Some will wonder why should we push ourselves outside our comfort zones. After all, often our comfort zone is well – rather comfortable, easy and non-challenging. It doesn’t really require too much work and often allows us to be a little laid back. However, often until you do push yourself a little (or a lot) outside your comfort zone, nothing changes. If nothing changes, then nothing improves. Some of this article does include some change management tips as often these two concepts (change management and moving outside your comfort zone) fall hand in hand and cannot always be separated. Here are my top tips around these two subjects.
Pushing Beyond Your Comfort Zone
Know Your Why
Change, or improvement – and consequently, pushing outside your comfort zone, usually need to have a reason. We shouldn’t change things just for the reason of change. There should be a good reason, and it could be any number of things, including:
- Improving your job, career or income prospects
- Growing your business
- Becoming a homeowner (versus renter)
- Advancing your education
- Going on a trip
- Improving your health … and more.
When you have a ‘why’ or reason or purpose, then you’re more likely to be willing to take the next step and change and improve and often that means pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. Something as simple as speaking in front of a group of people can for some, be exceedingly difficult, but it might mean a promotion, or opportunity to grow your business, so you might want to become good at this. Recognise where you believe you’re holding yourself back, possibly because it’s uncomfortable, and decide if you want to change this. You may even want/need to challenge your existing beliefs.
Overcome Fear and Start
Frequently, the hardest step is the first one. It may well be uncomfortable, scary or perhaps if you’re honest with yourself, it’s as simple as a degree of laziness. You may have even developed coping mechanisms to manage your fear of failure. If you don’t give something a go, then you won’t fail. Whilst you might believe that if you do nothing, you won’t get ahead, but you won’t fall behind either. The thing is that often, by standing still you are, in fact, sliding behind. You may be left behind as others around you take up the challenge, improve themselves, push outside their comfort zone and then naturally leave you behind.
So, the best thing you can do is to make a decision of what you want to change, determine the first step and then take that first step. It’s been said a million times, but it’s true, often the first step is the very hardest!
How to Get Started
Once you know what you want to change, achieve, action or improve, then write down your action steps. I do this a lot with both life coaching clients and business coaching clients. Writing down your steps means you’ve now got a plan of attack. Put those steps into chronological order (order you will action) and then begin with step one. If the change involves others (team, family, staff, co-workers) then involve them in the planning stage so that they have ‘buy-in’ as well. However, be strong, they may also (like most people) dislike change and may not be entirely on board. Listen to them, but have your ‘reasons’ ready to readdress their fears.
Make sure each step is small and manageable or do-able. Baby steps! You may need to seek help, training or guidance along the way. At this stage, don’t look at or worry too much about all the steps (that can create overwhelm) purely just look at your next step.
If you need to, put the action into your diary or schedule. You might want to get more exercise, and if that means getting up earlier, then step one will be to set your alarm. Also scheduling the walks, Yoga classes or trips to the gym in your diary will help. Ensure your diary (presuming it’s electronic) has reminders to help it happen.
Habits are Created Through Consistency
Turning up day after day makes the change happen. If you have a day you miss, or doesn’t happen, that’s one day; that’s not an excuse to skip all the tomorrows. For this reason, having an accountability partner is often helpful. Someone to help keep you on track and accountable for your actions. Once you declare your intentions to another person, you’re most likely to action it.
Once you do something uncomfortable a few times, guess what? It becomes less uncomfortable and before you know it, it’s easy and possibly even enjoyable and you’ll be seeing changes and results occur. For this reason, baby steps in the beginning should be advancing along the way. Perhaps you’re wanting to exercise more and initially it was purely a kilometre walk. Once that becomes comfortable, then you need to advance and move a little more outside the comfort zone and perhaps make it two kilometres. Perhaps you’ll speed up the walk and it becomes a jog. Possibly you’ll do some mini sprints for short periods as you jog. The point is, that once it becomes comfortable, you need to move it up a notch to stretch that comfort again to the uncomfortable. This is ongoing advancement, improvement and growth.
Manage Mindset
If the change is in the workplace, then you’ll need to manage not only your mindset but that of the team. With only you, or a whole team, when something doesn’t go to plan, we often get too ready, too quickly, to declare it a failure and quit. Things frequently go askew. There will be setbacks, challenges or hiccups along the change journey. You can choose to quit and declare it failed, or you can pick yourself up, dust yourself off and continue. Your play may need a tweak or adjustment. It might have been your plan was a little overly ambitious and needs to be spaced out a bit more. Something may have changed and the plan needs an amendment. Don’t spend too much time focusing on what went wrong, but rather, learn from any failures and then get back up on your horse!
Along the way, you may become ‘tired’ or a little over it, or stop forgetting just how well you are doing. For this reason, it’s often good to record our starting point and then track our progress. Your goal might have been to become better at selling. One way to track this is to look at your sales conversion rate when you started. Is the percentage increasing? When you’re doing well (or even purely sticking to the plan), reward yourself. This might be an early mark on a Friday, or going shopping or purely having a sleep-in once a week. Go back to your why and remind yourself of the big picture.
When it comes to change, improvement and growth, do not underestimate the effect of those around you. Surround yourself with positive and motivated people. You may find that coaching will help you have someone in your corner who will help you in very practical ways to achieve your goals and objectives. A coach also acts not only as your planning guru but is also a sounding board, plus accountability partner. A coach is there to help you achieve your goals and that is their focus; there are no other motivations or motives. In my view, when it comes to my clients, it’s all about you and your potential. If you’d like to chat to me at all – reach out here.
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