Why You Must Stay in Your Comfort Zone
Your Success depends on it
Really? Have I lost it?
No, really! Hear me out.
You should stay within your comfort zone if you want to succeed. Because getting out of the comfort zone is, well, uncomfortable.
As human beings, we have been working for centuries to make our lives more comfortable. So, getting uncomfortable is not precisely what we desire to do.
But we are told that success requires getting out of our comfort zone.
“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” ~ Neill Donald Walsh
One of the things I learned from my awesome dad was not to accept everything you hear until you can verify it for yourself.
So when I heard that you must get out of your comfort zone to succeed, I wondered if that was true.
I have tried doing things that are out of my comfort zone, and some of those things were way out of my comfort zone, like climbing the tallest peak in Texas or walking from Chicago to Santa Monica.
While they may have been satisfying in the short-term, they did not create a lasting change.
So, what to do? What to do?
However, several years ago, I came across a book that made a big difference in my life. It taught me to stretch my comfort zone as opposed to getting out of it.
When we stretch our comfort zone, we can stay within our comfort zone as it keeps getting bigger and bigger, but it is still comfortable.
Success requires that we must become more than we currently are. And any growth will warrant expanding our capabilities. We must stretch ourselves to prosper.
The book that I’m referring to was about weight loss. The premise behind the book’s central idea was to stretch out your comfort zone.
It suggested that to create long-term and sustained weight loss; we should walk as fast as we can for as long as we can. In other words, it suggested that we should move to the edge of our comfort zone.
When we do that, our bodies will have minor damages in the muscles and other parts of our bodies. But the body is designed to repair itself during sleep.
So when you go to sleep, those torn muscles would be repaired and in the process become just a little bit stronger than they were before they were damaged. That is the body’s way of ensuring that the damage does not keep reoccurring.
Well, what happens in the process is that we have effectively created and extended our comfort zone. Now it will take more effort to walk as far as we can for as long as we can.
In conclusion
If you want to grow and prosper or get better at any skill, you don’t need to get out of your comfort zone. You should instead stretch it by living on the outer limits of what’s possible at the moment and not staying in the middle of the comfort zone.
As always, thank you for reading and responding. You might enjoy these related stories as well.
Rasheed Hooda is a published author and a regular contributor to ILLUMINATION, a writers’ community on Medium where writers support each other.
He is a self-proclaimed weirdo who lives a Freedom Lifestyle and writes about related topics — Travel (a top writer), Personal Growth, Freedom, and entrepreneurship. (Get the Newsletter)
“You can let others tell you what it means to be successful, or you can decide it for yourself.”
