4 benefits of stepping outside your comfort zone

Your comfort zone isn’t necessarily a physical place, rather it’s a psychological and emotional construct you’ve both created for yourself and have been conditioned into as well. Your comfort zone helps define the routine of your daily life. It’s the space in which everything you are familiar and comfortable with resides in. That comfort zone implies safety and security.

Creating a comfort zone means you can move throughout your day without worry, anxiety or stress. It’s a healthy framework for keeping us calm. But when the time calls for challenge, transition and growth, stepping out of that comfort zone is equally as good for us.

Stepping outside of your comfort zone, on purpose, is an incredibly beneficial thing to do. Learning to cope with change, stress and challenge, means that when they rear their heads without warning you have already developed an arsenal of coping mechanisms. And quite simply, when you don’t step outside of your comfort zone, you are missing out. Missing out on growth and a whole world of experiences and opportunities you’d never see coming.

When you stop to think about it, can you see the boundaries of your own comfort zone? Do you actively know where they are? Are you choosing to stay inside them?

Why? Is it fear of failure?

When you start stepping outside your comfort zone and rise above this fear, you shift your outlook. Instead of a fear of failure, it becomes an appreciation of failure. You learn to see failure as a teacher, even a valuable experience. It’s not that you seek failure, but instead welcome it when and if it does come because you know that there is growth in failure too.

Here are four benefits you’ll see when you start to break through that comfort zone:

1. New challenges push you to dig deep and call upon the wealth of experiences and life lessons you already have in your store. You’ll have no idea of the things you can solve if you never push yourself to tap into this knowledge.
2. Taking risks help you grow. Regardless of the outcome, a risk will see you grow. The lessons you learn from success or failure become part of your personal story board, ready to be called upon for future challenges.
3. Leaving your comfort zone opens you up to new opportunities. If you aren’t out there, pushing against the boundaries you’ll never see what is circling just outside of your comfort zone.
4. Leaving your comfort zone helps you learn to cope with change. Change is an inevitable fact of life. The more you challenge yourself, the better you become at adapting and dealing with unexpected change.