Your Comfort Zone Is a Kill Zone
Posted on September 11, 2015 by Loretta Love Huff, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.
Your comfort zone is a vast wasteland of opportunities you let slip by, dreams you didn’t pursue, relationships you shirked and jobs you didn't take.
I just came back from a speaking engagement. I had tailored the talk a bit: first, because I had less time than normal and second, because it was a new, special market.
Even in the short time I presented, I found myself talking more than usual about our comfort zones.
It didn’t occur to me how important a topic it was until several people came up afterward to thank me and when asked “what touched you the most?”, they replied quietly and thoughtfully, “the comfort zone part”.
I looked up the definition of a ‘kill zone’ and found it to mean “the area of a military engagement with a high concentration of fatalities”.
So, based on this premise, your comfort zone has created, swept under the rug and buried “a high concentration of fatalities”.
Think about it. Your comfort zone is a vast wasteland of…opportunities you let slip by, dreams you didn’t pursue, relationships you were afraid to develop, jobs you didn’t take, dead-end jobs you didn’t leave, calls you didn’t make, gigs you let someone else win, important conversations you stuffed, trips you didn’t go on, stands you should have taken but didn’t, differences you could have made but ignored, fears you let dominate and prevail, personal growth you didn’t experience.
Have I said enough? Are you squirming yet? I am.
We all have a comfort zone. We often don’t even notice it. We delude ourselves into thinking it’s a happy, safe place.
And at some level, it is. But at what cost?
If you could trade that safety for deeper relationships, being fully expressed, earning more money, being seen and making a bigger difference in the world, living a thrilling, fulfilling life experiencing what might seem like magical serendipitous moments, creating the life you dream of, would it be worth stepping out of that comfortable, dream-killing zone?
Here are 7 ideas to break you out of your kill zone comfort rut.
1. Find something on your bucket list and do it this week.
2. Call the person you’ve been avoiding, have the conversation you’ve been afraid to have and do it in a way that honors both of you.
3. Commit to a goal so big and public it scares you.
4. Be more controversial on important issues that matter to you.
5. End any relationship that is no longer serving your greater good.
6. Stop waiting for permission.
7. Stop waiting to feel ready or confident. Take the action you’re dreading; confidence and readiness will appear as a result.
Do any of these and feel your power. Do all of them and expect a miracle (or two or seven or more)!
