The Truth About Your Comfort Zone

by Mardig Sheridan

You've probably heard that to be more successful, you'll have to get out of your comfort zone. Although that advice is well-meaning, it's inaccurate. In fact, getting too far out of your comfort zone will hinder your success. If that startles you, allow me to explain where the theory originated.

You won't find it called "the comfort zone" in scientific journals, although the concept was born out of a series of psychological experiments commissioned in the Fifties by a multi-national corporation that wanted to ascertain how it could create a working environment that would result in a higher level of productivity from their employees. It is proprietary information and the corporation that instigated the study did not want their employees to know they were part of an experiment. Note, too, that in the Fifties, psychology was still an emerging science and was often looked upon with a great deal of skepticism.

I want to stress that the intended aim of the study was to discover how the company could create a working environment where the employees would enjoy their jobs so much that they'd be motivated to perform at a higher level. Consequently, the company would make more money, and they could pay their employees more money. What a great concept!

In behavioral psychology, conclusions are a matter of statistical observation. Using control groups to establish a baseline, the psychologists observe what results occur as a consequence of changes made in an alternative environment. If 95 percent or more of the subjects respond identically to the change, then it is deduced that their behavior is universal.

To begin with, the psychologists designed environmental changes in the workplace. For example, they took down walls and put up cubicles, or took walls down and had an open workspace. They changed the brightness and color temperature of the lighting and the physical temperature of the building. They changed wall colors and the times for coffee breaks - arrival and departure times for getting to and leaving work. What they discovered was that productivity increased for a short period of time, and then fell back to its original level.

So they designed a more dramatic model. Utilizing commissioned salespeople, they averaged the low and high income over the period of each person's employment. In other words, they established that individual's comfort zone of earnings. Then they made radical changes. For example: moving a person from an urban to a rural area - or rural to urban. They changed compensation strategies. For instance, being paid on the basis of a team sales effort rather than the individual's sales result. Or they took away an established and successful salesperson's client list and gave it to someone less successful. Suddenly, the salesperson who had been taking orders for years had to start cold calling, and the less successful salesperson was making more money than he ever had before. These, as well as many other changes, affected the employees dramatically; which probably explains why the company wasn't too keen on publicizing it. Here's what they learned: Those salespeople whose experience of the changes involved making less than they ever had before would do one of two things. Some of them quit. But 95 percent or more of them did not. Instead, they worked to raise their income back to what they had been making previously - back to their comfort zone of income.

We are always proving the truth of our beliefs - being right about our attitudes.

This didn't surprise the scientists. If you have established a certain lifestyle and expectation around how much money you should be making, then you will do what you must to maintain it. Some of us grew up being taught that this was motivational. That life was about having enough to be secure. You may have heard something that sounded like this: "Now you listen here young lady/young man, you'd better give up on that foolish dream of yours. You need to get a good education and learn a skill that you can fall back on. Something you can rely on to get a good job, get vested and have a retirement plan -- something solid and secure. 'Cause if you don't, you won't have enough money to feed the kids, pay the mortgage, or take care of your family. You'll die old and broke and lonely."

Recognize that speech? Our parents meant well. After all, they wanted the best for us and most of us want more for our children than we had. But consider their training. It was probably the same as they were giving you. This is fear-based motivation. Fear does motivate, but is fear-based motivation a joyful experience of life? Does it encourage taking risks and possible failure? Of course not. Here's another truism of humans: Whatever we believe to be the truth is our truth. We are always proving the truth of our beliefs -- being right about our attitudes. If we believe there will not be enough, then our truth becomes our reality -- no matter how much we ever have, it will never be enough. That is living a life of fear. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "If you live your life in fear, you will most assuredly die of that which you fear most."

So that discovery didn't surprise the scientists, but this one did. When they made a change such that the salesperson was now making more money than they ever had before, one of two things would happen. Believe it or not, some of them quit. Perhaps they thought if they were good enough to make this much, they could make more somewhere else. But over 95 percent of them didn't. Amazingly, they reduced their income back to the level they had before the change was made. In other words, they returned to their comfort zone of income. No matter what changes the scientists made and as many times as they repeated these experiments, the same results occurred. As a result, the scientists arrived at this observation: Each of us decides how much we are comfortable with, and we will allow ourselves to have no less than that and, most importantly, no more. The comfort zone, as it's come to be called, was discovered quite by accident.

The question is whether what you have in your comfort zone now is enough. Only you can answer that question, but if your answer is no, what can you do about that?

That explains why so many people who win the lottery end up deeper in debt then they were before they won. In fact, many of them end up in bankruptcy. Now I suspect you'd love to challenge that statistic, but think about your life. Have you ever had some money come to you that you weren't expecting and, in a short period of time, wondered what happened to it?

In the Eighties, I was a film director making television commercials in Seattle. I hired an agent in New York and was soon awarded several national commercials from major advertising agencies. Although I completed shooting the commercials, and the clients were satisfied, I devastated my relationships with the agency producers who had hired me. To this day I'm embarrassed by the idiotic way I treated them. They never hired me again. At that time, I was so far out of my comfort zone that I sabotaged the very success I was pursuing.

Several years ago, I was golfing with a professional football player named Norm Johnson. He was a place-kicker for the Seattle Seahawks for years and then played for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Norm was one of the most successful and accurate field goal kickers in the history of the National Football League. As we were chatting, I asked him, "How do you do it? The game is on the line, three seconds left, your team will win or lose depending on you kicking a ball fifty yards in the air through goal posts that must look like fork tines at that distance. You're in the other team's stadium, and seventy thousand people are screaming at you, wanting you to fail. Millions of people are watching you on TV. When it's time for you to execute, there are eleven very large human beings who are going to do their best to tear your head off. How do you do it?"

"Mardig," he said, "I just get in my comfort zone. I've been doing it since I was a kid in high school, I did it at UCLA, and I've been doing it for years as a pro. I expect to kick the ball through the goal posts; it's what I'm comfortable doing."

The comfort zone isn't good or bad, right or wrong. After all, we all have one. The question is whether what you have in your comfort zone now is enough. Only you can answer that question, but if your answer is no, what can you do about that? It's a certainty that you will not allow yourself to have any more than you believe you deserve, but what if you want something above your current comfort zone? How will you resolve that dilemma? The answer is this: You must raise your comfort zone -- one small incremental step at a time. If you push the top of your zone up one tiny step, it doesn't feel out of your reach. It must be something that you can do, even though you haven't done it before. But it can't be such a big step that you aren't willing to do it.

First you must recognize that what stops you at the top of your comfort zone are the attitudes you hold, and the behaviors that follow from those attitudes that keep you stuck at your current level of comfort. This is why attitude is so important. In 1896, William James said, "The greatest discovery of my generation is that you can change your life by changing your attitude." Attitudes and beliefs like "I can't afford it, I don't have the time, I'm too busy, or I'm too tired."

Forget "getting out of" your comfort zone and focus instead on expanding it.

James also observed that about ten percent of all people have enough courage to take the risks required to have the richest, fullest, and most successful life possible. The other 90 percent spend their lives finding the reasons, excuses, and justifiers for why their lives aren't working out very well. People who achieve their dreams get bigger than their reasons (attitudes) at the top of their comfort zones. They create a vision that is more compelling than their excuses and justifiers. They are willing to change their minds, shift their attitudes, and become unreasonable. They know that a dream without action is, in truth, a fantasy.

A woman in one of my classes dreamed of recording her songs and becoming a professional musician. Her reasons for not doing it were that she had a good job and didn't want to lose it. She had a family that demanded her time and was also concerned that maybe she wasn't talented enough. Her friends told her that she was foolish to consider the life of a musician. Her justifications were reasonable to be sure, but she still had her vision and agreed to take one incremental step. She committed to choose the songs she would record and get a musician friend to chart them for her. That's all she promised to do. She did not commit to record the CD or anything more, just choose the songs and have the charts written. She agreed to tell her support team when she would complete her task, and asked them to hold her to it.

Today, she has recorded her songs, sells her CD, and performs professionally. And by the way, she still has her job and her family. Perhaps one day she will quit her job, I don't know. She wrote to me recently to say she has plans for her next recording. By taking one incremental step at the top of her comfort zone, she established a new ceiling. Once she had a new top, she raised that another notch -- and another -- until she had raised her expectations of herself to include her dream and turn it into reality.

One of the most inane things I've heard from well-intentioned speakers is that we "should get out of our comfort zones and take action with more confidence," as if we've been holding back some secret reserve until that breath-taking revelation. Sometimes the accomplishment we seek is so overwhelming that we're tempted to give up before we begin. As the woman pursuing her dream of being a musician shows us, the path to success that appears to be out of reach is building self-confidence one incremental step at a time.

Forget "getting out of" your comfort zone and focus instead on expanding it. Here's a specific methodology for doing just that:

Note what you want. This is the "big success," which at this point is part of your attainable vision, but still in the distance.
Determine your next incremental action step. Take one step forward on the path to the "big success." Make it something you've never done before, but something you know you can do.
Make a commitment. Specify the date you will complete your action step.
Enlist a life-support person (not a family member). Someone you know will hold you able to keep your commitment and be unwilling to accept any excuses.
Specify the date you will ask this person to support you. You are to tell this person your next action step, the date of completion, and ask him or her to support you and hold you accountable.
Select a back-up support person. Someone else to whom you will report when you've completed step number five. Tell this person the date you will call to report your life-support is in place.
Specify the date you will report to your back-up support person. His or her only job is to hold you to your commitment to put your life-support person in place.

When you accomplish this first step, you gain confidence to take another. You have defined an action step and although it is a stretch, you know you can do it. You have set up a mechanism to support yourself to do it, and when it's completed, you will gain more confidence. Because you have more confidence, you can set a higher plateau. You've proven to yourself you can do it, you have raised your comfort zone, and now you have the confidence to push it further. Once again, it is a step-by-step process.

In Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill writes, "When you begin to think and grow rich, you will observe that riches begin with a state of mind, with definiteness of purpose. You, and every other person, ought to be interested in knowing how to acquire that state of mind which will attract riches."

That state of mind must be inside, not outside your comfort zone. Ultimately you will be successful only at that which you feel competent doing within your comfort zone. You will allow yourself to have only as much as you believe you deserve. If you want more than you have now, you must raise your comfort zone one incremental step at a time.


	E-mail: Mardig Sheridan 3817 29th Avenue West Seattle, Washington 98199 Fax: (206) 282-9564 Phone: (206) 283-4252
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