Do something strange each week!
October 1, 2007
In my last post I talked a bit on stress and how utterly and completely useless I think it is. But fair enough, as some people pointed out there also a thing called healthy tention.
What I try to do in my life (and find really challenging sometimes) is to try and get out of my comfort zone at least once a week. Of course I don’t manage to do that every week, but it feels nice and refreshing anyway.
As you know everyone has a comfort zone, which we are strongly urged to stay in by ourselves because we function best when we do things we actually know very well how to do. When you step out of your comfort zone, you have to think about your every move or response because your not using your normal and strengthened neural connections. This is very energy consuming, and our bodies like to conserve energy.. that’s why it really doesn’t want to go there.
On the other hand, when you do step out of your comfort zone, you feel more alive, you learn a lot and you create new neural connections for later use. You also gain the ability to look at things from different perspectives or see new connections that you didn’t see before… which might be very valuable even in business.
So what qualifies? A lot actually!
- The obvious if of course to go skydiving, paragliding or something like that (I’m planning on taking a paragliding course next year :-) woohoo!).
- But it doesn’t have to be that extreme. Why not try going to a professional conference on some topic that is completely out of your normal field of expertise (For example, I’m in IT but went to a philosophical conference on ‘what makes an educated man?’ a few weeks ago. It was amazing)
- Or even simpler: Talk to people you’d normally never talk to; Ask if you can follow someone during work for a day if they have an interesting job; do some volunteering or simply read an obscure magazine/blog!
I’ll personally take anything to stay away from the TV ;-)
Kisses and my apologies if I sound to pedantic ;-)
Have a great day,
–
Wafel
Picture attributed to Roee C. on flickr.
Comments
4 Responses to “Do something strange each week!”
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Can only say: True that!
Enige inspiratie geput uit: http://www.43folders.com/2007/10/10/solving-problems-outside-your-comfort-zone ? :-)
Uhmm the 43F post was posted yesterday, this one is from October 1st :p
First article to really catch my eye, and i genuinly think this is so true. The whole comfort zone stuff didn’t really was an issue untill i was kind of forced to break through it, literally telling myself: ‘JUST DO IT AND GO! WHat… you wanna spend the next months locked inside your room and behind your desk?’
It’s learnfull and refreshing, and man… interesting people can be met and very nice things can come out of that…
Step out of that thing, and through that expand it! What’s the worst that could happen? ;)