Being Pushed Outside of Your Comfort Zone

As humans, we are hard-wired to discover, grow and evolve. Seemingly out of the blue you are inspired to take on a more challenging position, ask for more money, start your own business or perform a physical feat.  If you can tune into how you feel, you may discover part of your feels expanded, excited, even giddy while another part feels contracted, afraid, hesitant.  That’s the part of you that is saying “OMG what do you think you are doing?”

You might tell yourself that you don’t have the confidence to pull it off but what really is happening is that your fearful ego is throwing up all kinds of worse-case scenarios to keep you in what it believes to be your safety zone.   You may hear things like “you’ll make a fool of yourself” or “who do you think you are” or “you’ll fail and be ridiculed” or “you could be killed”.   Even though those things are not likely to happen, that fearful ego voice sounds very convincing.

You could be the one pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone or it might be circumstances doing it for you.  Either way your belief in yourself and your abilities has a tendency to skip out of the picture leaving you doubting, procrastinating and second-guessing yourself.

You might try saying “Fear, I know that you are trying to protect me and keep me safe, and I appreciate your for that.  If you could just back off for a bit so that I can give this a shot, you can come back when it’s done and bask in the glory of thinking “see, it wasn’t so bad”.