comfort zone | The Caleb Barney Collection

Playing it safe is costing you

If you want to “play it safe” or to not be criticized, you can find ways to hide. Don’t take the shot. Don’t take the risk of losing, messing up, or looking foolish. Don’t play the game…

But if you do that, you limit how much you can grow and how great you can become. Each time you fail, you learn something. You grow. You become more anti-fragile. Use those failures as stepping stones for your success.

You can stay within your comfort zone, but by doing so, you’ll never reach your full potential.

Your level of success depends on this

You can be mildly successful by never going out of your comfort zone, never speaking up or standing out, and never really risking much. But when you don’t risk anything, you cap your upside.

The best social media influencers realize this. Many of them say provocative things to increase engagement. The greater amount of comments on their post will tell the algorithm of Facebook, Instagram, etc that this is a popular or trending topic and then shows that to more people (which, if it really is a controversial post, often leads to more engagement). It’s a self-perpetuating cycle. To gain the greatest social media success, you can’t stay small. You have to be ok with people disagreeing with you (sometimes vehemently). It’s easier, and more comfortable, to not post anything. But if you don’t say anything, it will be harder to be seen. To maximize your success in this avenue, you need to be willing to step outside your comfort zone, to speak up, to stand out, and to risk being criticized.

I really don’t like using that example because I don’t want to encourage anyone to say something they don’t believe in just to get more likes, follows, comments, recognition, etc. But I used that example because I feel like many people can understand it. If you value comfort, stay small and unrecognizable. But if you value maximum exposure, you’ll have to take the good (success) with the bad (risk of failure).

Getting out of your comfort zone

Most of the best things in life happen at the edges of your comfort zone. If you only want to feel comfort, you’ll be less likely to branch out/try new things, to overcome adversity, learn new skill sets, etc.

The higher degree of difficulty, the less comfortable most people are with trying to tackle that problem. If you’re willing (and able) to solve that problem, and if you can find a way to solve the problem for others too, you often are compensated (monetarily) for it. Most people want to stay in their comfort zones and are willing to trade money for comfort (paying someone else to solve their problems). There’s nothing wrong with this. We all do it, and depending on the stage of life we’re in, it may be a smarter financial decision to pay an expert/specialist to do something more efficiently so you’re not wasting your non-renewable resource (time) on something you don’t know how to do well and will end up with a worse finished product than if the expert did it in the first place.

Life will only change when you become more committed to your dreams than you are to your comfort zone.

Four things to avoid when trying to improve…

1. Avoid getting locked into bad habits. You usually have an idea of if you shouldn’t be doing something, so don’t do it.

2. Avoid resisting change. Change not for change’s sake, but to progress. Always strive for a better way to do something – doing it more effectively, more efficiently, or finding something to replace it. (Do you need to be doing that activity at all? Does anyone?)

3. Avoid seeking comfort in repetition. Just because it’s comfortable doesn’t make it right. The greatest times of accomplishment are often preceded by the greatest challenges/struggles which push us outside our comfort zone. We must embrace challenge.

4. Avoid applying old solutions to new problems. Your core values should stay the same. Your goal(s) might stay the same. But your tactics on how to complete the goal could (and probably should) change somewhat regularly, depending on if the tactics are producing the results you want. Just because a specific solution worked for something else doesn’t mean it will work for this new problem.