employment opportunities. It can prevent social opportunities. It can make group activities uncomfortable.
◦ On the other hand, maybe you’re afraid of heights, but you live in a small town in Nebraska and your fear of heights has zero impact on your life. This an example of a limited comfort zone that isn’t limiting your progress. Why bother to change this if it doesn’t really affect you?
2. Shake up your routine. Create a simple change in your life. Take a new route to work. Try a new restaurant for lunch. Change your dress style. Watch a new TV show.
3. Engage in activities that are good for you, but slightly uncomfortable. Join a yoga class. Take a public speaking course. You can kill two birds with one stone by increasing your comfort zone and improving yourself in some way. What would be good for you that also makes you uncomfortable?
4. Use the five-second rule. You probably have a lot of great ideas, like walking over and saying “Hi” to an attractive stranger. But, you talk yourself out of this type of thing every time.
◦ The key is to take action before you can start rationalizing with yourself. Act on your positive impulses before you can chicken out.
5. Go on a lot of dates. What’s more uncomfortable than a first date? A lot of first dates. Join a night of speed dating. Join an online dating site and make several coffee dates over the next month. You’ll get plenty of practice dealing with the discomfort. Plus, you might even find your soulmate in the process!
◦ If you’re already spoken for, talk to strangers wherever you go. Strike up a conversation and see how long you can keep it going.
6. Go someplace alone. Go to a restaurant you love and get a table for one. Take yourself to the movies. Visit a local park and soak up some nature – alone. Learn to feel comfortable out in public by yourself.
7. Meditate. Meditation shows you how crazy and undisciplined your mind is. It also gives you a more realistic perspective of life. It’s also boring and hard to do at first.
◦ Meditating creates discomfort that you can easily learn to overcome with practice. Then, you’ll be glad you learned when it starts helping you get the most out of life.
8. Read something that makes you uncomfortable or bored. Read a book or watch a movie that makes you uncomfortable. It might be a horror novel or a non-fictional work that talks about things that normally make you shudder (like spiders). Expose yourself to it and learn to relax through it.
Everyone has a comfort zone. The most successful people have a greater zone of comfort. This is part of what made them successful.
You can expand your comfort zone a little each day. As your comfort zone increases, so will your self-esteem and success. Those with large comfort zones can be more, do more, and experience more.