Overcoming Being Comfortable

Being comfortable, sounds like a great state of mind right? Probably the first thing you think of is laying in a nice big bed with a fuzzy blanket, or sitting on a lounge chair on a warm beach. These are all awesome things, why would you want to overcome them?

^{Went with the beach pic because it is damn cold outside today!}

Unfortunately, at its core being comfortable is a state of inactivity. You are relaxed and at peace. But in order to progress you need to get up and move. When you lift weights, you are disrupting the stasis of your body and literally breaking muscle fibers so that they can grow. Likewise in order to grow as a person, you need to get up and break things. We grow the most when we are tested, or when we fail. Failure forces us to reexamine our approach to the issue to find a solution where success is often accepted uncritically. Failure also sucks, is unpleasant, and makes us uncomfortable.

So how do we wake ourselves up from our comfortable state? The first thing is to set yourself up for success. I reached my comfortable state during a time in my life when my personal life was a mess. I was in an extremely toxic relationship that took all of my time and energy, so I settled into a lifestyle where I did whatever caused me the least stress. We have a finite amount of resources, time, energy, and motivation to go around. If we have one part of our lives that is draining those things, it doesn't matter how hard we try, leaving our comfortable shell will fail. So the first step in any of this is to identify your bottleneck. This idea comes from how we evaluate business process flows to increase throughput. If one part of the system is not keeping pace, then the entire system is stuck going at the bottleneck's speed. In my case, removing the bottleneck meant leaving the relationship (which also required A LOT of discomfort to do). Since then I have made fantastic progress personally, and I am in a wonderful relationship now which an amazing partner. It took a lot of effort to get to this point, but now I'm comfortable again, so time to break things!

I have a pretty long list of stuff I want to accomplish this year. Getting better at DJing, learning a flow art, reading more, writing more, and hitting a 1000 pound powerlifting total. But the biggest one is leaving my career in IT for something I'm more passionate about. I don't enjoy programming and I would rather fix problems I care about rather than making business information systems work. It's hard to find motivation to accomplish the personal things when I need to use all of it at work to get my job done (hint: I'm currently doing this post in a moment of failed motivation). So in order to jump careers I'm heading back to grad school in the fall to get either an MBA or MS focusing in I/O Psychology. Business and psychology were my two favorite topics in school and I let my need for comfort suck me into a job that I could do well and was simple, but didn't really interest me. So to get back on track, I'm giving up a lot of nights out on the weekend and lovey evenings at home with my fiance to make this happen. I'm only able to do this though because I got my life to a point where I can take on the extra work.

In some ways though, going to school is easy. Once you've made the choice you select your classes and do the work assigned. The daily struggle to accomplish vs just be comfortable is much more challenging. I have my own theory of personal inertia based on Newton's first law. I've always found the more I had to do, the more I was able to get done, and the more I rest the more I tended to stay at rest. But how do we start moving if we're already at rest? It turns out that as much as we like to think we consciously choose every action we take, much of what we do is actually based on habits and triggers. Did you think about locking the door when you left the house this morning, or did you just kind of do it? Do you find yourself always craving a soda around the same time everyday? Habits are very important and useful to us, they basically create sub-routines for our brain based on triggers that allow your brain to focus on doing other things. Habits are easy and therefore comfortable. But if those habits are getting in the way of our progress, they have to be broken (often a very difficult task). The two best ways to accomplish this are trigger avoidance and habit replacement. For example, let's say you want to do more cooking, but you have a habit of just sitting on the couch after work and watching TV until it's too late and you end up making a frozen dinner or getting take-out. If you wanted to fix this, you could try either going straight to the kitchen when you get home (trigger avoidance), or sitting down and reading a chapter in a book instead of watching TV (habit replacement). You will probably feel some strain or discomfort initially as you will want to just continue your old habit, but after a few weeks you will notice a new habit take hold and you will reach a point of stasis again. For me personally, this means instead of watching TV while I eat and not getting off the couch after, listening to music while I eat and then practice mixing after.

So to recap for the TL;DR crowd, Comfort is nice, but it stands in the way of our personal growth. We have to break out from our comfort zone in order to grow because failure and stress are better teachers than success. The most effective way to break out is to:

1. Set yourself up for success by identify what is going to stand in your way beforehand and working to eliminate it.
2. Identify the bottlenecks to your growth so that you target the most effective areas first.
3. Change the habits that are causing you to seek comfort over growth.

If we can accomplish these things our forays into the world of discomfort will be productive and rewarding and hopefully encourage us to do so in the future to help us continue to growth throughout our entire lives!