Stay In Your Comfort Zone

Did you know you were allowed to be comfortable?

You hear it all the time:

The comfort zone is bad for you.

It’s making you lazy and complacent. You need to get out! You need to challenge your fears. You need to take action. If you don't, you’ll never improve, and your life will remain mediocre. How sad…

Okay. Suppose you’re a heavy procrastinator.

You didn’t work on your project. You didn’t go to the gym. In fact, you’re feeling so low today that you can’t even do the dishes.

And it’s not like you didn’t try.

You’ve been upset with your lack of discipline. You’ve been watching self-help videos. You’ve been telling yourself: “I’m gonna stop my bad habit. Tomorrow, I’m going cold turkey. Even if it’s uncomfortable.”

Notice the cycle?

You get inspired. You try hard. You slip up once. Then you blame yourself. You think there’s something wrong with you. You’re frustrated. And back to square one, we go.

So the question is…

Are You Truly Comfortable?

We assume people in a "comfort zone" are happy with the way they are.

For example, you eat a plate of spaghetti.

It makes you happy.

But that happiness is temporary. As soon as you finish eating, you know there’s a payoff: The plate is empty and dirty.

You have to do something less enjoyable, which is cleaning.

So you leave it in the sink.

Then you eat a bowl of cereal to distract yourself.

A handful of biscuits. Crunchy peanuts. And why not, a cup of milk chocolate. Repeat that multiple times, and you end up with a pile of your so-called "comfort zone".

On the surface, we assume it’s comfort.

You don’t have ambition? You‘re anxious about meeting people?

“You’re too comfortable.”

But a closer look into the sink, and you’ll know why the dirty dishes remain dirty dishes…

I don’t trust myself enough to do this.

Well, that sounds a lot like dis-comfort to me.

Most people don’t realize that behind the "lazy" or "restrained" person lies the terrible belief that they cannot take action.

So they feel powerless.

No wonder they’re craving comfort.

The First Step to Being Comfortable is to Admit You Want Comfort

This is what comfort means to me:

Feeling safe, happy, and healthy.
Living in alignment (acting naturally).
Feeling at ease with myself and the world around me.
Making art effortlessly.

Basically, I want a life of well-being where I don’t have to make sweaty gym face contractions in order to get what I want.

I want to be happy without working hard.

Is it bad?

Gosh, sounds terrible. Such a lazy, naive, and undeserving way to think!

But that’s not you. That’s the voice you’ve integrated from watching how "the world works".

Since childhood, you were conditioned to have the best grades. You watched movies about heroes reaching for their dreams. And you naturally thought: “I have to surpass myself, so that I can be worthy of my efforts.”

And that’s fine if you think like this. But many of us lack the self-trust to achieve anything with that belief pattern.

So what’s the alternative?

Procrastination. Creative Block. Insecurity. Mental Restraint. Social Inhibition. Low Self-Esteem. Addiction. Despair. Self-Hate. Worry. Lack of Purpose.

Actually, these traits are all the same thing:

They’re an avalanche of beliefs that imply you’re not good enough (a.k.a. comfortable) as you are.

And yet, the general advice is: “Get out of the comfort zone.”

Are you kidding me?!

None of this is comfortable; more like the opposite.

So instead of getting out…

What If We Stayed With The Dirty Dishes?

If you can’t get out, then stay.

Good news if you thought you had to seek discomfort.

Because you’re already in.

I watched the pile of dishes accumulate, and it was scary. I thought I’d be stuck forever. Procrastination took over me, as I lamented: Why?!

But I didn’t understand the way my mind worked:

I had skyrocket expectations (110%) and rock-bottom confidence (0%).

Result: I wasn’t aligned with myself.

My goal was to clean all the dishes in one sitting.

I believed I had to push harder. That because I couldn’t bring myself to do the dishes for some reason, I’d never be happy.

But in my quest for improvement, I forgot that my goal was too high for my current state of low confidence.

I was trying to build something out of nothing. But I needed a foundation.

And thus…

I had to let my expectations fall to the ground.

Step #0: Stop Improving

I sat alone, watching the dishes from afar…

What if I remain that way for the rest of my life?

So what.

It gets better, I promise.

But I should be doing something!

Yes. But telling yourself you should doesn’t push you to act anyway.

So what if you shouldn’t?

Perhaps you’ll remain the old version of you…Forever. You’ll never find the key to happiness. You’ll never embrace your true self, always restrained, always reactive, always an idiot.

So what.

Ha ha ha!

As I started to realize that the dirty dishes don’t matter in the grand scheme, that I’m okay by default, that I don’t need anyone else to tell me “You’re good” or “You’re bad” to keep going…

I felt at ease.

Some call it meditation.

It’s ironic. You’re doing nothing, but at the same time, it’s everything you need to be doing.

Imagine staring at the dirty dishes and being okay with that?

The point is to know internally that you’re not "Procrastination". You’re not "Low Self-Esteem". You’re not "Addiction". You were merely experiencing these symptoms. And that can happen…

That can happen.

It’s okay.

When you’re no longer dependent on shame/pressure to achieve things, your confidence will improve.

Step #1: Imagine Yourself Cleaning One Dish

Okay, we’re not taking physical action yet.

We’re just watching the possibility of getting up, moving to the sink, cleaning one dish, and…calling it a day.

Uncomfortable, right?

Not because you have to take action.

Action is not a hard thing to do.

What’s actually hard is the fact that you have to do so little.

Maybe you think you have to accomplish everything at once. All or nothing. Remember, your expectations used to be 110%.

But now you’re at 1%.

As I allowed myself to take one tiny step (rather than a GIANT one), an even stranger thing happened:

I felt inspired.

In Step #0, you were at ease with the dirty dishes.

In Step #1, imagine being at ease with one clean dish and leaving the rest dirty.

So you start cleaning.

Wait, wait. What just happened?

Pause for a second.

That clean spoon…

…is the materialization of your self-trust.

You trusted yourself enough to clean one spoon.

Sounds ridiculous. But one minute ago, that spoon was dirty. Now it’s not.

You already changed your life.

Let’s see how this could unfold.

One clean spoon leads to a clean mug, then a clean bowl, then a clean plate, and so on. It gets easier, because you’ve shown yourself: “See? I can make this tiny step. I can probably do another tiny step.”

The good news?

You don’t have to take massive action. You don’t need to be super confident.

You do 1%, then stop. Another 1%, then stop. And so on.

Repeat that every day for the rest of your life, and that’s how you achieve the impossible.