Step Out of Your Comfort Zone: How to Challenge Yourself
Written by MasterClass
Last updated: Jan 10, 2023 • 5 min read
It takes a lot of courage to step out of your comfort zone. Challenging yourself can be uncomfortable and even frightening, but it’s a worthwhile pursuit in countless ways. By taking just a few small steps forward each day, you can jumpstart your personal growth and achieve things you never would have imagined you could accomplish.
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What Is a Comfort Zone?
Your comfort zone is the area of your life in which you feel like everything is in its right place. It encompasses the behaviors, habits, and places you turn to when you’re on autopilot. It’s a metaphorical place where there’s little to no risk and where you never have to face your fears.
Staying in your comfort zone can manifest in a wide variety of ways. Perhaps you go out to eat at the same place each Friday rather than ever trying a new restaurant. Maybe you stay at a stable job rather than ever striking out to pursue a long-held dream or desire.
There’s nothing wrong with having a comfort zone; however, to evolve as a human being, you must step out of your comfort zone periodically to challenge yourself and explore new things. Without leaving comfort to enter this sort of growth zone, you’ll remain stagnant in both your personal and professional growth.
Why Is Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone Important?
You must leave your comfort zone to live up to your full potential. Here are a few reasons why disrupting your daily routine and getting out of your comfort zone is so important:
- To achieve your dreams: Renowned psychologist Abraham Maslow placed self-actualization at the apex of his hierarchy of needs. In other words, he thought becoming the full-fledged version of your unique self is the most important thing you can ever do. To reach your full potential, however, you must leave your mundane and ordinary comfort zone.
- To build your confidence: To develop self-confidence, you need to challenge yourself. As you take small steps to acquire new skills, you will realize there is no difference between the successful people you admire and yourself. Each time you achieve a new goal, you’ll see you have what it takes to succeed and gain a new level of confidence.
- To conquer your fears: When you get to the end of your comfort zone, you’ll have to act with courage. If your default mode is to run away from your fears, you’re not alone. Human beings are hardwired to stay in their comfort zones. You have to go against your innate biological programming to try new and scary things. But when you do so, you might discover you had nothing to worry about in the first place.
Why Is It Difficult to Step Out of Your Comfort Zone?
It’s easy for people to operate with a fixed mindset. They want to believe things can remain how they are, for better or for worse, often out of a fear of change. These self-imposed limitations might stifle you, but they do provide a great deal of comfort and predictability.
Setting goals, facing your fear of failure, and leaving your comfort zone might feel like a direct threat to your well-being. In reality, doing these things will enable you to maximize your sense of personal fulfillment.
How to Get Out of Your Comfort Zone
Learning to grow takes courage, tenacity, and an openness to risk. Take these steps to get out of your comfort zone:
- 1. Adopt a growth mindset. Leave behind your fixed mindset about how life is or should be. To grow, you must believe it’s possible for things to be better than they are now. Personal development takes trial and error, so be just as ready to fail as you are to succeed. Still, it’s the only way to get out of a rut and achieve your full potential.
- 2. Seek out new challenges. The same path will take you to the same destination every time—you’ll need to take different routes to achieve different results. Your options to challenge yourself are endless. You could try public speaking for the first time, learn a musical instrument, get a new job, or even go skydiving. As you do so, keep in mind the Yerkes–Dodson Law, which states you are capable of performing at your highest level in scenarios that test you or stress you out a little. However, avoid situations that completely overwhelm you.
- 3. Set manageable goals. Break down each goal into a series of baby steps. You run the risk of becoming discouraged if you try to do too much at once. For instance, suppose you live in California, want to visit New York, and are afraid of flying. You could take several short plane flights to nearby destinations first to get yourself ready to one day visit the East Coast. Regardless, always remember a single step forward is a one hundred percent improvement over taking zero steps at all.
3 Tips for Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone
Getting out of your comfort zone can take a lot of motivation and preparation. Here are three tips to keep in mind as you set out to try new things:
- 1. Ask what you want out of life. Define what you are looking for in your lifetime. Ask yourself where you want to be in one year, five years, even ten years. Plot out the skill set necessary to make it to any given goal you set in the time you prescribe. Maybe your goals are even simpler.
- 2. Look for support. Reach out to friends, family members, and coworkers for support on stepping out of your comfort zone. They can offer you new perspectives on how to build confidence. For that matter, you might be able to face some of your mutual fears together.
- 3. Reframe your fears. When you think of fear as something negative, you’re less prone to want to face it. Instead, think of the things that scare you as opportunities. Every time you overcome one of them, you’ll prove to yourself you can do far more than you anticipated. The worst-case scenario you have in your mind is nothing compared to a life spent without ever challenging yourself to become the best version of who you can be.
You’re Worth It
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