Truth Bomb Tuesday: There’s two ways to find the edge of your comfort zone.
There’s two ways you can push yourself to be your most awesome version possible.
The way I think about it, it’s a bit like having a shower. Imagine you are trying to find the perfect temperature – not too hot not too cold. How do you do that?
Well, there’s two ways to do that. One way is to turn the cold tap on, and then turn the hot tap on gradually adding more and more hot until you get to the temperature you want.
The other way is obviously to start with the hot tap on full and then start adding cold until you get to the temperature that you want.
Both will lead you to the temperature that you want, in theory.
In the same way, there are two ways to get to find your edge – the place where you are pushing yourself, but not so much that you’re burning out your adrenals and giving yourself stress disorders.
Not everyone is born to ride mountain bikes out the back of an aircraft carrier. And that’s ok. We are all different.
We all have different ideas about where our edge is.
But it is important to not let yourself get to soft. You do need a bit of push to reach your potential.
And so the way I see it, there’s two ways to find your sweet-spot edge.
The first is to start our timid, and then slowly start adding acts of courage and heroism into your life, slowly expanding the frontiers of what you feel you are brave enough to do.
The other way is just to embrace full-power, free-fall courage right from the beginning. That is, you try to embody the most courageous version of yourself possible.
Having done that you can then start walking it back. You can see where your limits are. You can learn where you are out of your depth. You can learn where the line is between courage and foolishness.
Now theoretically both of these parts should lead you towards your innate courage. But it doesn’t work that way.
I think we are just very bad at learning where our limits are. Our instincts for survival mean that we are hardwired to play it safe. We might think that we are at our limits, operating on our edge, but sometimes we just never know what we are capable of until we are pushed.
And so if we take the path of timidly expanding into our courage, I just don’t think we will ever reach our full potential. We will never find what the actual limits of our courage are. We will always underestimate it.
But sadly, this is the road that I see most people choosing. We play it safe. We stick to our comfort zone’s. And we only expand the frontiers of what we think we are capable of after we have already proved it to ourselves.
And in this way we never really know what we are fully capable of.
So I reckon it’s much better to go to the hot water route. See yourself as courageous and incredibly capable. Assume that you are Hercules in a Armani suit.
Once you have done that, you will learn where your limits are. You will recognise your edge. But you will know that these limits are real, and not just some figment of your timid imagination.
So these are the two roads to courage. Almost everyone takes the first, and almost everyone under shoots their potential as a result.
So be the hero you never thought you could be. Your true courage and the life you want to be living is there waiting for you.
DB.