Comfort zones are beautiful, but nothing grows there

After years of working with leaders, entrepreneurs and high performing individuals, I can attest this it true.  If a new opportunity presents itself, a high performing individual will jump straight out of their comfort zone and stretch themselves – it is how you achieve greatness in you life.

But it is not that simple is it?  Why is it that many of us struggle with creating long lasting change?  The change could be as small as changing what time you wake in the morning, or to stop looking at your phone as soon as you wake.

In the work I do, I see my clients go through many stages as they heal and evolve and the same theme seems to occur frequently.  Humans gravitate towards what is familiar and comfortable – even if the habit, behaviour or thought is no longer serving them.

I often get asked:

“If I am getting better, why do I feel uncomfortable sometimes?”

The reason:  because we measure the success of our healing and change in terms of comfort and ease.

However, if we are truly going to embrace change, we have to leave the known behind.  And what is the known? It is the familiar, the predictable, the habitual.

Dr. Elizabeth Lombardo, Psychologist and author of Better Than Perfect, says people who regularly seek out fresh experiences tend to be more creative and emotionally resilient than those who remain stuck in routine.

“Breaking your own mould can only make you stronger and more confident to reach higher levels in your professional and personal life,” she says.

Discomfort is an important part of growth and development. It is often a necessary part of learning, pushing yourself and taking risks. Being uncomfortable can be uncomfortable in the moment, but it can also lead to greater self-awareness and confidence in the long-term.

When we are uncomfortable, we are pushed outside of our comfort zone and forced to confront our fears and take risks. This can help us develop new skills, increase our self-confidence and learn how to handle ourselves in difficult situations. By facing our fears and embracing discomfort, we gain the courage to take chances and try new things.

Discomfort can also help us become more resilient and better able to cope with stress and adversity. When we face uncomfortable situations, we learn how to manage our emotions, think more critically and find solutions to challenges. This self-discovery can help us become more resilient and better equipped to handle difficult situations in the future.

Finally, discomfort can help us appreciate the good times and savour our successes. When we push ourselves and make ourselves uncomfortable, we can better appreciate the moments when we feel comfortable and happy. We can also use the lessons we learn from our discomfort to create positive change and build a better future.

Overall, discomfort is an important part of life. It can help us become more self-aware, confident, resilient and successful. We should embrace discomfort as an opportunity to learn, grow and appreciate life.

Your subconscious mind is a powerful force. It takes up about 95% of your brain power and handles everything your body needs to function properly, from eating and breathing to digesting and making memories. It also holds all the “programs” that control the way you think, what you believe, the way you feel, act, react, and pretty much everything else that forms part of who you are.

To really implement lasting change, we need to not only understand what our subconscious mind is, but how it affects our

𝙒𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙞𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙨𝙪𝙗𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙨𝙘𝙞𝙤𝙪𝙨 𝙢𝙞𝙣𝙙?

The subconscious is the part of our mind that makes decisions without our needing to actively think. The mind encompasses the thoughts we know we are having at any given moment.

The subconscious mind goes beyond learning new skills. It’s involved in information processing and affects everything we think, say and do. It stores our beliefs and values, determines our memories and monitors the information all around us, deciding what to send to the conscious mind and what to store for later. It affects every moment of our lives – and most of us don’t even know it.

Our conscious mind is our free will, learning, intervention, invention, attention, speculation, decision making, behaviour control, focused concentration and restrains emotional reactions – its our creative centre.

Often what keeps us from living the life we want are subconscious programs and beliefs. For example, you might always subconsciously do the same things but expect a different outcome. Or you may have underlying beliefs like, “I’m not worthy of success.”, “I’m not smart, capable, or wealthy enough.”, “There is no way I can do this.”, “It’s better to play it safe.”

Limiting subconscious beliefs often stem from childhood.

Quantum Law believes that your environment is an extension of your mind and if you change your mind there should be evidence in your life.  And when you align your behaviour and make the right choice you will achieve your vision.

To really change you need to:

1.VISION:  revisit your vision every day.  Continuously mentally rehearse (think about) and physically demonstrate every day your new way of being and continuously visit what it would be like you are installing the neurological hardware ahead of the experience.

2.ALIGN YOUR BEHAVIOUR:  with your intentions.  Decide who you no longer want to be and observe your behaviours that you need to cease.  If you are aware of the behaviour, you are able to self correct it.  The process of change is becoming conscious of your subconscious self.

3.REPEAT:  Make conscious choices to choose and repeat new skills and behaviours that support in achieving your vision. We must repeat it over and over again. Repetition means to maintain and sustain new connections in the brain which allows long term changes to embed as your new normal.

4.GRATITUDE:  Creative consciousness, on the other hand, is the awareness that, when you feel joy, love, or gratitude before your VISION is made manifest—and you combine that energy of joy, love, or gratitude with the intent of new information.

5.SURRENDER:  to how your creation or vision shows up.  Trust the greater mind is organising the creation in a way that’s right for us with timing that’s right for us and we must allow it to unfold in a new or different way than what we had planned or anticipated.  Think about it, if you knew what to do you would probably have done it already – that’s called the known.

6.EMBODY + BECOME YOUR VISION: Do this via your recordings by merging with the energy of our future, the remaining in that energy throughout your day.  When it becomes your state of being, then you will finally get out of your own way which makes surrendering and trusting making it easier and more natural.

If you don’t make a concerted effort to stay in the energy of your creation throughout your day, its the same as eating an organic breakfast, then spending the rest of the day eating junk food.

If you don’t make a concerted effort to stay in the energy of your creation throughout your day, its the same as eating an organic breakfast, then spending the rest of the day eating junk food.

To breakthrough your old patterns and live a life you have always dreamed, you must break the habit of being yourself and reinvent your new self.

You have the power to reprogram your subconscious and remove the emotional charge that keeps you living in the past and repeating old loops.

To change you must retrain your brain to think new thoughts, to try new experiences and build new neuro pathways in the brain to stop if from reverting to old loops.

You can achieve this by:

1. 1. Learning
   2. Remembering
   3. Be in the present

Law of Association – Learning creates new synoptic connections, when you learn something new there is a physical change in your brain, new neuro pathways are formed.

The law of repetition – Remembering is maintaining and sustaining these synoptic connections, so we need to revisit constantly to fire and wire these new neuro connections for long term change which creates a new level of mind.

Thought is more real than anything else to humans. We are able to bring memories to life in seconds and when we do, we are then living and feeling that thoughts and emotions that were attached to that thought like it is happening all over again. Meanwhile, we are not present and we are effectively living in the past.

Present is to loose track of time and space. When you are in flow or focused – present, you forget you’re a physical matter, that you are a body with thoughts, you are completely present in the moment and not thinking about something that occurred days, weeks or years ago.

Therefore to really embrace change, we need to learn new things, practice it daily to remember, be conscious of our thoughts and live in the present. This takes practice and at times can be harder than it sounds.

That’s why is is great practice to consider what it is you’re trying to achieve and what behaviours, thoughts or habits you either need to stop or start to realistically achieve this goal. Writing this down is infinitely more powerful. Use the workbook below to help you with this process.

By definition, willingness is the state of being prepared to do something or to take action. When it comes to implementing a change in your life, it usually means being ready to engage in an action or series of actions that leads to the desired outcome and includes the ability or willingness to work towards the goal even though the process may not be fun, or rewarding, or enjoyable.   When we embark on the path of change, we have to leave our old self behind or at least part of, meaning we shed layers of old thought patterns, feelings and behaviours that no longer serve us.  This can only be described as uncomfortable.

For example, a person may want to change a long-standing behavior pattern such as drinking too much, over eating, or smoking.  But to do this, you have to be willing to endure all the challenges that come along with making that change.  For example, if you are trying to lose weight and you are at a party and the cake comes out.  Your brain will tell you “its only one piece of cake, they’re all eating it, let’s start tomorrow”  Why? Because its familiar!  You are used to the behaviours, emotions and feelings of doing this and it is wired deep in your subconscious as an automatic reaction.   If you are going to eat less and make better choices, you’re going to have to put up with the discomfort of feeling things you may have been avoiding by distracting yourself with food and choose new habits, feelings and behaviours to focus on until your create new neuro pathways and they become your new normal and habit.

So again, why would anyone ever work to change a behavior if discomfort is part of the process? We do it because it matters, we have a solid intention behind why we need to make the change.  The changes we are making matter so much to us, that we are willing to move through the pain, frustration, fear, worry, anxiety, because we understand that when we achieve the change we would have elevated our state of being.

So, if in reading this you find that you are willing to take this on in an effort to change, you may wonder how do you actually do it?  The answer is to understand your why.  Why do you need to make the change and what will your life look like when you do.

Being willing to embrace the unknown and uncomfortable is not an easy thing to do but in being willing you can open up to the process of change in both the short and the long term.

It is believed that our thinking and our consciousness creates our individual and collective reality. Therefore, the reality of our life and experiences are fundamentally the creation of our minds. If so:

Human thoughts determine our sense of being. It is one of the fundamental principles of quantum physics and was proved in the 1900s with the double-slit experiment and proved recently by Dr. Larry Farwell. It conclusively determined that the behavior of energy particles at the quantum level is the human observer’s conscious intent. For example, it has been observed that the electrons under the same conditions would sometimes act like particles. Moreover, at other times, they would switch to working like waves, formless energy—completely dependent on what the human observer intended and imagined was going to materialize. Whatever the observed believed would happen is what the quantum field did in the experiments conducted over the years. (1)

When we make a conscious decision, our human energy field is interacting, instructing, and influencing the field all around us at all times. Our conscious beliefs, desires, and intentions are infused into our energy field because they are defined and directed by the energy of our thoughts and emotions.

We now understand that if we are thinking the same thoughts as yesterday, it’s more than likely, your making the same choices today.  Those same choices today are leading the same behaviours tomorrow.  The same habitual behaviours tomorrow are producing the same experiences in your future.   To change this, we need to not only be willing to change, we need to understand the deeper purpose.  Why we need to conduct this change.

Intention is awareness given a purpose.  When you understand WHY you are doing something and couple it with an elevated emotion of what it feels like to achieve it you will achieve your transformation.  Positive intentions lead to a positive attitude.  Our subconscious mind always believes what we tell it, so if we infuse our intentions & our days with positive, encouraging emotions, chances are that we’ll begin to experience them in our lives and our body & mind will profoundly benefit from this.

Intentions are the transformation of interests into a cognitive and behavioral process directed at a conscious goal. Intentions are living interests.

Now that we understand that to grow we need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, we need to embody the feelings of what it would be like to have achieved our goal, choose new behaviours and repeat this process over and over and have a solid intention coupled with an elevated emotion – what’s next?!

Well its Action!  If we spend all of our time learning and talking about something new, but never take action, we will never move forward.  We have to do something with the new information we have acquired.  We need to initiate it.  We must match our mind and body in the practical application of your new knowledge like it has already happened.  We must practice and practice some more. This stage of learning and creating takes constant rehearsal (mental as well as physical)  – and constant repetition.

It will take time, awareness and energy. we must stay conscious of our choices, employ restraint so we don’t relapse into old patterns.  We may make mistakes, but we must keep doing, keep learning and self-correcting.

You will get there, you are a genius creation of the universe and your possibilities are infinite x