The Comfort Zone summary

Take a moment and imagine a time in your childhood when you had trouble doing something, like your math homework or learning to ride a bike. What kinds of things did people around you say about it? 

For many, the answer might have been something like, You’re just not trying hard enough, or If you want to get better at anything, you have to work hard. Or perhaps it was the ever-encouraging Nothing comes easy.

The real message in these comments is simple: anything worthwhile in life comes with a high price in effort, time or discomfort. Whether at school, work, in sports, or even around the family dinner table, the belief that hard work is the only way to achieve your goals is an accepted paradigm. 

And beliefs matter more than you may think. The human brain believes things, like messages it hears from parents, teachers, religious leaders, media, or peers, and then actively looks for evidence to support those beliefs. The idea that experience determines your beliefs is actually false. Called confirmation bias by English psychologist Peter Wason, it's an all-too-human tendency to ignore evidence that contradicts one’s beliefs, and unconsciously seek confirmation of them instead.

So if you believe that you can only build a life you love by working incredibly hard all the time, you’re going to look for evidence that this is true. You’ll completely ignore the fact that this belief is actually chaining you to discomfort, anxiety, and stress. Even worse, this belief is based on the idea that there’s some fundamental deficit you have to make up for by pushing yourself to grow in uncomfortable ways – that you can only accomplish worthwhile things by working against your own nature and not being your authentic self.

That’s why the first step in finding your comfort zone is to seek out beliefs like this and start to challenge their implicit messages. If you’ve internalized the idea that your self-worth is tied to your achievements, you may feel compelled to keep pushing yourself as a way of life. That’s a recipe for burnout and exhaustion, and for denying yourself the love and compassion you so richly deserve just for being you.

So the next time you feel compelled to say “yes” to setting a goal or taking on a challenge regardless of how anxious or fearful it makes you, pause for a moment and ask yourself why you feel that way. You may discover that these beliefs are trapping you outside of your comfort zone, keeping you in places that are far less conducive to living a life you love.