Video Transcript

Josh Matthews-Morgan: Today I’m going to talk about comfort zones. Now, you’ve probably heard the old wisdom that in, order to grow and to go after what you really want in life, you have to push yourself out of your comfort zone. But today I’m going to tell you that sometimes it’s really not the best advice.

So here’s the old way of thinking: here’s your comfort zone, and this is where the magic happens, just outside of your comfort zone. Now the logic behind this is that if you push yourself to take an action that’s out of your comfort zone, you’ll grow. It’s really not bad advice, right? It’s just sometimes not the best way of doing it.

And there’s a couple of problems with this: that if you push yourself too far out of your comfort zone, it can be really uncomfortable and actually you can experience some pretty extreme anxiety if the action you are taking is really far out of there.

The second problem with it is that sometimes it takes a long time for your comfort zone to actually catch up to the action that you’re taking. So that means that you have to be uncomfortable over and over and over again until the comfort zone finally expands.

But really there’s a better way of doing this. The better way of doing it is to expand your comfort zone first, and then to take the action.

So, in order to do that, you have really have to understand, what is your comfort zone?

Now you might think of your comfort zone like one of those electric dog collars that dogs have on, that if they get past a certain area too far away from the house it gives them a certain electric shock, right? And, after really only a couple of times of this happening to the dog, it starts to be really afraid of getting even close to that comfort zone. Just like us humans do when we start to get really uncomfortable.

But the big difference between the dog and the human is that the dog can’t control whether it gets shocked or not, it can’t control the edge of its comfort zone. But us humans, we have control over that.

See our comfort zone is really made up of our thoughts, our conditioning and our programming deep at a subconscious level. It’s all the bad things that we tell ourselves is going to happen if we take a certain action or if we go after what we really want to do.

An important thing to remember is that your subconscious mind can’t tell the difference between a fantasy and a reality. So, it feels like all those things are really real and valid things to be afraid about, but sometimes, they’re really not.

To expand your comfort zone, you actually have to change your thinking at a subconscious level. So imagine, instead of pushing yourself through it, like a dog might do if it wanted to experience freedom, imagine if you just turned off that electric dog collar or if you yourself moved the comfort zone out even farther.

Now, we’re going to share with you a lot of different processes and ways that you can do that.

But for now, just remember that, the next time you come up to the edge of your comfort zone, don’t just plow through it. Go ahead and write down a few of the reasons why you feel uncomfortable and then really put them to question.

You’ll discover pretty soon that those reasons why you’re uncomfortable are not really valid reasons and that you can take that action and become confident and sure of yourself when you’re doing it.

And that’s one way to expand your comfort zone.