Are You Stuck? Get Out Of Your Comfort Zone!

Do you have excuses that you are using a little too often? Do you notice that “I’m too tired” is a common response of yours? Do you hear the bit of resentment you are hanging on to in your “Why bother” response that you catch launching out of your mouth 3 times a day? I encourage you to dig deep to find the excuses that you use most often.

So now that you are aware of your excuses, ask yourself, if this was true and I did it anyway, what would be the worst thing that could happen? Would I lose something, or expose something? What is your best guess of what would happen if you put the excuse or reason aside? Sometimes you may find a hidden opportunity to make a change.

The purpose of fear is to keep us safe. Fear wants us to be tucked in comfortably where things are predictable. Predictability breeds safety. Fear likes that. Excuses become a tool then to keep things the same. Your voice of fear will probably come up with several reasons why you should hang onto resentment, or give up, or shut up.

Identifying your excuses is a way to discover how fear might be holding you back. Excuses keep us from taking a new action, that way we don’t have any expectation to do anything different, and we get to avoid being uncomfortable. Think of the excuses that you were able to come up with. Do they keep you safe and comfy somehow? Would you be uncomfortable if you had to do something different? Would you have to say yes, speak up, take action? We don’t like feeling uncomfortable. We don’t like trying something that we haven’t done before. It’s scary to stick up your hand, or be willing to go first, or express gratitude. So we don’t. We listen and take action based on our excuse.

I would like you to work on getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. Push yourself to be a little less comfortable. Say Yes to your co-worker and go to the networking function, linger in the staff room, pack a lunch, walk away from the sales rack. Notice how being uncomfortable makes you feel. What is it about it that makes you uncomfortable? How does it feel afterwards if you push yourself a bit? What does your inner voice say? Can you hear yourself saying stop or does a part of you want to keep at it?

Moving your life forward so that you are getting more of the good stuff is the result of consistent effort to take action. What some of my clients find is that when they start taking action despite their internal voices saying, oh I’m too tired, or I don’t have anyone to go with, or I’ve got too much work, is that things start to happen. Taking action allows possibilities and opportunities to reveal themselves.

Excuses excuse us from feeling uncomfortable. I encourage you to push against that a little. Are you willing to try on uncomfortable in order to try something different for a change? Are you willing to give up an excuse and see what really happens instead? Give it a shot, see what happens. What do you have to loose except an excuse?