Are You Comfortable?

I recently came across a post shared by Anthony J James (https://www.garudax.id/in/ajjames/) who is a thought leader and an innovator, helping companies to grow their brand and scale their business. Do follow him or connect with him to read and learn from his sharings.

Back to the post that was shared. It is not a new image, and many of you might have seen this before. But I wanted to share it along with some thoughts and reflections of my own as I "study" this image a little more.

This image above shows the different zones in our day-to-day experiences in any aspects of our life. All of us would be very very familiar with the Comfort Zone, the place where we feel safest and in control. As we move out of that zone, the natural instinct would be to feel fear because we are now treading in unfamiliar territory. Of course we'd find excuses why we shouldn't but once we get past that fear, we start to learn.

The Learning Zone then becomes the place where we discover more about ourselves, realizing that we are able to do things that we never thought we could do before. We get to know our biggest enemy, which is ourselves, and we learn how we can overcome the obstacles that we've put in place so that we can continue being comfortable with the status quo. And once we've learnt how to overcome these obstacles, this Learning Zone then expands and becomes our New Comfort Zone.

And that's where the Growth Zone happens. That's where we start growing and experiencing a new level of personal satisfaction and sense of achievement.

In any organisation that faces a transformation, these are the different zones that everyone in the organisation should find themselves in. We are all comfortable doing what we are familiar with and we are, by our own definition, successful. So, why do we need to transform? And we resist the transformation because we fear what we do not know. But once we've overcome that fear, we start learning new things and achieving greater heights and we start to see a level of success that we've never seen before.

If you relate this in your own personal lives, many of us in this day and age want to lose weight and be fitter and healthier versions of ourselves. So we eat less, exercise more, hit the gym, run the treadmill. At the treadmill, we choose the settings that we are comfortable with, without exerting or pushing ourselves too hard. After that 30-60 mins in the gym and with some sweat, we feel that we've accomplished something. We've exercised. We've clocked our workout for the day. Sound familiar?

But what if we can do more? What if we increased our incline by a bit more, increase our speed by another digit, carried 0.5kg more in weights. That's getting out of our Comfort Zone. That's overcoming our Fear. That's Learning that we can if we set our minds to it. And that's where we Grow and improve.

How long more do you want to be comfortable?