Decisions That Influence Getting Out of One's Comfort Zone

The mythical “comfort zone” so often talked about is nothing but the range of behaviors and situations in your life in which you feel comfortable, safe and secure. All the things outside of your comfort zone make you feel stressed and insecure. For example, approaching strange people at parties to make friends with them might be outside your comfort zone, whereas asking them for the time might be within your comfort zone.

It all comes down to constantly expanding your comfort zone and incorporating new areas of your life into it. When some behavior, action or situation is a part of your comfort zone, it will never make you feared or stressful. How do you expand your comfort zone? Only by doing things that are outside of its borders. Only when you discover that your fears were unfounded and unnecessary will they vanish forever. So every single day you should be doing things that scare you or used to scare you before.

Let me give you a few examples. Go down the street and smile at strangers. When on a bus, sing your favorite song, clearly and visibly moving your lips. Go to a part of your city where you’ve never been before (unless it’s a place you shouldn’t be going without a machine gun and grenade launcher). Talk to strangers. Ask them how to get somewhere or for their opinion on something. Go through the supermarket with your left hand raised and keep it that way. Go to a club alone and meet people. Or jump into a fountain. Remember that all of your fears are primitive and primal. You are absolutely safe and just need to rewire your brain and tell it, “Dude, come on, take a look around, it’s 2016 already! We don’t live in caves anymore!” enough times that it finally gets it.

When we make a decision and take action, our current situation (and hence, various possible risks) becomes more real and clearer. It becomes more defined. And what’s more defined is never as terrifying as something we can’t describe or can’t clearly see and define. This phenomenon is easily observed if you watch horror films—we feel the most tension in those parts of the movie when something gets closer and closer, the floor creaks, the window shutter slams into the window frame and we can sense that there’s SOMETHING hiding in the dark. That’s when we fear the most. But once this “something” materializes into a shape of some kind, even as the most obnoxious monster or vampire, the tension decreases. No zombie or mummy in any movie will ever induce such fear as we feel when we don’t know what’s lurking around the corner. Once you see it—the fun is over.

The same effect applies to real life, when we are so afraid that something might happen that we don’t even try to think about what that “something” might really be or whether it can really happen. We stop at the thought that something will be scary and we become petrified. We pause our “internal horror film” in the exact moment of the greatest tension, and then we rewind it to the beginning. A good medicine for our fear is often simply to watch “the movie” to the end.

I guess you already know what it’s about. Going on “missions” is the best and fastest way to boost your confidence. Once you start doing them, your comfort zone will increase quickly and for good, and your confidence will follow. This is true in all areas of your life. Do you want to be more self- confident during public speeches? Give as many public speeches as you can, and so on. Thanks to such a mindset you will start feeling much better in all kinds of life situations. Doing all these things will make you feel as good as possible, absolutely cool and self-confident.

Take your “confidence notebook” and write out all of the missions you will be doing during the coming week. One mission a day, seven days straight—no breaks. Start with the easiest things (e.g., smiling at strangers on the streets), gradually progressing to more and more difficult missions. You will see that they will all be stressful only at the beginning. After only a short time, you will feel more self-confident. Some time ago, after a seminar I was taking part in, we hit the streets with the attendees and started doing things that would be considered socially “strange” by most people. We would approach people and start asking them silly (not disrespectful, but uncommon) questions, and even ended up taking a shower in the city fountain. After no longer than a single hour of having this type of fun, the majority of us gained the courage to break the ice and started feeling about 200% more confident in further social interactions.