Learning how to get out of your comfort zone is an important life skill to develop because if you stay in your comfort zone 24/7, you will never flourish creating your ideal life and achieving your goals.
Alasdair White, a management theorist known for his work on performance management, defines the comfort zone as
“A comfort zone is a psychological state in which things feel familiar to a person, and they are at ease and (perceive they are) in control of their environment, experiencing low levels of anxiety and stress. In this zone, a steady level of performance is possible.”
Alasdair White
The benefits of the Comfort Zone
The comfort zone has a lot of things going for it.
You are not as anxious because you perceive you are in control of the environment and task.
“Uncertainty, scarcity, and vulnerability are minimized” is how Brene Brown, a Professor and empathy expert, describes the comfort zone. She continues to say a comfort zone is a place
“where our uncertainty, scarcity, and vulnerability are minimized – where we believe we’ll have access to enough love, food, talent, time, admiration. Where we feel we have some control.”
The comfort zone provides a lot of psychological safety and is an important part of life. If you lived out of your comfort zone 24/7, you would feel anxiety all the time and would eventually feel like you have no control in your life. Feeling this anxious all the time could lead to chronic illness, depression, and a restless mind.
The comfort zone is the behavioral space where your activities and behaviors fit a routine and pattern that minimizes stress and risk. It provides regular happiness, low anxiety, and reduced stress. Spending a lot of time in your comfort zone is critical for overall well-being.
Why you need to learn how to get out of your comfort zone
Your comfort zone provides a lot of safety and feelings of confidence. However, the Catch 22 of the Comfort Zone is that you need to leave your comfort zone to grow your comfort zone. Having a growth mindset is essential for learning how to get out of your comfort zone. See how to cultivate a growth mindset here!
Plus, you need to get out of your comfort zone for a variety of reasons.
Expanding your Comfort Zone prevents life from getting stale
If you never expand your comfort zone, it can deplete your life pretty quickly. What used to be stable and comforting can turn stale and confining over time. Which explains why it is important to treat your career like a start-up and occasionally look for new hobbies to learn about.
You can Handle unexpected Changes Easier
Brene Brown wrote about how one of the worst things people do is pretending fear and uncertainty do not exist. She says that people who take controlled risks and challenge themselves normally have increased control and have less anxiety when things inevitably go wrong in their life. From small things like knocking off a car mirror, to handling bigger stresses, people who step out of their comfort zone regularly have an easier time dealing with unexpected life events.
You Can Develop New Skills
Think back to when you were a little kid, first learning algebra, or even your ABCs. You were out of your comfort zone then, even if you didn’t know it. You kept practicing and practicing, and now the ABCs and algebra are second nature to you.
Acquiring new skills or developing existing ones requires you to venture into the unknown, experiencing a little anxiety, and learn the new knowledge required to accomplish your task. By learning to get out of your comfort zone, you develop new life-altering skills.
By Venturing out of your Comfort Zone, more becomes Comfortable to You
In the above example, once you understand and accomplish the task that was originally outside your comfort zone, it then enters your comfort zone. You feel confident and certain you can achieve success again in that area. By continually venturing outside of your comfort zone, skills, or experiences that seemed outside of your comfort zone slowly come closer and closer.
See other ways you can become more confident with this guide here!
Alex Honnold, the rock climber who free soloed El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, has one of my favorite quotes on this concept:
“My comfort zone is like a little bubble around me, and I’ve pushed it in different directions and made it bigger and bigger until these objectives that seemed crazy eventually fall within the realm of the possible.”
Alex Honnold
For him, he started doing more and more ambitious climbs until climbing one of the tallest rockfaces in North America without any equipment suddenly became possible.
You will be more Productive
In his research, Alasdair White found there is an “optimal performance zone” where performance can be enhanced by some amount of stress.
The stress forces people to pay closer attention while they are working, which increases knowledge gain and promotes creative thoughts on how to do the task more effectively. It is when people are doing tasks that they know very well that they are more relaxed, but exhibit signs of less creative thought, and are mostly going on autopilot until the task is complete.
How to get out of Your Comfort Zone
Knowing the importance of getting out of your comfort zone is the first step. Now we can focus on practical tips on how to get out of your comfort zone in ways that work for you.
Know what Your Comfort Zone is
In a study by Nona Kiknadze from Duke University, She found that people who could accurately assess their “comfort zone orientation” were better at understanding what they needed to do when being introduced to anxiety-inducing tasks (such as giving an impromptu speech). The people who knew this was outside their comfort zone understood they would naturally get anxious. However, these same people also were more likely to value pushing themselves out of their comfort zone and were more confident when facing this anxiety-inducing task.
By simply knowing what your comfort zone is, and recognizing when you are beyond it, you can practice self-compassion to accept you are feeling uncomfortable. Then transition your energy to more productive emotions like feeling confident in yourself to handle these novel tasks.
See the World as Mobile
Normally, life is pretty stable with following the same routine each week. Contrast that with something like international volunteerism. This job is full of living life outside the comfort zone in a new location and working a new job.
Laura Prazeres, a professor specializing in migration and mobility research from St. Andrews, found that students who volunteer to work in the global south volunteer because they want to extend their comfort zone and their sense of ‘home’ to include the global south.
That explains why so many people venture to far-off lands where they can practice self-discovery. However, these kinds of adventures aren’t available to everyone and only last a short time.
Start seeing the world as mobile, even at home, change your routine. Every day seek little opportunities to expand your comfort zone. That might mean giving a genuine compliment to a stranger, talking to a new co-worker, taking an online class on coding, or joining a new professional organization in your town. There are always new opportunities to expand your comfort zone, and you don’t have to go to exotic locations to find them.
Believe you can step outside your Comfort Zone
As cheesy as it sounds, you need to believe you can step outside your comfort zone to start learning how to get out of your comfort zone.
In a study, undergraduate Pharmacy students at Robert Gordon University were given the task to do an additional research project in any area of their choosing relating to pharmacy. They were given complete control of the research question and had full ownership of the end product. What the research found was these students were initially overwhelmed with having to run this intensive project, while still working on their other assignments and managing their lives. Understandably, the initial benchmark showed all the students were feeling negative about this assignment.
What is interesting is that some students started to see this as an opportunity to pair it with their other classes. They reported that even though they felt overwhelmed, they reminded themselves they can accomplish all their work, and because they realized the research would benefit them in their professional careers, they started taking more ownership of the product. By the end, these students found the assignment to be overwhelmingly positive and beneficial for them getting into their Doctoral program because they had an interesting project to talk about during their interviews.
By believing they could handle their work, and step outside their comfort zones, these students took what was a pain of a project, and used it to capitulate their professional aspirations.
Take it a Day at a Time
As Brene Brown says, “Tiptoe out of your comfort zone, and go back.” Learning how to get out of your comfort zone takes years of practice. You have to keep trying every day.
Some days you might step outside by giving a big presentation at work in front of all your peers, and other days it might just be quietly trying to make a new dish at home. By expanding your comfort zone little by little, you will be surprised at how large your comfort zone will become. Which will then expand your life and make it so you have much richer life experiences.
Main Take-Aways
- Learning how to get out of your comfort zone is all about trying new things every day, and mixing it up between large and small tasks.
- By stepping outside of your comfort zone continuously, you will learn how to handle unexpected events better, you can develop new skills, and you will be more productive.
- Learn where your comfort zone is, and find ways to expand it each day.
Action item
Look at your calendar for the next seven days. What is one thing you can do each of the next seven days to expand your comfort zone? Write these actions down and hold yourself to accomplishing them. At the end of the week, reflect on how you feel about challenging yourself. Acknowledge the tasks were scary but see how good you feel knowing you can continue to handle and work on them.
