The Edge of Comfort

Femke Stuut

“Life begins at the end of our comfort zone”. When I heard this the first time, it immediately rang true to me. And even now I whole-heartedly agree with that statement. I especially agree with it when nothing is challenging me toward the edge of my comfort. “Bring it on!” I usually say. And most of the time the Universe simply shrugs and says: “It shall be done!”  It’s at those times where I find myself near the end of smooth sailing, that hesitation and uncertainty take over. Suddenly I’m not so sure of this principle that life begins at the end of our comfort zone. Should I take a step forward into personal growth and the experience of feeling alive? Or do I take a step back to ensure my safety, never knowing what could have been?   The thought of stepping beyond my fears into the unknown takes me back to the time that I went canyoning in the South of France a few years ago. The pictures in the leaflet looked gorgeous and appealing: mesmerising waterfalls, mountain walls that were carved and sculpted by the fast stream of water that runs through it in wintertime. It was nature at its best. So without any doubts in my mind I signed up for this adventure. As we began our descent, it started out with playfully climbing over rocks and lightly treading through the shallow river. Then moving on to the first small jump off a steep slope into the cold water a few feet below. It was all fun and games, nothing spectacular yet. That is, until we arrived at the point in the river where it dropped about 100 feet. We were given a choice to turn back now or to abseil down, knowing we’d have no way of turning back after. Talking about the end of a comfort zone!   As I prepared myself for the 100 feet drop, I could feel the rush of fear running through my veins, frantically looking for a way out. The same questions kept repeating themselves in my mind: “What if the rope doesn’t hold? What if I’m not strapped in right?” My hands were shaking and my knees felt wobbly. Yet at the same time there was a distant picture of what it would be like if I reached the bottom and my feet would touch solid ground again. I knew it would be better than I could imagine. I’d feel so proud! So it was something I really wanted. Conflicted between the opposite ends of an emotional spectrum, I hesitated somewhat before I finally mustered up the courage to grab the rope, place my feet on the edge of the cliff and let myself ease backwards.  Even now I vividly recall the intensity of my emotions in that split second where you’re going over the cliff, but you’re not sure the rope is securely fastened.   For many of us, actualising our dreams and starting something new can feel similar to standing on the edge of a cliff. Just imagine looking down into the abyss and slowly turning your back towards it as you start to take a few steps back until gravity pulls you down and the only thing that’s keeping you from falling is a rope that can’t be more than an inch thick. It’s the fear in that tiny freefall, where we’re not certain something or someone will catch us, that can stop us from moving forward, isn’t it? The thing we often don’t realise is that after we take the leap, we can start to take little steps towards our goal. Just like in abseiling, where you can take bigger jumps when you become more certain and more skilled, or baby steps if you are still unsure of what you are doing.   Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back-- Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets in Faust:  Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.” (W. H. Murray)   About a year ago I found myself at the edge of such a metaphorical cliff. I had been there for a while, standing on the ledge. In fact, I’d been there for more than a year now. Pacing up and down, afraid of looking what was beyond it. I wanted to set up my own business, but I found myself making excuses for not moving forward and taking this step into the unknown. I was holding myself hostage in status quo, trying to avoid friction, failure and vulnerability. Paradoxically, it was through the act of staying put that I felt all those sensations I was trying not to feel.   For me, setting up a business felt overwhelming and I didn’t know where to start. I needed help. And I found it in the form of a mentor programme run by Michelle Duval, called Success Business Development Systems. I had met Michelle two years prior at the meta-coach training she and Michael Hall teach. As we modelled her successful coaching business as part of the course, one of the things she said was that she had a “just do it” attitude. I had wondered how on earth I could adopt this attitude as my own. The mentor programme gave me a chance to discover how she had mapped “just doing it”. And I can say it’s been an incredible learning experience! One where I’ve been faced with many descents into the unknown and beyond the threshold of my own comfort zones.   Right now, more than a year later, I find myself at a point in life where I can confidently say that synchronicity and serendipity arrive not by chance, but as a result of actively committing to that which we are called to do.   So how do we actively commit ourselves to something? What are the prerequisites? What does it take to venture outside of our comfort zone and start to make things real? And what specifically do we need to commit to?   “No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself.” (James Russell Lowell)   In committing to a calling, sincerity in dealing with our self is a crucial step in our own growth and development. It’s about stepping out from behind our masks, our conventionalities and our defence mechanisms into truth and honesty about our reality and our selves. It’s about committing to be real and authentic with everything that exists within us. Not only our hopes, dreams and sense of purpose, but also our fears, our disappointments, our anger, and even our insecurities about those hopes and dreams. It’s only when we accept, appreciate and embrace everything that is real for us right now, that we can start to transform and self-actualise.   It is often said that we need guts to go after our glory. And we do indeed need a certain kind of boldness and courage to go after our dreams. Yet in speaking to friends, family and (potential) clients I noticed that there’s a common misconception about the kind of courage that we need. This might be the reason why so many people don’t go ahead and just begin it. What I found is that we often tend to think we need to risk everything now if we want to achieve our dreams. It’s all or nothing. And we’d need a huge amount of courage to overcome the challenge, wouldn’t we? Because we’d need to commit our self to something we don’t feel we can handle and there’s just too many uncertainties we don’t have control over. The greatest learning that I got from doing Success BDS is that courage is about facing and embracing whatever is in the here and now and then take it from there. It’s not to conquer the “all” in all-or-nothing thinking.   And once we take that learning on board, we can then ask our self this question: “Given where I am right now, and what my heart is calling me to do, what is my next step?”   “We generally don’t want to suffer conflict at all; not creatively, not neurotically, not if we can avoid it. We thus generate a kind of approach-avoidance pattern: If I don’t approach the conflict, I can avoid feeling uncomfortable though the end result is that I also avoid responding to the call.” (Gregg Levoy)   This kind of sincerity with our self is scary to most. We’d prefer to avoid it and remain in our comfort zone. Yet by avoiding it, we also don’t respond to our call. Good (or let’s just be honest: mediocre) becomes the enemy of great, and as we live the life of comfort and safety many of us forget our dreams, and lose our connection with our sense of purpose. Often, and for years on end, we fool ourselves that we don’t even really want our dreams or convince ourselves that they are impossible to achieve. We find ourselves in jobs we don’t necessarily love, in relationships that have lost their magic, or we procrastinate from executing those plans we’ve made when we were younger. Admitting to the truth is painful and can even induce a state of fear or panic. So instead of venturing into a place where we’ll feel alive again, we surrender to comfort.   Why is it that it feels so dangerous for us to be truthful, and stay with that truth? What’s at stake? And how can we create a space in which it feels safe to be real and authentic? Part of the answer is ego-strength, or a lack of it. Ego-strength plays to the ability to look reality in the face without caving in or wishing it otherwise. It’s the ability to separate our beingness from our doingness, so we can stand in awe of our being even if we make mistakes and fail. When we lack ego-strength, we’re not going to like the truth, because we make things about us (personal), and we make it pervasive and permanent. That’s when we’d prefer to deny what really is, so we don’t have to feel the pain that might go with it. Ego-strength helps us to put a positive spin on things by indexing an event as being about the event (non-personal), in the here (non pervasive) and in the now (non permanent), thereby isolating and containing the pain. (for a more extensive explanation on ego-strength, see a previous article in non-euclidean cafe called “Super powers or ego-strength?)   "If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimation of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment." (Marcus Aurelius)   The “problem” with honesty is that it inevitably comes with consequences and taking responsibility for our lives. If we don’t have a certain sense of self-efficacy to change what we don’t like about where we are, then the truth can become very unsettling. This is why we need reconnect with our sense of ownership over our basic powers of thinking, feeling, speaking and behaving. In Neurosemantics we call this our power zone. It’s where we are response-able for the way we map things in our mind with our thoughts and feelings, as well as the way we react with our external powers of speech and behaviour. With it, we build a relationship with the world around us and as a result we are the creators of our own reality.   Accepting and embracing our power zone, will empower us. It also means, however, that we fully accept responsibility for the realisation of our dreams. We’ll no longer be able to blame others for holding us back or not giving us what we want. Nor can we place responsibility on our parents for the way they raised us or anything else in our history. We can’t even use our current level of skills as an excuse for not going ahead and actualising our dreams. Because ultimately, all of the thoughts and feelings we have about those concepts are just a figment of our own (sometimes incredibly creative) imagination.   Once we become aware of that and realise that we can change the way we’ve mapped things, we can start to re-create it in such a way that it serves us. The end result being that, as we stretch the way we perceive the world around us, we also expand our comfort zone. And not only that, we can start to feel safe even when we venture beyond it! This, I have come to realise, is vital for every aspect of life in which we wish to self actualise.   “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.” (Henry David Thoreau)   We’ll all be standing on ledges in our life. And we all get that same choice. Do we take a step forward into personal growth, or do we take a step back into safety? If we decide to commit to our own self actualisation, we will most likely encounter more rather than less descents into the unknown. We’ll feel discomfort, fear, pain and many more emotions that reside at the edge of our own comfort. Beyond that, though, we’ll also experience the richness and fullness that life has to offer when we respond to that which we are being called for. “Bring it on”, I say!

Bibliography Unleashed: A Guide to Your Ultimate Self-Actualisation (Meta-Coaching), L. Michael Hall (Neuro-Semantic Publications)   Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life, Gregg Michael Levoy (Three Rivers Press)   Toward a Psychology of Being, Abraham H. Maslow (John Wiley & Sons)   The Scottish Himalaya Expedition, W. H. Murray

 

Femke Stuut (a Noneuclidean Cafe Contributing Editor) is an internationally certified Neuro-Semantics and NLP  trainer and Meta-Coach. She is founder and director of "Completely United Training and Coaching”  in the Netherlands. Her vision is to facilitate in the Self-Actualisation of the world by awakening and aligning individuals and groups  to the purpose of their existence. She does this through training, coaching and writing. She can be reached at femke@completelyunited.com

Photo Courtesy of 123rf.

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