Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.
— Neale Donald Walsch
Breaking out of your comfort zone is one of the most difficult personal growth activities. Your brain will do everything it can to prevent you from breaking free. The brain likes things to be predictable; it wants safety and comfort. This is both good and bad. Good because the brain’s safety mechanisms keep you alive and out of danger. Bad because you’ll have limited growth experiences.
Since you’re a growth-oriented person (I know this else you wouldn’t be reading here), your heart craves meaning, purpose, and expansion. You want to break free of your limits and see what’s possible in life. That possibility lives outside of your comfort zone.
Breaking free
How do you break-free? How do you go from where you are now to where you want to be?
At first glance, you may think more courage is needed. This makes total sense because at the precipice of your comfort zone are a handful of Dementors1. The risks and fear of the unknown can stop you dead in your tracks.
For example, let’s say you’re in a misaligned marriage. You know it’s time for the marriage to end. So you muster up the courage to start the divorce process. You file the papers and go through mediation. But when you get to the last step of making the divorce final, your courage wavers. You step back and find logical excuses for not moving forward. In the end, you cancel the divorce and decide to tolerate the marriage misalignment.
What happened to your courage? There was no solid foundation of trust beneath it. Without trust, you will not take risks. You may go through the motions of breaking out of your comfort zone, but in your heart you know it ain’t happening. You will lack the follow through once real fear is present.
Trust begets courage. Having a profound trust in something is knowing that you’ll be okay no matter what happens. Trust builds a foundation of safety. This foundation activates courage and at the same time provides the fuel to make those final pushes through your comfort zone.
Where to place your trust
In others
You can place your trust in other people, like a spouse, best friend, or teacher. You can trust that no matter how many times you stumble or fail, that loved one will be there to pick you up and support your journey.
This type of trust is a strong motivator. Most of us don’t want to let others down. So the fear of letting someone down can motivate you into action and to persevere when the going gets tough.
Putting your trust in someone is also putting your love into someone. Love is a strong motivator, too—perhaps a stronger motivator than fear. Unconditional love provides safety. When you feel safe and held, it’s much easier to look beyond fear and act in spite of it.
In yourself
What would happen if you decided to unconditionally love yourself? No perquisites. No earning love. You just wholeheartedly love and trust yourself. This is not vanity, it is deciding to accept and appreciate yourself across all timelines—past, present, and future. That is how you develop trust in yourself.
Trusting in yourself is giving permission to be imperfect and to fail. Those two states—imperfection and failure—are essential to your growth. You cannot breakout of your comfort zone unless you are willing to make mistakes and accept your failures. And while you are failing forward, have trust that you’ll be okay. Trust that you can always learn from the experience and find another way. Trust that you are useful, and every decision you make is the right decision. Trust that everything is happening FOR you and NOT against you.
If you have no trust in yourself, you have no confidence. No confidence equals no courage. No courage means you remain status quo.
In Life
I call it Life. You can call it whatever suits you—Reality, Universe, the Present Moment, God, Allah, Buddha Nature, etc. Placing your trust in Life is placing trust in the absolute “is-ness” of this moment. This is the space between thought and the noise that fills Life. It’s the realization that you are not separate from Life but rather an integral part of it. Talking about the absoluteness of Life only points to it. The experience is more of an energetic feeling or the background hum.
When you trust in Life, you’re trusting in an intelligence that we cannot comprehend but can feel that it is working for us. This trust is knowing that everything is working for the highest good of all, and for your highest self, even when it doesn’t look that way. Trusting in Life is the path to feeling like you belong in the world. This type of trust is letting go of resistance and allowing Life to work through you. Two famous quotes come to mind: “Let go and let God” and “Not my will but thy will be done.”
If you trust in Life, you realize that your comfort zone and fears are illusions. There’s nothing to break free from. Your comfort zone and fears are nothing more than mental constructs created by the self or ego. This kind of trust puts you in a state of relaxed confidence. You dissolve resistance and just know what do and when to do it. You act with appropriate wisdom and compassion.
Conclusion
Trust begets courage. If you want to break out of your comfort zone, and experience new aspects of life, you will need to develop profound trust in your life. Trust will be the fuel to move past your fears. To cultivate more trust, you can place it into others, yourself, and/or Life. You don’t need to earn trust. Trust is a decision. You can decide, right now, to trust.
A fearful dark creature in the Harry Potter series that basically sucks out all emotion and your soul. See the wiki page here.