Comfortable pathways
HOW to purposefully expand your comfort zone as a pathway to achieving your goals was a key message at a business workshop in Geelong.
The Get More Goals workshop was told an advantage of the “stretch zone” was that it overcame the common pitfalls of setting unobtainable goals, such as losing motivation through the lack of immediate results.
In the workshop at The Village Geelong on Wednesday, facilitators Les and Merry Watson highlighted that people were naturally creative beings who got bored if they stayed too long in their comfort zones.
“What can happen is we stay so long in the comfort zone, we react to the frustration,” Mrs Watson said.
“And we do something extreme just to break the frustration of the boredom.”
That can result in repetitive and unrewarding moving between the comfort zone and “twilight zone”.
“A lot of people do that their whole life,” Mrs Watson said.
The couple overviewed potential models of moving towards goals and how to take “the next single step”.
“That’s going to take you out of your comfort zone, but not too much,” Mrs Watson said. “You maintain that until that is comfortable and because we are creative beings, created to grow, you will start to think ‘I am starting to feel uncomfortable now’.”
By continually expanding your comfort zone you move closer to your goals without creating stress. To assist in identifying the next steps and staying on track, Mr Watson introduced the ESI framework which involves: EXTERNAL ACTION: What action do you do to achieve your goal; SUPPORT: Having support structures and accountability partners to share the journey and being open to that support; and, INTERNAL FOCUS: Having positive self-talk and motivation.
The workshop also explored value-based goals based on a “wheel of life” assessment, which involved giving different areas of life a personal satisfaction rating to identify those parts in need of greater focus.
“If you get too focused on one area, the others may suffer,” Mrs Watson said.
The workshop also included advice on developing habits to help with “brick-bybrick” goals”.
“If you establish the habit, the goals will take care of themselves,” Mrs Watson said.