COMFORT ZONE Vs FREEDOM

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

WHAT IS YOUR DEFAULT POSITION ??

Are you one of those people who constantly looks at life through a pessimistic lens? Or, are you someone who has a more optimistic filter?

More pessimistic, to many, sounds like a space they might NOT want to play in. More optimistic is viewed as more appealing; maybe it is a space that opens one to contemplating possibilities.

However, BOTH positions are out of balance, out of equilibrium.

The first position tends towards more negatives than positives and the second position swings the pendulum towards more positives than negatives. The pendulum swings from one side to the other as you repress the negatives in search of the positives.

What is important to know is that the pendulum is swinging from one side to the other rather than being centred and stable. The less centred you are the more you are likely to be distracted towards one side and then the other. This means less focus, greater distraction. You become scattered and scattered thoughts are scattered energy - a weakened energy, a weakened force and a weakened position. 

This can and does impact your decisions, your relationships, your work-life etc.

When  you are tending towards negativity you close your Mind to what is possible and if you are constantly in that space it will eventually become your neuro-chemical default position to the point where it might seem that 'life is just like that'.......until something or someone shakes you up somehow and you begin to rethink things.

When you are tending towards the positive you dare not even contemplate the negative. You constantly want only the positive and you constantly seek that which you judge to be 'better', the word 'judge' being the operative word here; you chase 'happy' because 'happy' is 'good'; it is positive, it is better!! 

Both positions are closed to their respective opposites. 

There is another position you could play in - that being Balance or equilibrium. When the pendulum stops swinging it comes to rest at centre; having gone from one side to the other, it arrives at the centre. 

Rather than seeking positive without negative or staying in the negative because positive is out of your awareness, consider finding your centre, your balance, your equilibrium in any situation that seems to pull you from one side to the other, that creates doubt & uncertainty.

Open up to the possibility that every positive has a negative (& it does not have to be a hugely debilitating negative so don't panic!) & every negative has it's positive, concealed though it may be.

When you arrive - and I use that word deliberately because it can be and often is a journey - at balance, like the pendulum, you will be at centre. You will seek neither the best nor will you judge things to be the worst; you will seek neither positives nor will you run from negatives. For a moment you will see the balance and the wisdom of the situation. 

The more often you are prepared to take this process seriously and act on it, the less often distractions & imbalance, scatteredness and doubt will throw you from one side to the other and you will more likely take advantage of your wisdom to guide you.

It's a process, it's a journey, it takes committed action and it is so worth doing!

Lilly Fitzgerald

WOW! IT'S 2016

We have already passed the middle of January and before you know it, we will have reached the end of January.

Across the globe, schools resume as students return from their summer break, most workplaces begin another year with most, if not all, of their employees returning from holidays. Things return to the mundane and by that I mean you go back to carrying out all those daily routines that are familiar. 

So, I am wondering:                                    

•  how will you impact the lives of others  in 2016? What is your intention?

•  what is your gift that, if you shared it,  you might contribute to other people's  lives? 

•  What is unique about you? - and of course each of us has a uniqueness to share and make a difference  in some way. 

• Have you thought about what your uniqueness is and how you might make a difference to others?

• Have you reflected on how you made a difference and\or contributed to other people's lives in 2015?  

• Have you reflected on how other people have impacted you and your life in 2015?

If not, you would be WISE to do it NOW!  

"WHY?", you might ask?

I would answer: "Because when you do that, you will come to appreciate yourself firstly, for 'being' and secondly for 'doing' AND you will allow yourself to fully appreciate other people in your life, whether in relationship, career, social life etc."

So, what have you intended for this year for YOU? 

May be you have already begun enacting some resolutions you made; something you RESOLVE to achieve; something you COMMIT to completing. 

As Jim Rohn would say, 
"Have you 'fashioned' your life to how you would love it to be in 2016 and even beyond?"

To a great year!
Lilly Fitzgerald
Consultant\Counsellor; Educator; Mentor
Dip T; Grad Dip Counselling; Cert IV Bus Man; Cert IV TA, Fitness