How To Stay In Your Comfort Zone

It's not what you think.

We grow at our own pace, thank you very much.

What are some things introverted people hear a lot? (Besides ‘you need to talk more?’)

“You need to get out of your shell!”

“You need to step out of your comfort zone!”

Ugh.

I’ve gotten this too. The implication is loud and clear - you’re not being loud enough for someone’s tastes. You’re not doing enough, you’re not exciting enough, etc. You’re just not enough.

In a business setting, especially in entrepreneurial circles, the second statement is pretty dang common. There’s a firmly held belief that in order to have success (hopefully defined by yourself, but typically it’s per someone else’s definition), you need to be more and do more than what you’re currently comfortable with.

“Bust out of that comfort zone! All your dreams are waiting for you outside of your comfort zone, if you’ll just reach out and take it!”

To be fair, there is some truth to this. Anything worth doing or having takes hard work, and when you’re learning something new or going in a different direction for the first time, that does mean trying things you never did before. For a lot of people, that can be frightening. It’s more comfortable to stay where you’re at, where you know what’s what, where it is and how it works.

That’s not usually where growth happens, though, and that’s what people are trying to say when they tell you to step out of your comfort zone. Staying stuck and stagnant isn’t a good thing. We need to be learning and improving our whole lives, and that won’t happen if we refuse to try anything new or go anywhere we haven’t been before.

However.

I don’t think shells are necessarily a bad thing, and I prefer to think of comfort zones a bit differently.

First, let’s look at shells.

For one thing, shells are incredibly useful. If we look around in the animal kingdom, we can find at least a few who wear them: crabs, snails, and turtles.

Now crabs, while terribly ugly yet delicious creatures in my opinion, have shells they outgrow every now and then. It’s a periodic process called molting, where they break out of their shell that has gotten too small for them, and then they bury themselves in moist sand and must be left strictly alone for a while.

Isolation is very important during this stressful time: without a shell, they’re extremely soft (they could literally fall apart) and quite vulnerable and quite tasty to predators and even other crabs.

Yup.

A crab without its shell is totally helpless until their new shell hardens up. They have to have a shell in order to survive, and nagging at them during this delicate process is completely detrimental.

Outgrowing our old shells, metaphorically speaking, must happen from time to time, but while totally normal and healthy, it’s not always an exciting process. People like to act as though breaking out of an old shell is an adventure we should be raring to go on like Bilbo Baggins, but sometimes we’re feeling too vulnerable and scared at the time to celebrate yet. Some of us need time and space to figure things out and grow into our new shell at our own pace without getting picked on and devoured by other crabs. How many of us have gotten dragged out of the sand in our soft state before we were ready - for our own good, of course - and ended up falling apart?

Snails, on the other hand, have one shell they stay in for a lifetime. They don’t grow out of it and don’t leave it. But here’s what I learned a while back: if a snail’s shell breaks, they can possibly re-grow and repair it, because it must be repaired - without a shell, they die. And if the shell is so severely damaged it takes too much out of their teeny systems to repair, they die.

Are you catching on?

Everyone needs a secure home base where they can recharge and know what’s what. Having our shell broken into and being relentlessly exposed to things we don’t know how to handle yet (or simply can’t) is overwhelming, to say the least; and some of us, if not most of us eventually, will totally shut down when we can’t take any more pressure and stimuli.

One more example: turtles. We all learned as kids that turtles call their shells home, because it is. Turtles are the ultimate homebodies - wherever they go, they’re already home, which is pretty cool. When danger threatens, all they have to do is retreat their head and legs inside, and they’re safe inside their hard shell (unless somebody decides to use them as a football or something, which would be pretty rude). Who in their right mind would tell a turtle to get out of their shell for their own good, unless they had a hankering for turtle soup? In which case, it isn’t for the turtle’s benefit, is it?

When the world gets to be too much, and we can all agree that it can sometimes, we need a place to retreat and rest where no one can bother us for a while. Being social isn’t always the answer, especially if you’re introverted - a little peace and quiet will set us to rights, so long as someone isn’t knocking loudly on our shell telling us to come out and rejoin the others right now.

Having a protective shell is essential, especially in a world as cruel as ours. Even if we don’t need to retreat inside it at the moment, it’s pretty handy to have a hard casing for things to roll off our backs.

I know, we’re not crabs or snails or turtles. It’s called a metaphor. I’m making a point.

Is it wrong to have a secure retreat? A quiet haven in this crazy, mixed-up world? Is there a rule that we have to stay constantly open and exposed with no means of defense?

That’s total BS.

There are plenty of times to stick your head out of your shell and go places and do things, yes, but it should always be there when you need to take a break. And some of us need more down-time than others. Just saying. (Raising my hand here!)

Then we come to comfort zones, which are kind of similar.

Most of us like staying in our comfort zones where everything’s familiar, myself included, but what about all those big, awesome things we want to achieve that lie outside of it?

Here’s how I prefer to look at it: instead of beating myself up about forcing myself to step outside my comfort zone, I work on expanding it.

Let that sink in. I’ll give you a minute.

In exercise, for example, we may start off badly out of shape and everything feels painful, but we work at steadily increasing our strength and stamina until things we couldn’t do before are now easy. A 50 lb. weight or a 5 mile run doesn’t change, but they feel a lot lighter and shorter when you’re stronger.

Learning something new can be intimidating, but I try to see it as adding something to my repertoire. Once I get the hang of it, it’s now part of my skill set - and in my comfort zone.

See how it works?

The more I learn, the bigger my comfort zone gets, which ultimately means I can stay in it a lot easier and have plenty of space to work in without having to leave as often. A bigger shell to live in. Sneaky, ain’t it?

Of course, this does mean taking those initial baby steps outside your comfort zone to begin with, but notice I said baby steps. Taking big, grandiose leaps is more dramatic, but not always necessary. Gradual progress is fine, so long as you’re still moving forward. Increasing your comfort zone takes time, probably longer than most people have the patience for, but humans are an impatient lot anyway, so it’s okay to tune out anyone who says you’re too slow. I officially give you permission.

One last thing: some people try to use the comfort zone excuse to get you to do things that will never be one of your strengths. Some folks say that introverts need to get more comfortable making phone calls, for example.

Good grief.

I get that there are situations where phone calls have to be made, but if they were always strictly necessary to make it in life, I wouldn’t be here today, y’all. I really do better communicating in written form. Text and emails, please.

Writing can be organized ahead of time, crafted to say exactly what I want. That’s how I sound halfway intelligent on here.

Spoken conversation is too much like improv, which I reek at, by the way. If I have to talk everything out, I end up tripping over my words and sounding more like Beavis and Butthead.

“Uhhhhhhh.......”

It’s just not one of my strengths. I can get by when I have to with phone calls, but I’m working from a place of weakness and it won’t be my best. Like having to use my non-dominant hand.

Expanding your comfort zone should go hand in hand with playing to your strengths. Don’t let anyone tell you that you need to focus too much energy on something you’re not wired for. Forcing a fish to learn to climb a tree is a huge waste of time, when you could be coaching it to be the best swimmer it can be.

Because a fish’s comfort zone is in the water. Could be a river, a lake, an ocean, a fishbowl, but it’s gotta stay in its element.

Guess what happens when you take a fish out of water.

It dies.