Expand your comfort zone
Inertia — Nº192
Don’t run from discomfort. Seek it daily.
We draw these circles around ourselves, envisioning them as boundaries of what feels safe. Some are sketched in childhood—wobbly and uncertain, like first attempts at writing our name in cursive script. Other circles, we drew more recently, careful lines mapped out by experience and circumstance. We mark these circles as the edge of what we call possible, and we'll fight anyone who dares refute it.
Call them comfort zones if you must, though that phrase has gathered dust and motivational-poster staleness. These are the spaces where breathing comes easy and your shoulders drop away from your ears. The territories where you know every tree, every shadow, the precise melody your footsteps make against familiar ground.
We consciously (or perhaps not) treat them like prison walls, thinking growth equals scaling them in desperate lunges, panting during our escape and wearing discomfort like medals of honour. "Look," we say, breathless and proud, "I left my comfort zone today. That's enough for a while." But then we always return, don't we? Back to the familiar ground, back to the known.
Funny how you can feel so busy planning the great escape, gathering your confidence like a rope ladder, ready to climb the walls of your own making. "Comfort is the enemy of becoming," are the whispers of the wind you feel whisk over your ear. As if the only path to growth is perpetual unease, a lifetime of standing in rooms where you can't find the light switch.
But remember those moments where you viewed the assignment all wrong. Take learning to drive. At first, it can feel like trying to pilot an airliner, then suddenly you're singing along to music whilst navigating rush hour traffic (exactly how it went for me). The driving didn't get easier—you just got more comfortable. You expanded your view of what's possible.
There are so many things we do to expand and establish more comfort. Work, cooking, reading and writing, meeting new people, or travelling. From this it clicks: perhaps it never was about getting out of your comfort zone, but about making it bigger? Like renovating a home. No one shrinks a house, but they do spend each year seeing what they can add, bit by bit, moving the edge of their world a little further out.
I gave it a try when going to one of my first networking events alone. You walk in and it feels like everyone's wearing their ambitions like neckties; too tight and not quite right. Instead of forcing myself to network like I was cosplaying an extrovert, which would have felt like an extreme sport, I brought discomfort with me. I started with a quiet corner, made it mine, and then moved onto talking to one person—someone who seemed as relieved as me to have a quiet conversation. Then another. And somehow, one or two people even drifted over. By the end of it, I had created this little oasis where good conversations just... happened. Naturally.
You say to yourself, "isn't that something?" That's what growth really is, and what I mean by overcoming inertia. Not a constant push into the unfathomable, but expanding what 'comfortable' means. In sport, performing at a great level doesn't get easier, you just grow more comfortable at certain outputs.
It's like learning a language through immersion rather than flashcards. You don't just memorise the words so much as let them seep into your bones until one day you realise you're thinking in them.
Push your boundaries, yes, but remember to be gentler about it. Because comfort isn't the opposite of growth—it's the soil growth needs to take root. Less battering ram, more water wearing away at stone.
Perhaps we should stop treating our comfort zone like something to escape from and start treating it like something to grow into. To take what scares you and make it feel like home, not through force but through familiarity. Through staying long enough to learn its language, its rhythms, and its secret shortcuts.
It’s never about settling for less. It’s about being comfortable with more.