Does “Get Out Of Your Comfort Zone” Sound Right To You?
You hear it all the time. All over the place.
Google it. Google lists 64,300,000 results for “Get Out Of Your Comfort Zone.”
Check it out if you want to: Click Here.
They’re saying that to be a big, successful achiever…
- You have to expand from where you are;
- That pushing or expanding your personal envelope is going to be uncomfortable for you; and,
- That you have to do it anyway.
You see and hear it so often that it sounds like it must be true.
It’s not. It’s a myth.
It’s bad advice for the most part.
The real key to being both satisfied and successful is to:
- Live your life fully and completely inside your Comfort Zone.
- Doing so assures you a life of amazing self-confidence and self-esteem.
- It’s the best way to end negative self-judgment.
- It’s the easiest way to live your life and reach your full potential without stress and anxiety.
In fact, I’d go as far as to say…
“Never Get Out Of Your Comfort Zone.”
What Is Your Comfort Zone?
“Comfort Zone” can be defined as, “a place or situation where one feels safe or at ease and without stress…” Source.
Per the Cambridge Dictionary, “Comfort Zone” is, “…a situation in which you feel comfortable and in which your ability and determination are not being tested.” Source.
My definition – the definition for this Article and for Be The Naked You is:
- Being and living your life as your “Naked You” self.
- Feeling, thinking, acting, reacting, and interacting in ways that are in alignment, sync, and harmony with your Core Dominant Temperament™.
- Maximizing your innate, natural strengths, positive traits, and positive characteristics while consciously and deliberately minimizing, managing, and overcoming your innate, natural weaknesses, negative traits, and negative characteristics as needed.
- Doing what you’re good at and like best while avoiding what you’re not good at and don’t like.
How’s It Look In Real Life?
One thing you’ll need to do to make staying in your Comfort Zone work for you in your day-to-day life is to ignore other people’s advice, suggestions, opinions, and judgments.
Just because your best friends get thrills out of bungee jumping or motocross racing or competitive ballroom dancing, doesn’t mean you have to either like those things or do them.
Those friends will probably be touting the things they love and love to do. They’ll excel at telling you how much better off you’ll be if you love and do what they do.
Of course, you can love those things and do them if you want to.
However, if you don’t want to, wouldn’t feel comfortable, or it would stress you out doing them, then say “no.”
Go ahead and pull your Comfort Zone comforter over your head. Cuddle up in it. Congratulate yourself for doing so.
Do what you’re good at. A lot. With your best effort.
Avoid everything else if and when you can.
Those friends will also tell you that being in your Comfort Zone is limiting. And, that getting out of your Comfort Zone is liberating.
Not true.
Getting out of your Comfort Zone isn’t liberating.
It’s stressful.
Staying in your Comfort Zone is liberating.
Doing what you love and skipping what you hate is liberating.
Staying in your Comfort Zone is liberating as soon as you accept that it’s Okay to stay there.
It’s liberating as soon as you stop negative self-judging about it.
Regardless of what you like or don’t like, it’s OK.
There’s nothing wrong with you if you don’t like bungee jumping, rock climbing, football, knitting, yoga, or meditation.
You don’t need therapy because you don’t like or aren’t good at things that your friends, family, or society happen to like.
Don’t Misunderstand
I’m not saying it’s wrong or bad to try new and different things.
I’m a big believer in trying new things. Otherwise, you’ll never know what you like, don’t like, or what you’re good at or bad at.
The trick is to start with a thorough understanding and complete acceptance of your own, unique Temperament.
That’s your safety net. That’s your starting point. That’s your foundation. That what’s natural for you.
Once you have that down pat, you can explore branching out. Expanding. Testing. Improving. Growing.
When you try something new and don’t like it or aren’t good at it, you don’t have to continue doing it. You know where your safe place is and can go back there if you want to at any time.
If you try something new and like it, are good at it, and want to make it part of your life, guess what?
You don’t actually get out of your Comfort Zone for it.
You bring the new thing into your Comfort Zone.
You embrace it. It becomes part of your Comfort Zone.
You expanded your Comfort Zone.
Staying in your Comfort Zone doesn’t mean you aren’t be growing.
It’s not stagnation.
Venture out if you feel like it.
Only do it for yourself…never do it to prove something to someone else.
You have a bazillion choices.
Make choices that are compatible with your Comfort Zone.
Make choices that will help you grow by bringing new things into your Comfort Zone.
Don’t go outside your Comfort Zone.
Rather, expand your Comfort Zone.
It All Starts With Your Temperament Type
Your Comfort Zone is the sum of your innate Strengths, Traits, and Characteristics. It’s your Temperament Type in action.
That’s why it’s so comfortable. It’s natural for you. It’s practical, feels good, and it’s healthy.
It gives you power and sends you down the road to success, satisfaction, and contentment.
It’s 100% personal because you’re 100% unique.
You can achieve personal satisfaction and success by living in your Comfort Zone.
Stay in alignment, sync, and harmony with your Core Dominant Temperament™.
True happiness, satisfaction, and stress-free living aren’t about trying to change who you are.
They’re about Being The Naked You. Living in alignment with your innate Temperament.
(If you don’t know your Core Dominant Temperament™, including your innate Strengths, Traits, and Characteristics, please go take our free Temperament / Personality Test now. Click Here. Then scoot back over to this article. It will make lots more sense if you have a good understanding of your Temperament first.)
Temperament Types And Comfort Zones
Each of the 4 Temperament Types has their own version of their Comfort Zone.
Unlimited versions of Comfort Zones exist within each Temperament Type. That’s because each individual has his or her own unique Comfort Zone. That includes you. Yours is unique to you. At the same time, it will be similar to everyone else that shares your Core Dominant Temperament Type.
For example, pretend you’re a Yellow Phlegmatic.
By nature, Phlegmatics are on the shy side. They’re not aggressive. They dislike confrontation and conflict.
Those traits become aspects of a Yellow Phlegmatic’s Comfort Zone.
If you’re Phlegmatic, people have told you since infancy that you should be more aggressive. More proactive rather than reactive. Bolder. More forceful. That you should set boundaries and not let others cross them. To speak up more. To stand up for yourself.
Translated, that advice means, “get out of your Comfort Zone.”
How would you do that?
You’d have to put yourself in direct conflict with yourself.
Your Temperament and Comfort Zone are parts of your innate, unchangeable, DNA.
Your Comfort Zone is as much a natural and unchangeable part of you as your eye color is.
You can’t change it.
The best thing to do is accept it and learn to live with it.
You cause yourself stress and anxiety when you act in ways that are in conflict with your Temperament.
You’re fighting yourself. You’re doing battle with your nature.
That’s a fight you can never win.
Now, change gears and pretend that you’re a Blue Sanguine.
You’re fun loving. You love to talk and be the center of attention. You’re fast paced and impatient. You’re spontaneous. You take action based on “gut instinct” and emotion.
Those traits become aspects of a Blue Sanguine’s Comfort Zone.
They’re key parts of the real you.
What have your parents, family, teachers, and friends been telling you all your life?
Slow down. Don’t show off so much. You have to be more patient. Pay attention. Focus. Stop flitting from one thing to the other. Be more series. Life isn’t all fun and games, you know.
They’re advising you to “get out of your Comfort Zone.”
Like the Yellow Phlegmatics, you have to go to war with your Temperament to get out of your Comfort Zone. You have to fight against your DNA and your own nature.
Those are not fights you can win in the end.
Plus, if you try, you’ll cause unnecessary stress and anxiety.
You’ll also set yourself up for failure.
Next, pretend you’re a Green Melancholy.
You love order. You have perfectionistic tendencies. You love to do everything “right.” You’re a natural born rule follower. You’re very patient. You’re a thinker. Like Phlegmatics, you’re on the shy and introverted side. Socially, you may be awkward and uncomfortable.
Well-meaning people, who believe they have your best interests at heart, will tell you to be more outgoing. More assertive. More friendly with people. Not so rigid. Not so analytical. More spontaneous. Not so boring.
As with the others, to get out of your Comfort Zone requires the kind of effort that’s counter to your nature. That effort causes discomfort, anxiety, and stress.
Finally, pretend you’re a Red Choleric.
You’re fast paced, impatient, aggressive. You love being in charge…in control. You’re bottom line and results oriented. You thrive on competition, confrontation, and conflict. You love to push and stretch the rules to suit your own wants and needs.
Those characteristics are parts of your unique, personal Comfort Zone.
Your family and friends have been urging you to slow down. Not to be so pushy. That you don’t always have to be first. Don’t have to win. Don’t need to be in charge of everything. That you can’t always get away with stretching or breaking the rules.
To get out of your Comfort Zone, you’d have to fight with your nature to make those changes.
But, you’d lose that fight. You can’t change your nature. It’s in your DNA, Genome, and Temperament. It’s unchangeable.
All you’d end up with is undue stress and anxiety.
About That Stress
We’re all different in many ways. Yet, we’re exactly the same if we try to get out of our Comfort Zones.
If we try to go against our Temperaments, get out of our natural Comfort Zones, and do everything people urge us to do all our lives, we create tons of self-made stress.
“Be slower,” they say. Or, “be faster.” Be more exciting. Stop showing off. Slow down. Speed up. Don’t be so pushy. Be more aggressive. Talk more – be more social. Talk less – be more serious.
The urging and advice to get out of our own Comfort Zone never ends.
Any time you make an effort to get out of your Comfort Zone you create internal conflict.
You fight with your nature, your DNA, your Gnome, and your Temperament.
You put yourself in conflict with your genuine, natural self.
That conflict causes stress.
Stress causes disease – both mental and physical.
“Stress doesn’t only make us feel awful emotionally,” says Jay Winner, MD, author of ‘Take the Stress Out of Your Life’ and director of the Stress Management Program for Sansum Clinic in Santa Barbara, Calif. “It can also exacerbate just about any health condition you can think of.”
Excepted From WebMD – 10 Health Problems Related to Stress That You Can Fix
The Bottom Line
Your Temperament Type is the manifestation and reflection of your innate nature.
Your physical and emotional equilibrium depend on living in alignment, sync, and harmony with your innate nature.
You cannot escape your own perceived shortcomings by trying to be something you’re not. Or trying to grow in ways that are contrary to your nature.
You only deceive yourself by trying to imitate or trade places with people who appear to be happier, more satisfied, or more successful than you are.
Attempting it causes you unnecessary stress and anxiety.
There’s evidence that stress causes inflammation and inflammation causes many – if not all diseases. (Body Ecology – Inflammation: The Real Cause of All Disease and How to Reduce and Prevent It.)
At a minimum, it zaps your energy and causes emotional upheaval.
Also, avoid making assumptions.
For example, if you’re an introvert, don’t assume life would be better if you were an extrovert.
Or look at it this way. You see people meditating. They may brag about how great meditation is for your body, mind, and soul.
It may sound good to you.
But, don’t assume meditation is going to make you “better” in any way.
It might. But, here’s the problem.
Meditation, for example, may be great for Yellow Phlegmatics and Green Melancholics. They’re slow paced, patient, and more on the introverted side. They’re inwardly oriented. They like reflection, calmness, and quiet times.
But, if you’re a Red Choleric or Blue Sanguine, trying to meditate may turn out to be stress producing and unsuitable for you.
Red Cholerics and Blue Sanguines are fast paced by nature. They’re in perpetual motion. They’re energized by people and activity. They don’t like to sit still and be quiet.
Reds’ and Blues’ spiritual growth may be more likely to come from being busy, having fun, or feeling productive.
There’s no universal right or wrong about any of this. It’s personal.
You’re doing the right thing if it’s in alignment, sync, and harmony with your Core Dominant Temperament.
That’s why it’s so critical to know, love, respect, and accept yourself at your core level.
That’s what it means to Be The Naked You.
Test lots of different things if you want to. Pull the plug quickly if they’re not working for you. Also, double down on things that do work for you.
Discover the things that work for you easily. Search for the most satisfaction and success with the least stress.
There’s one huge cautionary note here.
Sometimes you do have to push yourself out of your “Comfort Zone.”
It’s when you’re using it as an excuse not to be doing things that you know you need to be doing.
It requires conscious self-awareness. And understanding your Temperament. And knowing what makes you the way you are.
That’s why it’s so critical to dig in, “get” your Temperament, and always align yourself with it.
When you hear anyone telling you to “get out of your Comfort Zone,” be wary.
Even your parents, spouse, and best friends don’t know all the ins and outs of your personal Comfort Zone.
Sure, they have your best interests and heart. But, they see the world from their own, unique perspectives, not yours.
- It’s up to you to protect yourself.
- It’s up to you to avoid and cut stress from your life.
- It’s up to you to find your own straight road and smooth path to your highest levels of satisfaction and success.
- It’s up to you to reach your personal level of peak performance.
A great first step is to stay in your Comfort Zone.
It will help you live every moment in alignment, sync, and harmony with your Temperament.
You’ll always be able to access your natural Strengths, Traits, and Characteristics.
It guarantees you’ll Be The Naked You.