Our Comfort zone will be one of the greatest lies we ever tell ourselves. We believe living in comfort is how life should be, but staying in the comfort zone is a death sentence. America toted this aspect of comfort and easy living like it was the remedy for the more significant societal issues when it simply added fuel to the fire. Today, more people are on the decline and struggling than ever. The reason is that they have been told to seek and stay within comfort.

A comfort zone is a place or situation where someone feels safe or is at ease from stress. However, the comfort zone has one major flaw: it doesn’t allow maximum growth. We become slaves to our environment. For example, a shark placed in a fish tank will not outgrow the fish tank. This example represents what the comfort zone does to us. Yes, we might feel at ease from stress and feel safe, but we are far from our maximum growth.

Knowing that we have the potential for more growth, why do more people not go out and thrive for more? The answer is that people are afraid. Fear will be one of the main factors in why someone doesn’t take more action. The brain perceives failing as the fear of losing a life. It cannot tell the difference, but you can train the brain to seek failure, look through the fear, and not just avoid it.

I spent several years coaching children on how to swim. During that time, I coached various personalities ranging from brave warriors to scared cats. Though they might have started as scared cats, I turned them into the warriors I knew they could become. I use warriors, but you can also think of them as strong athletes; today, I want to call them warriors because I am in a fighting spirit as I write this.

I noticed that separated the people with tremendous courage and the more time children were what they learned to grow accustomed to. A story I like to tell people about moving past failure is that I had a family that swam with me, and I had the eldest son first. The boy was timid, but we worked at changing his mindset to be more powerful. Eventually, he spoke differently and was filled with more courage.

I eventually moved on to teach his younger brother how to swim, the difference was night and day. The brother was active and a daredevil. I could barely contain his energy in a teachable manner, but we got it done. The difference between the two boys was not their parents but rather the environment. That young boy came to every lesson when he was a child, and when it was his turn, it was common sense to be brave and look through the fear that his brother couldn’t look past.

There is another story of two boys who came to me terrified of the water. They put something in their mind, or they had a bad experience that caused them to be terrified of learning how to swim. They seemed happy enough in the water, so it wasn’t a fear of water, but they wanted to be able to touch the floor. Well, on the first lesson with the boys, the mother came over to me and told me she had been to various swim schools and that this was the last stop. She said they wouldn’t learn to swim if they couldn’t learn with me. The mom even told me I could use whatever method I wanted to teach them how to swim., I said, are you sure, and she said yes.

The following method will only work with young children who have not fully developed their subconscious minds. Have you ever wondered why children fear the dark or the monster under the bed? The subconscious mind plays more tricks on us than we are known to believe, so we sometimes have to provoke the subconscious mind to think differently. What I did for these boys was that I became the fear they had to watch out for. They were no longer afraid of the deep end but rather of me. (To hear the whole story, join me on Coaching In Session Episode 256)

Now that we know that we must go through fear from our comfort zone, how we do it will depend on you and your coach. My typical method for helping people with fear is to help them take small baby steps. Again, this is because the subconscious mind is fully developed by around 11-12, so we have to take small steps not to shock or scare away the subconscious mind. Think of the subconscious mind as a baby deer; we do not want to scare it away with rash or abrupt movements.

Once you add small bits of fear to your mind, your subconscious will begin to override itself, and you will begin to see through the fears you previously had. This process depends on many things, such as ingrained beliefs, mental health, childhood environment, and learned behavior. In a way, they’re similar, but some aspects make these separations easier for the mind to get around the blocks it has created. My advice for people trying to get out of their comfort zone is to get a coach to hold them accountable. The main reason is that the body hates change and will try to go back to comfort.

Staying out of our comfort zone is something we also have to understand. You might have to make significant changes if you are in phases where you push, stop, fight, and struggle. We want to get to the growth zone, where every new day is something new. In the growth zone, you might still see the fear zone due to the fear of failure or that you fail in the growth zone, and you cannot see that failure as growth.

Failure might seem scary, but it will be some of the greatest lessons you will ever receive. I do my best to seek failure every week, at the least. That means I am stretching myself toward new growth and success. I do not want you to fail every day because it could be acquitted to a bad thing depending on the circumstance. We want to get a taste of winning and success, so we can urge ourselves to take more action. The 3-1 rule also applies to this; we need three positives to counteract every negative, so you should achieve at three times the rate you fail, and if not, Get Yourself a Mindset Coach Today.

In closing, getting out of your comfort zone doesn’t have to be a difficult task. You have to figure out where you are and then take small steps toward a better you. If you do not know what better looks like, I encourage you to look for the people you aspire to be. If you find that you are stuck and need some guidance, do not walk that path alone. The students who came to me who were afraid of the water didn’t say I will do it alone; they asked for help. The power of asking can be the quickest way to get out of your comfort zone. So ask yourself: Why are you not living the life you know you can live?

Until then,

Michael Rearden

Founder of Reven Concepts