Why Growth Cannot Be Achieved Without Stepping Out of Your Comfort Zone

I think a lot of times, the thing that holds most people back, is their frame of mind as opposed to any distinct lack of knowledge. The frame of mind where we get too comfortable, sometimes too scared to experiment beyond what we already know. 

Sometimes the problem lies in us not being entirely aware of the reasons behind venturing out and trying something new. After all, if the feeling of comfort signals that our most basic needs are being met, why should we seek to abandon it?

“The comfort zone is a behavioural state within which a person operates in an anxiety-neutral condition, using a limited set of behaviours to deliver a steady level of performance, usually without a sense of risk.”  — Judith Bardwick

Guarded by the comfort zone, there isn’t always much incentive to go above and beyond or strive towards new heights of performance. It’s here that a lot of people choose to simply go about routines that hold lower or rather no risk, which, over a period of time, causes their progress to plateau.

There is this theory that puts this thought into perspective; a mouse was put at the top of a jar that was filled with grains. It was happy to have access to so much food around it, after which it decided not to search for food again. After all, with a load of food all around, it could easily live a happy life.

However, as days went by, the mouse devoured the grains until it reached the bottom of the jar and could no longer make its way out. It was now stuck. The mouse was solely dependent on those limited grains for survival and when the jar eventually empties out, the mouse will die.

In a world where short-term fulfilment seems to be the trend, it is rather unsurprising that people cave-in to short-term contentment rather than going through the long, boring and unpredictable process of investing in the future. However, this is a flawed attempt, as continuing to stay in your comfort zone, no matter how safe it may seem for now, has a high chance to lead to doom, at the end of the tunnel.

Point being that, short-term pleasures, more often than not, lead to long-term traps. If things are coming easy to you and you’re getting too comfortable, you are most likely getting trapped into survival mode. I am a firm believer in making the most of your potential and if you aren’t using it, you’re losing it.

It takes an immense amount of courage to step out from the comfort zone and into uncharted territory. However, if you persevere long enough, you’ll eventually enter the learning zone. The place where you gain new skills and deal with challenges resourcefully. After a period of learning, a new comfort zone is formed, wherein one’s ability expands to reach even greater heights of performance. That is known as the growth zone.

Stepping out of your comfort zone and making mistakes along the way forms the route towards great ideas and innovation. They are the stepping stones to shifting outside the comfort zone and towards the zone of growth, where new discoveries are made and substantial lessons are learnt.

Once you have successfully moved out of the comfort zone, even just a little, it almost becomes a compulsive need to find the answer to “What can I do next?.”

While it’s completely normal to enter into a comfort zone once in a while, it can also just as easily become dangerous to make it your home, because it’s a surefire way to lack motivation to move ahead in life.

Down the road, not taking action at the right time, would mean using up all your resources and being in a position where there’s no way out.