Self-Help Myths: Expand Your Comfort Zone

February 18th 2008

Welcome to another post in the self-help myths series! This time I will take a look at the comfort zone, which is the collection of areas, thoughts, attitudes and environments in your personal, social and work lives that you have become accustomed to. To stray away from these would cause varying degrees of anxiety, which can hold you back. A great many self-help guides state that expanding your comfort zone is the key to achieving your dreams. The more new things you do the bigger your comfort zone becomes, right? Wrong!

A lot of advice suggests that you should always look to do something new to expand your comfort zone, they will even go so far as to advise that you do a new thing every day. You decide to go to a new bar on Monday, smile at a stranger on Tuesday and admit you were wrong to a colleague on Wednesday. Realistically, what will any of that achieve in the long run? We all agree that habits don’t change overnight, so why should the boundaries of our comfort zone be affected by a bunch of random one-off actions?

Personal growth seems to be intrinsically tied to the idea of expanding ones comfort zone through regularly pushing ourselves into new situations and experiences. Especially in business. Ever had a personal review where you’ve been told you’re treading water? Oddly it’s never good enough to evolve and improve on what you have, you instead need to look for the next rock to jump on. Thus we have a culture of mentally unsettled managers who are constantly bombarded with new things. It’s not so much significant that they come away with anything of value, it’s simply the fact they get a new experience under their belts.

Yes, it’s incredibly important that you be open to new experiences and interests. It ties into the whole idea of being curious and inquisitive. There is nothing worse for personal growth than being close-minded. The more new things you do (even just one time), the more you will learn, the more you will experience, the more your mind will grow. As people get older they tend to slip into routine, and it gets to the point where anything that upsets that routine is both scary and intimidating. That is what you should be trying to put off as long as possible.

If you want to do something new everyday that’s brilliant. But don’t do it to expand your comfort zone, that’s a flawed concept. Do it because you want to grow your curiosity, learn new things, understand yourself better and ultimately learn to cope with all the anxieties that accompany a new situation or experience.

But what of the comfort zone itself? It shouldn’t be ignored, instead it should be treated in a different way. The comfort zone covers those actions, areas, environments, tasks, tastes in food, music etc that you are comfortable with, that define who you are. It doesn’t form overnight and the idea that doing something new once will actually make a single dent on that comfort zone is naive.

Effectively, your comfort zone is your base of operations, your place of strength. You want to culture it, feed it and make it a fortress by learning to know what you like and dislike, what makes you happy and what doesn’t. I went for a lesson of snowboarding a few months back. Tried it, wasn’t quite what I expected so I’ve not been since. However, I discovered a little bit more about what things I am into. If you foster a strong comfort zone, you can venture out into the wildest unknowns and do completely different things, because at the end of the day you know you have a strong comfort zone to come back to.