10/04/2014
Erase Your Limits… Expand Your Comfort Zone
If you could handle discomfort better, you would never procrastinate, never quit a diet, exercise every day, and complete everything you ever wanted to accomplish.
We can Follow this 6 Step process to become more comfortable with our discomfort and set ourselves free:
1. Start with something that’s difficult, but not too difficult. Learning Chinese is very difficult. But eating all your vegetables isn’t too difficult. Starting a gentle exercise program isn’t too difficult, either.
o Start with something that will enhance our life, but won’t be too challenging to implement or take an excessive amount of time.
2. Start slowly. If we’re going to start exercising, start with just 5-10 minutes. We can add a little bit of time each day or week. If we try to start with 60 minutes, it will probably seem too overwhelming to even get started.
o Why not give ourselves the best chance to succeed?
3. Push through a little discomfort. Maybe we are working on keeping the house clean or write a report or go on a diet. We are likely feel a strong urge to quit just 10 minutes or in a day, into our task. Keep working. A little later, we may want to quit again, but keep going. The third time, allow ourselves to actually stop.
o Try to do this with everything. Avoid letting ourselves quit anything the first time we get the urge to stop.
4. Observe our discomfort. A great way to deal with discomfort is to simply observe it. How does it feel? How we try to avoid the situation that is causing the discomfort? Do we try to distract ourselves with other activities?
o We might rationalize reasons why it would be better not to continue. Avoid falling into that pattern.
o Study our discomfort like a dispassionate observer. By simply observing and not becoming emotionally involved with our discomfort, we are likely notice that our discomfort lessens.
5. Find a way to smile. Smiling is a key component of learning to be okay with discomfort. It’s hard to be miserable when one is smiling. When the going gets rough, take a deep breath and force a smile, believe me, it always cheers one up and makes it easier to push through.
6. Continue to push a little further the next time. Just like with exercising, we can always do just a little bit more the next time. Each time we work through a little more discomfort, it gets easier and easier. Our capacity to deal with discomfort will expand quickly.
We can learn to be comfortable with discomfort!
Think of all the amazing things you could accomplish if being uncomfortable didn’t stop you! There really isn’t much you couldn’t do.
Those that avoid discomfort the most tend to end up with the most uncomfortable lives.
By accepting and managing our discomfort, we can build the life we so desire.
Start small, but get started.
Being a little uncomfortable never hurt anyone.
We master our discomfort and we’ll set ourselves free.
Feel happy to embrace discomforts... :-)