Bruce Kasanoff* says everyone has a natural comfort zone that feels great to be in, but ultimately can be limiting.
When someone says: “It hurts” or “I exercised as hard as I could”, it’s hard to evaluate that statement until you understand where that person falls along the human spectrum.
There’s an athlete in my town who summited Mount Everest with a torn anterior cruciate ligament. To avoid missing the climb, she got it repaired only after the expedition.
Other people wake up a little bit sore and spend the day in bed.
We each have a natural comfort zone, in which we spend the bulk of our lives unless we make a conscious effort to expand that zone.
In this blog, I’m going to make the case why you want to expand your zone.
You can create a spectrum around any aspect of your life: Uninhibited vs. inhibited; disorganised vs. organised; friendly vs. unfriendly; intuitive vs. logical.
For each set of qualities, you’d put one at each end of the spectrum, and then pay attention to where you generally inhabit that spectrum.
We all know people who spend the bulk of their time at one end of such a spectrum.
One might be extraordinarily disorganised; another might be incredibly outgoing and friendly.
We all have a natural range, so what you mean by ‘being friendly’ might be dramatically different from what others mean by that same phrase.
I’d like to highlight two ways to think about such a spectrum.
First, you can use it to understand how two or more people differ.
For example, when one team says: “We worked really hard this week,” it would be helpful to understand that members of the team generally lived in the middle of a spectrum.
They think that hard work means meeting two times in one week (for 45 minutes each).
In contrast, their chief executive thinks hard work means working 70 hours a week.
Without understanding where someone else lives on a spectrum, it’s very difficult to put his or her words in context.
Second, you can actively try to increase your ability to move beyond your comfort zone when circumstances make that a wise choice.
Imagine that you are an extremely logical, numbers-oriented person in an industry that is experiencing extreme disruption.
The odds are that you will get crushed unless you can learn to think more creatively and perhaps even start to act without having “all the numbers”.
In a similar manner, imagine a highly compassionate person who is always trying to spare his children from pain or adversity, until he realises that this instinct is causing his kids to be over-dependent and fragile.
To serve their long-term interests, he must learn to let them make mistakes and endure some hardships.
The notion that we all have a natural range is ripe with opportunities for better understanding the possibilities inherent in your life.
What feels to you like ‘being friendly’ may seem to another person like ‘barely being civil’. Your ‘taking a big chance’ may be equivalent to someone else’s ‘no risk at all’.
In many cases, we can go much further than we think we can.
We can be braver, tougher, more creative and more sensitive without going over the top.
Often, when we stretch our comfort zone, we really aren’t in dangerous territory.
It just feels that way, and the more we do it, the bigger our range and the more expansive our potential.
*Bruce Kasanoff is the founder of The Journey, a newsletter for positive, uplifting and accomplished professionals. He is also an executive coach and social media ghostwriter for entrepreneurs. He can be contacted at kasanoff.com.
This article first appeared at kasanoff.com.
