Life Hacks
Here’s How You Can Enjoy Your Life More in Better Zones.
Why should you settle for mediocrity or stagnant business, which brings no value to your precious life? There are better ways.
You can live with joy and serenity despite the challenges and setbacks of life.
If you want to become a happy and healthy person or an exceptional business leader, I’ve got a robust mental framework from my personal experience that you can apply to your life to boost your capabilities.
Best of all, this approach requires neither money nor significant time to implement. Anyone with some thought and planning can customize and use it to reap the benefits.
My goal in writing this article is to share a valuable life lesson that I learned through trial and error when struggling in my life, which had a life-changing impact on my success, health, and overall well-being. It is not just a theory but has a real-life application if used deliberately and consistently.
Using this framework helped me maintain composure and stay calm during critical situations, allowing me to enjoy my personal and professional challenges. However, it’s not a quick fix. It is a simple technique but not an easy one. It requires effort and time to adapt.
My stress levels were off the charts earlier in my career, nearly in a detrimental crisis mode giving me nightmares. Fortunately, a wise mentor taught me to reframe my thoughts and change my perspective using this mental framework. Therefore, I’d like to pass it along.
I applied it rigorously and turned it into a lifelong habit. More specifically, I acted in either comfort or a danger zone, adversely affecting my physical and mental health. Then I discovered the beauty of stretch and risk zones. I will explain their values in this article.
Before introducing the approach, I’d like to briefly touch on risk management so that my points in the third section make sense, as it was the most important one in my journey.
What is risk management, and why does it matter?
Risk management is essential for personal and professional life because it promotes safety, empowers decision-making, supports financial stability, and builds resilience. Only by taking risks can we create innovations.
My definition of risk management is analyzing potential risks in a personal initiative or work-related project, determining their likelihood and impact, and taking steps to reduce and mitigate them methodically to benefit personal and professional life.
To achieve my personal and professional goals, I intentionally use risk management. This process enables me to identify, assess, and prioritize risks to minimize, monitor, and control the probability, impact, and implications of adverse events or undesirable outcomes.
Risk management in life is essential because by managing potential risks, we can protect ourselves, our loved ones, our businesses, our careers, and our investments from unexpected events and negative consequences.
Choose the correct zone that suits your needs to be happy, healthy, and prosperous.
At a conceptual level, the framework requires visualizing four distinct zones in your life. You can call them comfort, stretch, risk, and danger zones.
Once you understand their scope, you can define and customize these zones based on your character, capabilities, values, goals, and dreams.
Keeping the zones as a mental picture and putting a reminder at home or work can be helpful. Seeing the picture first thing in the morning can be beneficial. Then, it can sink into your subconscious and become a behavior.
In the following four sections, I discuss the pros and cons of these four psychological states. I paid extra attention to the risk zone as it impacted my personal and professional life more than others.
1 — The Comfort Zone
The comfort zone is a psychological state where we feel safe, secure, and at ease because we operate within our familiar surroundings and habits. In this mental space, we avoid challenges and risks that might lead to anxiety, uncertainty, or so-called failure.
While the comfort zone might provide short-term benefits, it can be detrimental to our health and happiness in the long term. Most of our problems in this modern world are caused by living in our comfort zone.
Our comfort zone represents the behavioral elements originating from our reptilian brain and the limbic system. This zone is all about our most basic survival mode behavior. The body does not want to take risks as they are hardcoded as a threat in the old brain.
Some behavior patterns in this zone were enjoying only comfortable work, wanting to stay in bed long hours, eating comfort food, drinking sugary beverages, not exercising, not being exposed to cold, being distracted from little interruption, getting upset if challenged for minor matters, talking with only the familiar people.
Staying in our comfort zone for a long time can lead to complacency, lack of growth, and missed opportunities. It can hinder personal and professional development, preventing us from pursuing our dreams and making us feel unfulfilled and dissatisfied with our lives.
Stepping out of our comfort zone and facing new challenges, risks, and uncertainties is beneficial because it can boost our self-confidence, resilience, and overall well-being.
For example, we can develop new skills and perspectives and experience personal growth and fulfillment. Living outside our comfort zone can help us discover our true potential, as I cover in the following two sections.
2 — The Stretch Zone
The stretch zone is the area just outside of our comfort zone. In this zone, we go beyond our limits by working harder and smarter to achieve our goals much better than in our comfort zone.
We should choose the stretch zone because it provides a space for growth, learning, and development that is challenging and within our reach.
The stretch zone is where we start to experience growth and new learning as we push ourselves to adapt, learn new skills, and face new challenges.
In general, the stretch zone is characterized by healthy stress, known as acute or eustress, as opposed to chronic stress or distress, which I cover in the danger zone.
By stepping out of our comfort zone and into the stretch zone, we expose ourselves to new challenges and experiences that can allow us to develop new skills and knowledge.
The stretch zone can stimulate the mind to become more creative and develop new solutions to new challenges. It also can help us build resilience and adaptability, essential skills for dealing with change and uncertainty.
From my experience, the stretch zone was taking the next step in any task, getting up on time, studying to pass an exam, earning a new degree, finding a better job, reducing the clutter at home and in the office, having cold showers, exercising regularly, refraining from comfort foods, and enjoying outdoor activities.
This was the zone I started growing and gradually reducing my stress levels, healing my ailments, and seeing the world brighter. It did not require taking substantial risks.
Activities in the stretch zone helped me rewire my brain by changing its biochemical composition. For example, I felt a substantial increase in my dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin levels in this zone.
In addition, my muscles became more robust, flexible, and agile when operating in this zone. My visceral fat started melting. But I needed more to transform my health and earn my living, as discussed in the next section.
3 — The Risk Zone
This section is longer than other because it made the most impact on my personal and professional life. Therefore, it requires more discussion and explanation. The name of this zone might sound negative, but it can bring positives if appropriately used.
The risk zone is a powerful mental state where we take on challenges beyond our current capacity, capabilities, and experiences. It is a unique space where we step outside our comfort and stretch zones to take risks with the potential for success and failure.
While the risk zone might sound intimidating to some people, it is vital to personal and professional growth, development, success, and euphoric moments rather than anhedonia.
The risk zone involves the possibility of failure, but even if we fail, we can learn valuable lessons and insights that can be applied to future endeavors.
By taking on challenges beyond our current capabilities, we intentionally create the opportunity to overcome our fears and limitations and develop self-confidence, self-assurance, self-reliance, and self-esteem.
Taking risks and trying new things can stimulate our minds and ignite creativity and innovation. We turn to become an idea machine and find solutions quickly for our problems.
Some examples of the risk zone are starting a new business, pursuing a new career path we are passionate about, pursuing a challenging fitness goal, or taking on a leadership role in an unfamiliar area.
I understood that taking calculated risks was essential for growth, development, and success. When I learned and adapted to this zone, I started taking calculated risks starting with simple actions. I repeated them by increasing the input and workload notch by notch.
For example, I started to talk to consequential strangers in the street and engaged with people during train or plane trips by exchanging business cards and following up to create synergies.
I invested in new revenue streams, conducted research to learn complex subjects, filed patents, published papers and books, became a public speaker, made my body fat-adapted with six-pack abs, and constantly grew as my heart desired.
It is paradoxical, but this transformation happened by learning how to turn my risk zone into my comfort zone. Therefore, my risk zone never bothered me again. In other words, I redefined my comfort zone.
Magically and gratefully, my body and mind collaborated for this success. Therefore, the real difference and the game changer in my life were moving to and operating at the risk zone.
The optimal approach for me was to swing between the stretch and the risk zone related to my life goals, as the comfort zone made me sick, unhappy, stressed, anxious, and depressed.
As the risk zone provided me with the optimal values, I’d like to touch on the mindset shift I applied briefly. We know that uncertainty is in the very fabric of life. We all experience it but give a different meaning to it.
Uncertainty can be seen as a reality in dealing with future events. However, the future is unknown to us. There can be many hidden causes beyond our control, which may affect the outcomes.
You might wonder how uncertainty relates to operating at the risk zone. Learning to tolerate uncertainty indicates that we operate in the risk zone. Therefore, uncertainty is part of the risk management discipline.
Taking calculated risks is one of the entrepreneurs' requirements and the most fundamental characteristic of creating successful business outcomes and a balanced lifestyle. Risk and opportunity are inseparable, yin and yang.
Successful leaders know that opportunities are created by taking risks consistently. At the most fundamental level, we can simplify that, “no risk, no opportunity in life.”
However, once we learn to operate in the risk zone, we can turn the perceived pain into pleasure in a magical position. This behavior is evident and observable from the success of high achievers such as elite athletes, successful investors, and eminent professionals who contribute to and influence our society.
Different approaches to consistently managing risk and operating in the risk zone exist. You need to develop your style. For example, my risk management approach included several primary focus areas covering my major brain areas.
They are logic, leveraging prior learning, increasing my emotional maturity, distinguishing between reality and fantasy, and listening to my intuition.
The three broad approaches helped me deal with uncertain situations creatively and methodically by taking full responsibility for my life.
At a personal level, one of the standard techniques I used was to learn from past failures and transfer them into valuable learning experiences in my risk-requiring engagements.
This qualitative approach can be embedded in our lives as a habit. However, we need to focus on the quantitative aspect as well.
From a quantitative perspective, I use data effectively in my life. Data-driven entrepreneurs and leaders can use collect and use data from various sources related to the risks they take and mitigate.
In addition, I created my data by constantly recording my observations, personal experiences, and trial results, mainly when dealing with considerable risks. In my opinion, our risk zone should be documented as the most precious book of our life.
The Danger Zone
I briefly touch on the danger zone as it is self-explanatory and does not align with my life philosophy. However, I respect people who choose it deliberately for personal reasons and mental conditions.
When we act in the danger zone, we take on challenges far beyond our capabilities, with a high risk of failure and harm. The consequences of actions could be severe for ourselves and others.
Refraining from entering the danger zone is wise because it can lead to adverse outcomes such as physical and emotional harm. Acting in this zone might damage the relationships and reputation of people.
Some danger zone examples are being workaholics neglecting rest and fun, putting ourselves and others at too many risks, taking illicit drugs to enhance performance and body composition, and engaging in illegal activities with the potential for legal consequences.
As a workaholic and perfectionist in my younger year, I found myself operating in the danger zone, identified by others. It was unnatural and unsustainable. Fortunately, I moved myself to stretch and risk zones, not to compromise my values and not ruin my life unnecessarily.
Conclusions and Takeaways
During my leadership studies, I discovered that transformational leaders who passionately embrace uncertainty, operate in the risk zone, and step out of their comfort zones become change catalysts that generate insights and new businesses and transform stagnant businesses.
When faced with complex transformation initiatives in the workplace, handling uncertainties is critical in creating new options and choices that lead to desired innovation. Innovation does not happen in our comfort zones but thrives when fed with “nutritious/delicious” risks, as some entrepreneurs characterize.
Successful entrepreneurs who consistently operate in the risk zone keep dancing with joy and smiling, seeming not to be working at all. They have developed metaphorical muscles for risk handling, turning their risk zones into enjoyable comfort zones.
But this lifestyle doesn’t require wealth, as some might think. Instead, it’s about moving out of our comfort zone, extending it to the stretch zone, and then deliberately operating in the risk zone. With an optimistic outlook, you might even experience euphoria along the way, as often happens to me.
I expressly caution against moving to the danger zone due to the ramifications. For example, some ambitious entrepreneurs face dire consequences like losing their health, passion, family, and other values by attempting to operate in the danger zone and not realizing the undesirable impact and implications.
The key takeaway here is to keep dancing between the stretch and risk zones to reap the optimal benefits in life, as evident in the lives of successful people.
Why should you settle for mediocrity or stagnant business, which brings no value to your life?
So, try stepping out of your comfort zone, embracing uncertainty, and taking calculated risks to transform your life as you dream. But stay away from the danger zone to prevent harm to your life.
Here are six tips to filter noise and keep your sanity in this hectic world. You may check these six psychological practices to achieve tranquility amidst inner turmoil. And consider these seven life principles to keep your sanity in challenging times.
Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.
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