Among the many benefits that come with challenging your thinking, the opportunity to see your blinds spots is perhaps the most precious. Seeing your blind spots reveals the edges of your comfort zone.
A comfort zone is often what you yearn for when you need a break from challenging situations — which can be life itself. The comfort zone is often misconstrued as a place but in reality is actually just a habit for coping. When you learn how to identify your habits for coping, you can then master how to expand your comfort zone to transform your experience of life.
Here are some paradoxical examples of comfort zones; perfectionism, chaos, control, conflict.
What is familiar often becomes the comfort zone. Even though the actual state is not comfortable, familiarity is and can become your blind spot. What is habitual feels comforting even if it is not.
When the comfort zone is less about comfort and more about familiarity and habit, the original purpose is left in the dust.
You can, of course, stay in your comfort zone. However if you identify what truly brings you comfort you would realize you don’t need, or want to. Not as a self-actualizing conscious leader. No different than an athlete needing recovery time to achieve athletic prowess, a comfort zone is there as a place to regroup, refresh, celebrate, and rest. But, it is not the place where you can stretch the limits of who you are.
To begin a daily practice of stretching the limits of who you are, ask yourself:
What new reality would I like to bring into being, and what am I willing to do to expand my comfort zone to bring it to life today?
How to expand your comfort zone: envision a new reality.
Often, when people think of vision, they think it’s something in the future.
At Vista Caballo, when we speak about vision, we’re talking about creating a dramatically different reality outside of your comfort zone.
Vision starts with imagining a reality that doesn’t currently exist, intending what you imagine to come to life, and putting everything you have behind it to make it a reality. Chances are you will find yourself at the edge of your comfort zone more than a few times as you do. Which means you have to be very familiar with the edge of your comfort zone and know how to lead yourself past it when you get there.
Learn to negotiate with your toughest negotiator: you.
Admitting that you need to develop to explore new terrain takes courage. The more successful you are or have been, the easier it is to stay in your comfort zone rather than challenge yourself, especially if the road to success has been a tough one. The clearest indicator that you are on the edge of your comfort zone is when your thoughts, heart and instincts feel conflicted.
Being unsure of yourself or your abilities to perform well in a new reality is the perfect opportunity for your ego to do everything — and anything — it can to convince you to retreat to familiar behaviors and styles that fence you in.
This is where you become aware of just how tough a negotiator you are and where your truest leadership starts. You are the only one that can lead yourself to, and through, these moments.
Envisioning a new reality includes envisioning yourself as the type of conscious leader that can bring that reality to life.
The StillPoint Experience is one of Vista Caballo’s science-based transformative technologies that provides a framework to learn how to win the negotiations you need to lead yourself past your comfort zone.
Developing the ability to bring positive new realities for the good of the whole to life can empower and fulfill you.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete. Buckminster Fuller.
As Buckminster Fuller so brilliantly suggested:
Stop focusing on fixing or fighting. Instead focus on something so wonderful that the old simply falls away.
When you reach the edge of your comfort zone your ego will fight you.
Expect it.
Prepare for it.
Focus on developing new thinking.
Put everything you have into this.
Challenge yourself.
Create space for it.
Become great.
Then become greater.
Make being conscious, conscientious and aware your top priority and watch how conflict in your life falls away and your new realities come to life as you realize your comfort zone was not all it was cut out to be. It was just a habit from years gone by before you were who you are now.
Personal transformation for leaders — and stepping out of our comfort zones into bold unstoppable zones — takes awareness, willingness, time and practice.
This leadership development tip is adapted from “How To Step Out of Your Comfort Zone to Take On the World.”
Are you ready to step out of your comfort zone and join us in the unstoppable zone?
Vista Caballo is empowering and equipping conscious leaders to become unstoppable in leading their best lives and solving our world’s challenges: the leaders who know that only through the power of self-discovery will they be able to create the solutions to the current social and environmental challenges they face.
Join us. Equip and empower yourself to transform from where you are to where you want to be, and in doing so transform our planet.