“If it’s uncomfortable, it’s outside your comfort zone and that is where growth is,” Brett Portelli.  Everyone loves feeling good.  They love feeling safe and comfortable.  Knowing what comes next is comfortable because the risk is mitigated—we know what our days look like before they even begin and that makes us comfortable, and I daresay complacent, to life around us.  If we are doing the same thing day in and day out, we will never get anything different.  I am not exempt from this—I needed a routine with the best of them and I felt amazing knowing what I need to do—it was a sense of control.  Until it became a cage.  I couldn’t function outside of my assigned responsibilities, the tasks that needed to be done when they were supposed to be done.  Comfort can become suffocating, enticing us to lay back and do nothing, all the while we’re falling into that fluffy cloud unable to get out.  I personally love a good self-care day with a mini self-spa, soft pjs, great moisturizer, yummy treats, and a good book.  But neither extreme routine or extreme comfort is the reality of life.  We have to do things that make things happen and oftentimes that is out of the scope of what we would normally do.

We’ve had the conversation about growth and comfort zones several times before and it would be easy to follow that pattern because the sentiment is the same in the end: we need adversity to develop skills that help us achieve the things we want to.  But I want to look at growth.  We can look at growth as learning new skills, taking on more, expanding our sphere of influence, or simply enhancing what we have.  We encourage growth with the right environment and the right tools and materials.  That is true of any type of growth whether we are developing muscles or mindset.  When we are in the comfort zone, all of that material has been worked before.  We know it.  There is a reason why farmers let certain fields like fallow between specific seasons: the Earth becomes depleted of nutrients and its structure isn’t the same.  Sure, it may have yielded good crops and we know what we will get out of it, but eventually the crops will suffer and then nothing will grow.  The same is true of our comfort zone.  The longer we till the same Earth and cultivate the same cozy feelings, eventually that feeling will run out.  In that case it’s dopamine and a sense of security.  So to encourage growth, we need to step out of what we’ve known and till some new ground.

We are of nature and nature needs time to replenish itself—so do we.  But there comes a point when we have to take new steps forward if we plan on doing something else with our lives.  When we are ready to step forward, we stop seeking comfort.  We stop seeking answers for why other things went wrong. We stop blaming other people for what happens in our lives.  To the latter point, I will fully admit that there are circumstances when people are responsible for where we are in life and it SUCKS.  It HURTS.  It’s DEVASTATING.  But the sooner we are able to make a new choice and create new belief in ourselves, the sooner we move on and can cut those chains.  Growth is about development, it’s about opening doors, it’s about creating new things.  We can’t get dirty if we don’t dig in the dirt the same as we can’t grow without putting in a little effort.  Like we talked about yesterday, don’t be one of those people who never begins because someone else confuses us.  Take charge, step out of what we know and start forging a new prospect in life.  Trying new things will always feel off at first—there’s always a learning period.  The more we push forward and sew new seeds, the more we will get in return.  So let’s step outside the boundaries we’ve created and know so well and into a space where new things can surprise us—and we can surprise ourselves.  Let’s grow.