
Facing my fear should have allowed me to grow, as I understood the motivational slogans. What crisis would crop up? What new project would be dropped into my lap this morning? I’ll adjust.” Creating a Home We Can Thrive Inīut as the months went on, my sense of dread grew. “I just need to work harder,” I told myself. If I felt I was juggling more than I possibly could, I clearly had to hustle more. In accordance with the self-improvement mindset, I rationalized these feelings as stemming from my own inadequac y. On the inside, I was feeling defeated and helpless. On the outside, everything looked peachy - as if I were a picture of success.

Up to this point in my life, I had been driven by a mentality of pushing harder: straight As in school, top of my class in college, and now a demanding job in Manhattan. On most mornings, stress-induced cortisol was the only thing keeping me from collapsing in exhaustion. Rewind just a few years and you’d find me crammed on a bus heading out of New York City, at the height of rush hour, with a two-hour commute ahead. īy pushing myself in the name of getting uncomfortable, I had self-sacrificed to the point of exhaustion. Since then, it has been a huge asset that has helped me make big strides. I learned the hard way to define - and, more importantly, to honor - the boundaries of my comfort zone. When I pushed my comfort zone relentlessly, as the leadership experts advise, it led me straight into burnout. My experience, however, taught me something different. “A comfort zone is a beautiful place, but nothing grows there, ” is a popular graphic post on Instagram.Īnd Eleanor Roosevelt’s most-touted quote, “Do one thing every day that scares you”, adorns everything from office coffee mugs to wallpaper. When you stay in your comfort zone, “ you maintain flawed beliefs about yourself or you hold on to guilt and self-doubt”, the bestselling leadership writer and moti vational speaker Jack Canfield says. “It’s never as scary as it looks,” the Stanford grad student Yubing Zhang chants in a widely viewed TEDx talk, Life Begins at the End of Your Comfort Zone - one of several talks on this theme that the influential conference has given a platform to. It is impossible to escape the gurus and influencers on social media who preach that choosing safety is self-sabotage. That without getting uncomfortable on a daily basis, I’ll never get anywhere in life, my lack of courage realized. The main target should be expanding the comfort zone and optimal performance zone.Raise your hand if you’re sick of hearing that life begins at the edge of your comfort zone. Optimal performance management requires maximizing time in the optimum performance zone.


However, stress in general can have an adverse effect on decision making: fewer alternatives are tried out and more familiar strategies are used, even if they are not helpful anymore. Beyond the optimum performance zone, lies the "danger zone" in which performance declines rapidly under the influence of greater anxiety. White (2009) refers to the "optimal performance zone", in which performance can be enhanced by some amount of stress. Where we feel we have some control." Performance management

For other uses, see Comfort zone (disambiguation).Ī comfort zone is a familiar psychological state where people are at ease and (perceive they are) in control of their environment, experiencing low levels of anxiety and stress.īardwick defines the term as "a behavioral state where a person operates in an anxiety-neutral position." Brené Brown describes it as "Where our uncertainty, scarcity and vulnerability are minimized-where we believe we'll have access to enough love, food, talent, time, admiration. This article is about the psychological meaning.
