Staying in your comfort zone is staying with what is familiar. You activate the same neurology and chemistry, the same thoughts and feelings that keep you in that state of being. It is a cycle that perpetuates the same familiar behaviours, actions, decisions and therefore thoughts and feeling over and over. It is your conditioning.
Life, however, is dynamic and change is the constant. If change is that which challenges your comfort zone as it so often is and you resist, the result is internal chaos as well as external disorder.
“New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.” Lao Tzu – Philosopher
To evolve you will go through and must go through, challenges to your comfort zone; you will go through and must go through what can be perceived as periods of building \ construction \ birth \ growth \ syntropy \ order as well as perceived periods of destruction \ stagnation \ death \ entropy disorder.
Learning occurs by association as information is processed synaptically – linear, neuronal pathways and ephaptically – non-linear, electro-magnetic exchanges. Associative memories, when reinforced over a period of time, result in positive or negative perceptions that recycle whenever triggered and will run your life through emotional reactions; your high’s and low’s. You become conditioned.
Your conditioning becomes what you know, is automatic and often outside of your awareness – your comfort zone. You may not like being there (or you might and you just want to stay there and resist anything that challenges you) but it is familiar and predictable; in a nano-second and before you know it, you revert to familiar behaviour, actions etc.
“There are risks and costs to action…But they are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction.” John F. Kennedy – President, USA
Emotions distort perceptions, distort thoughts and you feel the discomfort throughout your body. Such distortions affect your cognitive ability to make clear, wise and effective decisions as blood flows away from the decision-making centre of your brain. This negatively affects your output, your personal performance and the quality of your interactions.
The stronger your conditioned thinking, feeling, decisions, behaviours, actions are the less conscious control you have. Your automatic sub-conscious programming is running. This is what you live daily.
Ask yourself these quality questions: How do I want to live? How do I want my life to be - right now?
Suggestions:
· Observe your High’s & Low’s – make a note of when they occur; under what circumstances?
· Observe your behaviour – make a note of whether you perceive it to be grandiose or passive\submissive and under what conditions.
· Observe your actions – note whether you are reacting, or perhaps avoiding and not taking any action or whether you are taking conscious action.
· Listen to your language and the words you use consistently – they define your experiences and give you an insight into the meanings you have assigned to those experiences.
A pattern will emerge that gives information about your comfort zone.
Commit to taking time every day to sit in quiet reflection and appreciation. Persist. Silence the ego, the analytical Mind.
“At the moment of commitment the entire universe conspires to assist you.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - 1749-1832 - Writer and Statesman
This will nudge you towards making active changes towards a new way of thinking and being. It is the first step.
Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” Dolly Parton - Singer, Songwriter, and Entrepreneur
“It takes effort to contemplate new possibilities beyond known choices. But that effort is the ‘pattern interrupt’…” Joe Dispenza
Lilly Fitzgerald
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