Is your ‘comfort zone’ just an illusion holding you captive?

I WENT to an amazing training session at the weekend.

The speaker was Jan Ruhe who made her millions in direct selling.

She was so completely inspiring and as I looked around the room, I asked myself ‘what is the difference between her and any one of us?’ She doesn’t have super-human powers, she’s not of alien form, in fact she was a normal mum of three children when she embarked on her journey, no different to me, or many of the people that I know.

I then became fascinated by the people who had sat there to hear her speak, any one of them could do what she did and when I shared this with the people that I was sitting with, it was interesting to hear the array of colourful reasons why it would never happen to them.

Of course this is only one example, however, in my line of work. I see first hand how we as human beings limit our own potential. Even when we are almost given the opportunity on a plate, we prefer to stay small, stay safe, secluded in our comfort zone, wishing, praying that we could do more and coming up with many reasons why any other alternative is not just something we could do or something that is right for us.

So why do we limit ourselves in this way, because it simply doesn’t make sense?

In many ways, it is linked to my thoughts here a couple of weeks ago about fear. We like to feel safe and secure in the knowledge that if we carrying on doing what we do, we think we know what the outcome is going to be.

If we do something different, then we can no longer be certain, we are moving into unchartered territory. This is why it is often referred to as a comfort zone, because it’s somewhere where we feel comfortable. But if we want to be somewhere else, is it really as comfortable as we claim it to be?

It reminds me of the quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein. “A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.”

The fact that he is imprisoned is an illusion, it is just that it hasn’t occurred to him his thinking the door is locked is an illusion. In the same way often when we limit ourselves it doesn’t occur to us the bars to us creating the life or business that we love, the bars to our prison that stop us reaching our potential and that keep us in our ‘un’ comfort zone are no more than an illusion. It is simply our thinking what we can or cannot do, what will or will not happen and that scary thinking can only stop us. It does not give us any useful or certain information about the reality of what will happen when we take that first step. When we see the bars for what they really are, a glorious illusion, we are then able to leave the place that we find so uncomfortable, take those first few steps towards our new life and leaving those limited beliefs behind us.