It’s well known that you will avoid those things that require getting out of your comfort zone. I fear many people are letting their comfort zones shrink to unreasonable levels, however. I see three big reasons why they do this.
Fear
The most common reason we avoid doing things is fear. Fear drives so many inefficient behaviors that it’s impossible to measure its impact.
Fear holds you back from calling on people who could make your day, month, year or career. It causes you to put off pre-call planning. It impacts your ability to speak with confidence. It neutralizes or eliminates so many positive traits that are buried within you.
We lean on our fears (though we never call them that) like crutches. Fear of the unknown. Fear of rejection. Fear of being made a fool of. And yet, these fears are complete fabrications in our brains. They’re thoughts. That’s it. Powerful thoughts, with sometimes sad origins dating back to our youth, but just thoughts.
They can be eliminated. See my list of “Other Resources” at the end of this post for suggestions.
Don’t be an “I could have…should have…would have…” person as a result of your fears. Don’t let your fears fuel your later remorse. As John McCain has said, “You can live with pain. You can live with embarrassment. Remorse is an awful companion.”
Shortsightedness
Another reason we avoid taking action to get out of our comfort zones is shortsightedness. The inability to see the big picture has caused unnecessary pain for many people.
Simplifying a key message of Anthony Robbins, we often get so “caught up” in the daily grind that we give little or no thought to the “why” behind what we’re doing. We forget what we’re working towards. We forget to enjoy what we’re doing now. We think life is just plain hard and unfair. And, as a result, we give in, we give up, we fail to initiate new projects, we fail to finish projects, we never get out of our comfort zones. Or worse, we give a 50% effort when life requires a 100% to enjoy it.
We’ve all known someone (someone else, of course, never ourselves), who has become so entrenched into their habits and their daily routine, as the saying goes, they can’t “see the forest for the trees.” That is shortsightedness. Failure to see the big picture.
Apathy
A final reason we stay stuck is apathy. This is a scary one.
I look at it like this: Where empathy is experiencing someone else’s feelings as though they’re your own; sympathy is feeling emotions similar to and because of someone else’s; and apathy is at the completely opposite end of the spectrum. Apathy is the absence of care. You could say it’s the absence of emotion and feeling.
To not care about what you get out of life is an awful state. To not care about your present or future or other people, well, I have a little trouble relating to this trait, but I see it too often.
A great man named Neal A. Maxwell once said: “Mark it down. People too caught up themselves will inevitably let other people down.”
Apathy is common when stress is present. Their bedfellows. My advice: invite stress, but have healthy outlets to release it and a support system for dealing with it.
A Remedy
I’ve learned this about people: the busier you keep yourself professionally and personally, and the more involved in serving others you can be, the more likely you are to kill fear, shortsightedness and apathy. The remedy is to set goals, have an active gameplan that gets you closer, literally, every single day to them, and to fill your life with other people.
Comfort levels never brought out the best in anyone. Get out of cruise control and step up your success.
Other Resources on Overcoming Fear
Brian Tracy article on self-talk; The Psychology of Sales Call Reluctance: Earning What You’re Worth in Sales by George Dudley and Shannon Goodson; Mark Sanford article on cold calling fears; Jacque Werth article.
Other Resources on Overcoming Shortsightedness
Stephen Covey article on first things first, and the book; George Keener on goals; great PDF from the University of Illinois at Chicago on self-directed life plans.
Other Resources on Overcoming Apathy
The One Decision, by Judith Wright; a nice article by Daryl Gibson at Salesstar.com; Man’s Search For Meaning, by Viktor Frankl; The Race poem by Dee Groberg.
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