Three Reasons To Get Beyond The Comfort Zone

When I was young my mother saw a classified ad in our Mississauga neighbourhood newspaper. It offered training for people interested in doing voice-over work for commercials and films. She said, “Daphne, you should do this!” 

Next thing I knew I was signed up for broadcast training.  As it turned out, I was pretty good and since that time I’ve been doing professional voice-over work.

While my Mom’s motivation was clearly to ensure that I had every opportunity possible to learn and grow she was helping me to embrace the natural risk taking behaviour of kids. It’s when we get older and learn to fear failure that we start to hold back, stay in our comfort zones and attempt fewer new things. 

That’s part of the reason we’re conscious of having Walden students pursue activities and learning that puts them outside of the comfort zone. There is no learning without some difficulty. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure. And, the more accustomed you become to exiting the comfort zone the more prepared you will be for life changes that force you out of it. Once you move out of your comfort zone, you immediately prove to yourself that you’re capable of achieving more than you thought was possible. And that will change the way you see yourself.

There are at least three reasons we motivate Walden students to stretch and the benefits to them are real.

It builds confidence: Confidence takes practice and lots of small steps. Children, sometimes, will be scared to attempt new things but once they do and succeed they will feel a genuine sense of achievement. The more you do things that scare you, the more you'll realize that you are capable of much more than you thought you were, and the more confident you'll become.

It builds creativity: Openness to experience -- which is characterized by qualities like intellectual curiosity, imagination, emotional and fantasy interests, and a drive to explore one's inner and outer lives -- has been shown to be the best predictor of creative achievement.*

It builds resilience: When faced with a school problem or an uncomfortable situation, resilience is how well a person can adapt to the events in their life. A person with good resilience has the ability to bounce back more quickly and with less stress than someone whose resilience is less developed. Everybody has resilience. When you’re out of your comfort zone you have the opportunity to learn that success can dispel anxiety. 

So, if your child comes home and expresses a concern that they’re being challenged to stretch their minds and/or bodies, don’t be worried. Getting kids out of the comfort zone is just one more way we build good people.

*Scientific American