Be comfortable with being uncomfortable

Stepping Out Your Comfort Zone | Self Confidence | Personal Growth

Who shrank when reading the title? (Be honest.) I mean, who wants to be uncomfortable? Nobody.

But guess how you will manage to reach your goals? (the answer is in the title 🙃)

Learning is a process.

At the second day of my coach training, the trainer explained to us the different steps of learning:

• Unconscious incompetence

→ You don’t know that you don’t know.

→ At this stage, you are not aware that you don’t know how to drive a car yet (for example).

• Conscious incompetence

→ You realize that it’s not easy and pretty hard.

→ You have had your first driving lesson and are simply frustrated.

→ Short: being uncomfortable.

• Conscious competence

→ You realize that you can actually do it now.

→ Remember that feeling when you had your driver’s license and drove a car for the first time alone and with nobody in it? (Pretty cool, right?)

• Unconscious competence

→ Let’s call this one “autopilot”.

→ Nowadays, you don’t have to think anymore and simply drive and I’m sure that it’s the same when you speak a foreign language - you just do it, there’s no bigger excitement there.

I’m sharing this because I know how hard it can be to be in the middle of the process of learning how to do something new, and how to fail again and again, and you think that there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. You’ve failed in the past, you’ll do it again. And this is where I want to stop you right now, because it’s simply not true.

There is freedom waiting for you,

On the breezes of the sky,

And you ask, "What if I fall?"

Oh, but my darling,

“What if you fly?”

by Erin Hanson

Trust the data

When was the last time you learned a new skill or managed a difficult situation? Please think at least of three situations (both personally and professionally). Think harder…if necessary stop for a few minutes and write down all those situations. Close your eyes and relive them. Think back how you felt when you actually came out of the difficult phase and it seemed impossible to keep going.

Listen closer

Deep inside, you already know that you are capable of surpassing “being uncomfortable”. So who’s telling you that you cannot do it? Is it your most loving, supporting and caring self, or might there be someone else who wants to take the stage of your beautiful mind?

What is that voice/person telling you? What does it want to protect you from? And is it serving your ultimate goal?

Refocus

I know. If you’ve been for too long in that comfortable zone, it almost becomes normal and you think “Well, that’s how it is. I’m just not made for this.”

But guess what happens in that (in)famous comfort zone? Well, nothing.

At the same time, you might have spent too much time in the uncomfortable, are suffering and also have made peace with that. Please don’t stay there. You don’t have to suffer in silence. Sometimes all it takes is some help from outside. Talk to a friend or look for a mental health professional. Once you speak out what’s deep inside of you, you will see that you are capable of surpassing that uncomfortable zone and can enter a new zone that you can create.

Let me finish with a quote that I had printed for the participants of my first personal development workshop. Maybe you find it provoking, maybe it doesn’t speak to you, but I have learned that fear should never be in the driver’s seat of your life, YOU are. So go in there and start driving! (you can start in the 1st gear, no problem 😉)

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be?”

Marianne Wiliamson