Do you avoid stepping out of your comfort zone?
Do you avoid trying new experiences? Do you let fear stop you from achieving your goals?
This article explains how you limit your success by living inside your comfort zone and offers you ways to step out of your comfort zone to achieve your goals.
Whatever you want to achieve in life someone else has most likely already achieved it. Whether you want to lose weight, run a marathon, stop smoking or overcome illness, someone else has already done it and shown you how to do it.
But some people go through their entire life with their mental hand brake on. They hold on to their negative thoughts and suffer the emotional effects that these negative thoughts have.
They stay in their comfort zone through choice and hold onto false self-beliefs and self-doubt. When they try to achieve their dreams, these negative thoughts and pre-programmed comfort zones cancel out their good intentions, no matter how hard they try.
You can achieve your goals, not through using willpower, but by simply releasing your mental handbrake and letting go of your limiting beliefs and fear. Releasing your mental handbrake erases your negative self-beliefs of fear, inadequacy, jealousy, resentment, anger, guilt and shame.
We all know it is much easier to slide downhill than to push up hill. It is easier to use your mental gravity rather than push uphill against gravity.
Feel your fear and just do it anyway
As you start taking action to achieve your goals you will have to confront your fears at some point. Fear is natural. But most people let fear stop them from taking the steps to achieve their goals. Successful people feel the fear and don’t let it stop them from achieving their goals. If you want to achieve your goals you need to feel your fear and just do it anyway.
Do you find yourself doing anything to avoid that uncomfortable feeling of fear? If you do, you will find achieving your goals very difficult, if not impossible.
If your goal is worthwhile then you take risks. You need to accept that you may not achieve your goal the way you wanted to, but that should not put you off trying to achieve your goal. Remember the wise saying: “nothing ventured is nothing gained”.
Get out of your comfort zone
Fear is your body’s way of telling you, you are out of your comfort zone and it is part of your ‘fight or flight’ response. It gives you that burst of adrenaline that helps you deal with a threat. In prehistoric times, fear would have saved our ancestors from wild animals but today it is simply a signal that you must stay alert and cautious.
Your comfort zone is a self-created prison with graffiti written all over the walls of your unconscious mind. This graffiti is a collection of statements that include ‘I can not’, ‘I should not’, ‘I must not’ and other negative beliefs that you have accumulated over your life. You are conditioned to think in this limited way.
3 ways to step out of your comfort zone
The good news is you can break free of your prison and erase the graffiti written on your walls. To step out of your comfort zone you must take these 3 steps:
- State positive affirmations that represent the happiness you want.
- Create powerful new mental images of yourself living your new happy life.
- Use the Emotional Freedom Technique therapy to erase negative thoughts, self-beliefs and emotions.
Performing these three steps regularly will help you change how you respond and behave to events in your life that keep you in your comfort zone.
Remember you are never stuck in your comfort zone forever. You can shift your thinking and behaviour so you can step out of your comfort zone. All that has been happening is you have been recreating the same experience and mental images over and over. You keep thinking the same thoughts, maintaining the same beliefs, speaking the same words and doing the same actions.
It is too easy to create an endless loop of negative behaviour which keeps you trapped in your comfort zone.
Create mental images of the happiness you want
Your limiting thoughts create images in your mind and those images govern your behaviour which in turn reinforces your limiting thoughts.
Perhaps your boss has asked you to give a presentation at work. As a result, you start worrying that you will forget some information. These thoughts create images in your mind of you forgetting some information while giving the presentation. Those images start to create a sense of fear and dread.
The feelings of fear cloud your thinking which makes you forget some of your information. Forgetting some information reinforces your self belief that you can’t give presentations.
Your negative self-talk reinforces the negative self-belief:
I knew I would forget something.
I can’t give presentations.
As long as you keep complaining about your present situation your mind will stay focused on it.
If you continually talk, think and write about the way you see your world, you will continually reinforce the neural connections and pathways in your brain that got you to where you are now. This means you will keep attracting the same negative people and situations and stay trapped in your comfort zone.
To break this negative cycle you must focus your thinking, talking and writing on the reality you want to create. You need to overwhelm your unconscious mind with positive thoughts and images of the new reality you want.
The problems we face cannot be solved with the same thinking that created them.
– Albert Einstein
What’s the setting on your emotional regulator?
Your ’emotional regulator’ keeps you in your comfort zone. When you have an experience that reaches the limits set by your emotional regulator, signals are sent by your regulator to keep you within your comfort zone. It achieves this by making you feel uncomfortable because what you are experiencing is outside your unconscious self-image. So to avoid more discomfort you retreat back into your comfort zone.
We all have self-images. For example, some of us see ourselves as leaders while others are quite happy to be a team player. Switching roles makes many people feel uncomfortable. They feel out of place. That is their emotional regulator and comfort zone in operation.
One way to move out of your comfort zone is to take regular small steps outside of your comfort zone that create a new self-image. This provides your unconscious mind with new thoughts and images that slowly stretch your comfort zone.
The power of positive affirmations
Another way to move out of your comfort zone is to use positive affirmations. An affirmation is a statement that describes your destination in its completed state.
Design your positive affirmations based on these six rules:
- Start with the words ‘I am’
- Say it in the present tense
- Be positive
- Keep it short and concise
- Be specific
- Describe at least one emotion
An example of a positive affirmation is:
I am confidently expressing myself clearly and eloquently.
To help yourself move out of your comfort zone you should say your positive affirmation in the morning and the evening.
Simply close your eyes and focus your attention inwards. Then repeat your positive affirmation three times. You can say it silently or out loud. Whilst you say your positive affirmation try to visualise yourself in that situation.
See yourself looking out at your world, from inside yourself, looking through your own eyes as if you are actually living that moment.
Hear the sounds you would hear when you achieve what your positive affirmation describes.
Feel the feelings that you would feel when you achieve your positive affirmation. The stronger the feelings the more powerful the positive affirmation process.
How can hypnotherapy help me step out of my comfort zone?
Hypnotherapy can help you shift your thinking so your negative thoughts become positive.
Your negative thoughts are all based on your life experiences leading up to today. Your negative thoughts also contribute to your limiting beliefs about what you think is possible and what’s not. Hypnotherapy can help you practice positive thinking and recalibrate how you see yourself.
Hypnosis can help you wipe away the graffiti on your walls and erase your limiting beliefs so you really believe in what you are asking for, so it can become your reality.
If you would like any help shifting your thinking so you can step out of your comfort zone, please get in touch for a free consultation. I will help you step out of your comfort zone to create the happiness you desire.