Step Outside Your Comfort Zone—or Into It—As You See Fit

When you’re an introvert, you’re forever being told to “step outside your comfort zone.” What about stepping into it?

Once a week or so growing up, we had liver for dinner.

“It’s good for you,” Mom declared, citing no medical evidence.

As importantly where our family was concerned: It was cheap.

Liver, as everyone well knows, tastes like an NFL football, though it is much less tender.

We kids eventually discovered that liver also shares the football’s rugged durability; my brother Mike once hid his piece of liver in Mom’s china cabinet, where it was discovered, still intact, by my sister Kathy more than a decade later.

Bon appétit.

I never understood why Mom made—let alone made us eat—liver, especially when it seemed as though she didn’t exactly love it herself.

Years later, though, she told me the simple truth.

“It was for your dad,” she said with a shrug.

Dad, it turns out, actually liked the liver, and not simply the bacon and onions and mashed potatoes disguising it.

So Mom decided—on purpose, mind you—to make it for him.

Often.

She almost killed the rest of us in the process, but that’s beside the point.

The real point is this: Mom chose to step outside her own comfort zone, if only in this small way, and she did it for a worthy purpose.

Stepping vs. Being Pushed

Ideally, that’s the way stepping outside your comfort zone should be: It should be you stepping, not you being shoved.

It should be something you decide to do, not a demand or an admonishment you feel you must obey.

And you should have a good reason for doing it vs. doing it just because … or just because someone tells you to.

Unfortunately, where introverts are concerned especially, the phrase “step outside your comfort zone” too often feels just like “eat your 
liver”: questionable with respect to its assumed benefits, doled out as face-value wisdom, off-putting, maddening—the opposite of helpful.

Even though it is almost always delivered with helpful intent.

Comfort Zone vs. Capacity Zone

Years ago, I came across an article titled “Get Out of Your Comfort Zone to Boost Your Career.”

It said, in part:

“Being able to step outside of your comfort zone is essential if you want to create a successful career. … You could do more in your career or with your business if you step outside of your comfort zone more.”

Is this bad advice?

No, not on the surface. But there’s a degree of black-and-white certainty behind such statements that grates on the nerves after a while.

Particularly the introvert’s nerves.

Beth Buelow, author of the thorough and thoroughly inspirational book The 
Introvert Entrepreneur: Amplify Your Strengths and Create Success on Your Own Terms, writes that she has decided to stop using the phrase “step outside your comfort zone” altogether, especially since, as she points out, it is “usually preceded by the words you have to.”

“After all,” she begins, perhaps only half tongue-in-cheek, “why would I want to step outside my comfort zone? My comfort zone is filled with dark chocolate, naps, kitty cats, my BFFs, spending a quiet evening at home, and reading in my comfy chair.”

But in short order, Buelow outlines a much more compelling argument for her shift in thinking—one that illustrates the critical impacts of both vocabulary and mindset.

“I have realized that the word comfort [in comfort zone] comes laden with judgment,” she writes.

“Being in the comfort zone = bad/safe, being out = good/scary.”

Better instead, she says, to think in terms of your capacity zone—and to then work on expanding it.

“Words matter,” she concludes:

“Within this reframing, the context shifts: Instead of moving from bad/safe to good/scary, I’m moving from good to better. I’m moving from a place of power to expanded power rather than from weakness to relative power.”

Maximize Your Strengths

Let’s face it: We all do have to step outside our comfort zones at times, sometimes with little or no preparation.

We don’t always get to choose, nor should we expect to.

But far more often than not, we can make our own decisions.

We can start by not only defining our own personal comfort zones but also by self-determining how and when we step out of them, and for whom/what—and, especially, why.

We can also acknowledge that when it comes to operating from within our comfort zones, it’s likely that we haven’t fully leveraged our many introverted strengths. Not really.

So let’s all do that before trying to become something—or someone—else.