‘LEAVING YOUR COMFORT ZONE & ENTERING YOUR GROWTH ZONE’

Part & parcel of the motivational goals of success & while being goal-oriented, it’s important to recognize what time is the best to switch to your growth zone. A zone that will act as your ladder to success while your comfort zone is under consideration or scrutiny.

All positive psychologies are for the sake of positive only thinking & measures while your comfort zone is a bit under consideration. It would help if you worked harder for success to transform your journey of success from a comfort zone to a more productive one, i.e. the growth zone. There are plenty of benefits of leaving the comfort zone: self-actualization, the development of a growth mindset, resilience & anti-fragility & greater self-efficacy. According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, it’s self-actualization on top of the pyramid model, followed by Esteem needs, Belongingness & love needs, Safety needs and psychological needs.

Your goal surely matters for you in terms of the success agendas & how well you can move from your comfort zone towards your growth zone.

Life is all but full of opportunities which are there in front of you to grab & to step outside your comfort zone. However, grabbing hold of them can be rather difficult, as taking advantage of a situation is more important than losing sight of your vision or your goal. In short, & to be precise, what’s more, important is to analyze your goal & understand it for your future vision.

In psychology or the study of psychology, the comfort zone is a behavioural state within which the person operates in an anxiety-neutral condition, using a limited set of behaviours to deliver a steady level of performance, usually without a sense of risk.

THE BENEFITS OF LEAVING THE COMFORT ZONE:

There are plenty of vital benefits of leaving the comfort zone while you enter the growth zone for good results. By good results, we mean positive-only results, as positive-only psychology is key to success while delivering in the growth zone.

Self-Actualization:

Self-actualization is achieving one’s full potential, including one’s creative activities. For many people, it is very powerful as it acts as a powerful incentive to leave their comfort zone. This is a key concept popularized through Abraham Maslow’s (1943) Theory that relates to human motivation & behaviours of change. Maslow described it as follows “What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call Self-Actualization.”

These are the needs. That acts like a ladder of success with the satisfaction of our ‘basic’ & ‘psychological’ needs.

As long as a person’s decision to leave the comfort zone aligns with the person’s values, this is a shift akin to making a bid for self-actualization. This is important as someone not striving for growth could fall into inertia later in life.

The Development of a Growth Mindset:

The second most important one is how it changes a person’s mindset. That is, how a mindset is transformed into a positive mindset as we have two contrasting ones, i.e. the fixed vs the growth mindset.

While discussing the fixed mindset, it’s the belief of people who have set doses of each ability, with a corresponding ceiling on how much they can achieve. There are barriers set in the mind which are from others as well as from some incidents in life. Thus, failure reveals inadequacy, and criticism becomes a fatal blow to self-esteem.

On the contrary, the growth mindset means recognizing humans as malleable. For this kind of stance, setbacks become learning opportunities, and human potential becomes unlimited. In such a mindset, challenges are taken seriously to overcome many obstacles and finally learn to fight your own fears.

Intentionally, leaving the comfort zone goes hand-in-hand with developing a growth mindset. The growth mindset is the one that acts as inspirational, i.e. it inspires us to learn and take healthy risks. These are risks that can easily lead to positive outcomes across life domains.

Resilience & Antifragility:

Practically speaking, life isn’t exactly a predictable affair for many people. This is sooner rather than later that everyone in life faces adversity. This also leads to a habit of expanding our comfort zone, which equips people with the sake of better handling of change and ambiguity with more poise. Hence, this also leads to resilience and, later, consistent resilience.

The confusion & ambiguity in the minds of people is always balanced or become less with the desirable ingredient of resilience.

Greater Self-Efficacy:

Self-efficacy is the belief or the self-belief in being able to execute the necessary actions in service of achieving a goal. This can be one goal or might be more than one goal that relates to that goal. The goals leading to higher self-efficacy are rather specific, not too difficult to handle and are short-term.

Like the many other benefits of leaving the comfort zone, this also might not happen overnight. However, despite this, the cumulative upward spiral of achievement and confidence levels can be a powerful asset for anyone. This can be anyone striving for positive change.

Achieving positivity or a positive always psychology is something that is difficult to achieve. However, while moving from one zone to another, i.e. from comfort zone to growth zone, an individual can achieve this with amazingly better results. Eventually, we need to always realize this fact in our minds that nothing can happen overnight, just as ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day.’