“Growth lies just outside your comfort zone.”

There’s a lot of value in this maxim:
It helps kick us out of stagnation and into action.
It helps us question our habits, our playing small.
It helps us pry our attention off of our past and realize that we can keep learning and growing.

But… it also smuggles in an assumption that keeps you from truly flourishing. It gets you halfway there, while eroding your sense of aliveness along the way…

Because the ‘comfort zone’ isn’t really about comfort! Instead, I find a more accurate term to use is the familiar zone.

The familiar zone is your internal territory of what you know (and think you know) including who you are, what you’re good at, and what’s possible and not possible. The familiar zone is your map. And what’s beyond it — the unfamiliar zone, the unknown — is the territory.

The important difference is this:
The familiar isn’t inherently comfortable, and
the unfamiliar isn’t inherently uncomfortable.

The familiar can sometimes be fantastically uncomfortable. We often choose the pain we know rather than face the unknown. We’re stuck not because of comfort-seeking but because of unknown-avoiding.

The unknown objectively has no feeling or experience to it — neither comfortable nor uncomfortable, neither exciting nor scary. You need to project a story onto the unknown first — and that’s what you’ll feel.

So it’s not that the unknown is scary, it’s just really common for people to make up scary stories about it. That’s normal as learned behavior, but not our nature. Spend a few minutes with a young child and you'll see the wonder and adventurous impulses of our nature. That’s the same state we can tap into in any moment when we don’t have much on our mind.

Moving beyond the familiar zone is a natural impulse, and part of our flourishing.
And it doesn’t need to be uncomfortable.
It doesn’t require courage or determination or grit.
You don’t need to battle the monster guarding the bridge… because there is no monster!

Whenever you drop (or forget to pick up) your stories about the unfamiliar, you find yourself in flow.
Doing the thing.
Trying something new.
Surprising yourself.
“I don’t know” becomes touched with wonder — often implying an enthusiastic “Let’s find out!”

The comfort zone people will think you’re being ‘courageous’.
The psychology people will think you’ve ‘done the work’.
But really you’re just following your intuition, without much on your mind.

So if you want to grow, become fascinated with the unfamiliar. Question the familiar. And don’t mind so much comfort and discomfort because that’s just a mental distraction on your way to becoming.

Michael McDonald :: Transformational Coach :: authenticintegrity.com​

P.S. Join me for my next free Insight Salon on Effortless Mastery on Sat April 26.

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