![]() ![]() Courage is no different - the more you step out of your comfort zone, the quicker and bigger your courage muscle will get. The muscles in your body don’t grow and get stronger overnight. While we can’t fully control our inner critic, we can take steps to manage it. If left unchecked, It will keep you from getting what you want and being the person you’re meant to be. Anderson calls this voice the ego or ‘inner critic’, because it’s constantly criticizing, hammering away at our ideas and self-worth. Our voice of fear chimes in at the very thought of leaving our comfort zone, because it wants us to live a safe and boring life. If you’re never scared, you are not being you. ”īeing scared is a good thing - if you’re never scared, it means you are coasting through life, not maximizing your gifts, and not living true to the person that you’re meant to be. “Having courage is being scared and doing it anyway, because the something you want is bigger than the fear itself. Luckily, we can use fear to our advantage instead - to exercise our courage, expand our comfort zone, and improve our life. In his book, Your Comfort Zone is Killing You: Finding the Courage to be You, author Billy Anderson refers to the fear of what other people think as the ‘big & nasty,’ because it is the number one fear that holds us back. Fitting in was literally a matter of life and death, and this is why our social fears can be so crippling. Historically, a human’s survival has relied on being a member of a community. ![]() ![]() We often attribute failure as being the cause of our fear, but fear of failure is more likely a fear of failing in front of others. public speaking, failure, being laughed at, standing up for what you believe in, telling someone you’re unhappy with them, someone telling you they don’t want you around anymore. Social fears have an acute ability to trigger the voice in our head that tells us to abort - i.e. Low self-confidence, making excuses, and worrying about others’ opinions. This is the headspace we’re in when we consider doing something that makes us uncomfortable. The diagram shows a visualization where the ‘fear zone’ is the immediate outlier of the comfort zone. Our comfort zone controls us through fear - remember, for thousands of years, the avoidance of fear kept us alive. ![]() “Everything you want is on the other side of fear.” Unfortunately what’s familiar isn’t always what’s best for us either, but our comfort zone can’t tell the difference.Ĭivilization has evolved faster than our brains have, and thriving in the digital society of today means repurposing some of our outdated instincts. Familiarity allows us to feel safe, let our guard down, and relax. Our comfort zone might be more aptly described as a familiarity zone - we return to the people, habits, and environments in our comfort zone because they are familiar. It helps us survive, which is good, but most of us want more out of life than to simply survive. The problem is that when our brain is pushing us to stay comfortable, it’s trying to do what’s best for our survival in the short-term, and neglecting our goals and aspirations for the long-term. We are all wired by instinct and evolutionary programming to spend as much time as possible within our comfort zone, because safety means survival. Our comfort zone is the place where we are least likely to feel threatened or in danger - it is our safe place. “We may live in an online world, but we have stone-age programming in our brains.” ![]()
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