Take you right into the danger zone

Interesting couple of posts on here this week from a variety of different people about comfort zones and how they are apparently a bad thing. As I’m about to ask you to read my latest blog post about comfort zones you can probably guess my opinion is slightly different on this subject.

Comfort Zones aren't a bad thing

A common assumption is that comfort zones are a bad thing. Sticking to your comfort zone or ‘staying in your lane’ is seen as detrimental to your personal development and means you miss out on opportunities that others who are more comfortable operating outside their comfort zone are more likely to grab onto.

However, this sort of statement doesn’t really reflect real human behavior.

There is nothing wrong with operating in your comfort zone, at least for periods of time.

Imagine a series of circles like the diagram below. Your comfort zone is slap bang in the center. Here is where you perform tasks using muscle memory. You’re able to do this because you are extremely comfortable with these tasks. And these tasks and behaviors will be different for every person.

Some people are extremely comfortable with speaking to other people, or presenting, whereas others find comfort in reflection or reading. What matters here is that these tasks are things you don’t have to spend a great deal of thought on doing well, because you have significant experience of performing them.

The next zone is unsurprisingly enough the area outside your comfort zone. Here you have a sliding scale of tasks and behaviors that you have varying levels of discomfort with, and again, for each person these things will be different. Being in this zone is useful, because the likelihood is that these tasks are areas where you still have a level of learning or experience you need to gain.

But outside this zone is the danger zone. The danger zone is the circle you can fall into if you find yourself spending too long outside your comfort zone and you’ll know when you are here because you’ll have that low level dread or worry about whatever the task it is you are trying to perform is. Those creeping feelings of anxiety and stress are your minds way of telling you that you have probably spent too long outside your comfort zone.

So what's the point you're making here?

All of these zones are incredibly useful and used together are how you build a growth mindset.

Comfort zone

You don’t get new learning and personal development inside your comfort zone – true, BUT you do need to spend time here to recharge and refresh. If you imagine for a moment you take a long run, at the end of this run your body is tired and needs to recover. Now you could decide to run a further 5k, but your time will likely be poorer than the first 5k you ran, and your body will feel even worse at the end of the second run, because you’ve not allowed time for recovery.

Your mind operates the same way. It needs time to recharge, and this varies for each person after each type of task outside your comfort zone. Sometimes we only need minutes back in our comfort zone to recover, other times we need longer. The important aspect of this is that you do need to come back to your comfort zone to refresh.

To give you a real example of this from me. I enjoy presenting, but I also find this draining and it sits outside my comfort zone, so after having one of these conversations I’ll likely do some reading or writing, things that are very much in my comfort zone, simply for me to recharge and feel ready to move onto something outside my comfort zone.

Outside comfort zone

Is where you get your personal development. Its where you experience new ideas and try new things. Its incredibly useful for your development BUT spending too long out here is detrimental to your learning, because eventually you’ll gravitate towards the danger zone and without action on your part, you’ll drift into the danger zone and stop learning.

The idea of working outside your comfort zone is that eventually these tasks or experiences start to gravitate towards your comfort zone and then become part of the comfort zone, increasing the size of it and providing you more opportunities to refresh and recharge.

The danger zone

Is what you slip into when you’ve spent too long outside your comfort zone. We all experience our danger zones in different ways. Some of us become solely focused on completing the task right in front of us, to the detriment of everything else around us, some of us feel our stress levels rising, some of us grow anxious or lose sleep.

Knowing what your trigger signs are for falling into your danger zone is an important exercise to perform as once you are armed with this knowledge you can spot the waning signs and then avoid slipping into the danger zone in the first place. Unsurprisingly you get zero learning from the danger zone.

So, in summary,

1. There is nothing wrong with spending time inside your comfort zone, in fact you should spend time here, to refresh, recharge and prepare for time outside your comfort zone.
2. Working outside your comfort zone is good, its where you learn and gain new experience, but be aware of how long you are spending here and spot the warning signs of slipping towards the danger zone.
3. Spending time in the danger zone is not good. You get zero learning here and long term it’s a drain on your brain and health. Understand your triggers that warn you that you are slipping into this zone so you can act before you fall into this zone.
4. Increasing the size of your comfort zone is a good indicator of personal growth, as we grow more comfortable with tasks, they move into our comfort zone and form part of our set of tasks we can use to recharge