Expand your comfort zone

Glenford Smith, Career Writer

"The first law of business is the same as the first law of life: Adapt or die." So asserts Fast Company magazine's editors in their best-selling book The Rules of Business.

It's a rule that, if followed, will give you the edge in dealing with one of life's inevitable realities - that change is constant and inexorable.

Many people have had to deal with the change from being employed to not having a job.

Following the recent termination of over 800 Air Jamaica staff, one former employee was asked about the likely impact of the layoff on his life.

His response was that he didn't know what he was going to do since he had spent decades working at Air Jamaica and didn't know anything else.

The reality is that even for those employees who survive layoffs, life at work is never the same as before.

They usually have new bosses, new policies to adopt, more responsibilities, less support and higher expectations imposed upon them.

Stop limiting yourself

What these changes demand is a willingness to adapt - to expand their comfort zone.

They have to stop limiting themselves in their careers by changing their habitual ways of thinking and behaviours in their work life.

Your comfort zone is where you are stuck to the same behaviour even when your situation demands that you change.

You have become programmed to think and behave yourself into set ways that have become 'comfortable'.

Expanding your comfort zone means being open to doing new things and old things in a new way rather than refusing to change because you're comfortable with the way things have always been.

For the newly unemployed, it means being willing to find a job in a new industry, going back to school, or even being open to starting your own business.

Homeostasis

The problem with change is that it is uncomfortable, hence our tendency to remain in our comfort zones.

Nicolas Lore, in his book The Pathfinder, refers to this tendency as homeostasis.

"We don't like to be off balance. We tend to keep things at an even keel. Every time something in our lives gets out of balance, our internal machinery sets off behaviours designed to return us to equilibrium," he writes.

The key to expanding your comfort zone is not to fight with yourself but to accept these inner feelings of resistance and keep on practising the new behaviour until you form the new habit.

This will initially demand self-discipline.

Transitioning to a new and unfamiliar job will be uncomfortable at first. So will starting your own small business.

Adapting to new bosses, a new work culture with its own rules will take getting used to. But to survive and thrive in a changing world of work, you have to learn the art of being flexible, adaptable - the art of becoming comfortable with discomfort.

To insist on remaining in your comfortable habits; to cling to the illusion that nothing has changed when everything has will be fatal.

Glenford Smith is a motivational speaker and personal achievement strategist.