One of the main ways to grow is to take risks—to step out of your comfort zone. As you know, taking the first step can be difficult.
Is it worth all the stress that comes with trying something new?
Will moving forward to achieve your goals help you grow as a person?
Is it still possible to impact the world in your next life season?
The resounding answer is yes, yes, and yes!
Comfort zones are more about fear and less about comfort. When you get over fearing the concept of fear, you can experience joy by taking small risks and growing. This article will explore how you can overcome your fear and find success.
First, understand your fear, then overcome it.
Fear is an innate, natural response in humans and animals triggered by anticipating potential danger or harm. It’s strictly activated by instinct to protect and keep us safe.
When you face any perceived risk, your body will undergo psychological and physiological changes, including heightened alertness and increased heart rate, which prepares you for your response: freeze, fight, or flight.
- Identify common fears
The more common fears include rejection, failure, change, the unknown, making mistakes, and public speaking. These fears may stem from your desire to avoid an adverse judgment or outcome, and their intensity varies from one person to the next.
- Recognize fear’s impact on your personal growth.
Fear impacts personal growth by holding you back from pursuing your goals, embracing change, and exploring new opportunities. It creates resistance and discomfort when you try to step out of your comfort zone.
Overcoming your fear is vital for your personal development. It will allow you to build resilience, expand your horizons, and discover your full potential.
- Understand the role stress plays in your comfort zone
Comfort zone is a real thing; it is rooted in research by psychologists Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson in 1908. According to the Yerkes-Dodson law, performance increases as stress increases and performance decreases as stress decreases. However, at a certain point high levels of stress leads to decreased performance. In other words, taking on too much too soon can lead to failure and may not benefit you in the long run.
Once you begin to identify common fears (i.e. fears that are common to man), recognize fear’s impact on your personal growth and understand the role that stress plays in keeping you in your comfort zone, you can create a strategy to help you ignore the fear that is holding you back. As you become more proficient in taking action in spite of the fear, the fear will begin to evaporate. This is how you challenge yourself to grow beyond your fears and overcome them.
Now you take command and follow your instincts.
Benefits of stepping out of your comfort zone
There are numerous benefits to stepping outside your comfort zone.
- Increase your self-confidence.
When you accomplish a goal, you boost your self-confidence. It is especially true if you challenge yourself, work hard, and achieve the goal. That boost in confidence may push you to accomplish other goals in different areas of your life.
- Expand your world.
When you step from your comfort zone, you will learn new things, see new places, meet new people, and try new experiences. All these things expand your full awareness of the world and your place in it. Stepping out may also introduce you to new areas of study or interests you’d like to explore further. You will expand your horizons on many different levels.
- Build your resilience.
Challenging yourself and moving outside your comfort zone can build your resilience. You’ll become more confident handling occasional failures and comfortable with higher uncertainty, stress, and anxiety levels. When things don’t go as planned, your new found resilience will allow you to become more adaptable.
- Improve your decision-making and problem-solving skills.
Stepping from your comfort zone means using critical thinking skills, making good decisions, and solving new problems. This process will stimulate those skills as you think creatively and find the most effective solutions.
- Live your remarkable life
Ultimately creating a sustainable habit of overcoming your fears and stepping outside of your comfort zone can result in you living a remarkable life. You can go from hum drum and slightly boring to becoming an interesting person. As you embrace new experiences and people over time you begin to live a deeper, more remarkable life.
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When you embrace new situations, you are challenging yourself to learn and adapt. Whether you master new technology, change careers, travel the world or acquire new creative skills, this learning and growth process enhances your life both personally and professionally.
Final Thoughts
When you turn fears into challenges, you can learn to adapt and overcome those fears. In these situations, remember to ask yourself two questions:
- What does this challenge require me to do?
- Do I possess all the resources I need to deal with it?
If you determine that you can’t overcome the fear and accept the challenge, that’s considered a type of “threat” response, and you will not be able to perform as well when you’re stressed.
If you determine that you CAN overcome the fear and accept the challenge, that will make it an opportunity for growth for you.
Ultimately, overcoming your fears and stepping out of your comfort zone causes you to embrace new challenges, learn new skills, develop self discipline, see more opportunities, and build resilience by pushing past perceived limitations and becoming stronger and more capable in the process.
So,are you ready to take that first step outside your comfort zone?
Be well + prosper,
Elaine xx
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