5 inspiring reasons to escape your comfort zone

Is this the year you’ll study something new, start a new career, chase a promotion or dive into that creative project you’ve been dreaming of?

It’s normal to feel the stab of ‘I-can’t-do-this’ fear when presented with an opportunity that seems beyond your skills and experience, but often the only way to move along the path to your dreams is to take a risk.

Plenty of hugely successful people have leapt into the unknown before you, and their experience can serve as inspiration, motivation or even a model to follow.

“I force myself to sit at the table, even when I am not sure I belong there … And when I’m not sure anyone wants my opinion, I take a deep breath and speak up anyway.” – Sheryl Sandberg.

The former Facebook and Meta Platforms COO is best known for her book Lean In, which advocates that women be more assertive and direct in business environments.

Everyone experiences moments of self-doubt – that panic welling inside that tells you not to speak up, that you might be about to look like an idiot. But Sandberg believes that the moments when you make those hard decisions, when you see a situation differently from everyone else, are the ones that shape you.

So be bold, think big and bring your individual life and work experience to the role to carve out your own unique contribution.

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“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.” – James Cameron

You may be wondering what the director of Titanic or Avatar knows about failure, but James Cameron is always on the cutting edge of the stories he tells in terms of technical achievements.

When he’s putting together a massive sinking ship or building an entire planet in 3D, he’s following a vision that no one else has achieved on screen before. To bring this back to our more earthbound lives, your aspirations should be beyond the realistic. Aim for the highest target you can, instead of settling for achievements within easy reach.

“You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realised how seldom they do.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

Sometimes you’ll be airdropped into a situation that requires immediate mastery of an unfamiliar skillset, with no margin for error and everyone’s eyes on you.

Those situations generally happen while you’re asleep, allowing you to wake up in a cold sweat and thank God it was all a dream. The rest of the time, people are willing to cut newcomers some slack while they find their feet in a new role… if they’re thinking about you at all.

Focus on picking up the skills you need, ask questions, and remember or write down the answers. But most importantly, don’t worry about other people’s opinions until you need to. Guess what? You almost never need to.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sail. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain

Twain’s famous quote is a directive to explore everything the world has to offer you, tossing doubts to the wind. This also serves in business contexts. Yes, you might embarrass yourself. Yes, your plans might not work out. But neither of these potential worries are anything other than a self-defeating roadblock to success.

When you explore, dream and discover, you’re in uncharted territory. In other words, you don’t know what you’re doing. Relax into the adventure, safe in the knowledge that you’re learning as you go. And worst-case scenario: you have to paddle a lifeboat back to that safe harbour and start again.

“Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill

It’s been said that entrepreneurs average 3.8 failures before they succeed… but the trick is, you have to keep going in order to reach that success. We’ve all heard stories about that whizz kid who had a simple idea for an app and made gazillions, or the guy who thought of that strange invention and cleaned up – but they are the minority.

Most people don’t have instant success and the trick is to keep on keeping on, because if you stop, you stop at a loss. James Dyson had 5126 failed versions of his now legendary vacuum cleaner… imagine if he had thrown in the towel at version 324?

Accepting that failure is a possibility means swapping arrogance for a release valve. There are setbacks in every journey, but an optimistic attitude that sees those bumps as small parts of a larger story will help you overcome them more easily.

Even if the worst happens and you find your confidence was misplaced, there are lessons to be learned from every experience. Version 5127 couldn’t have happened without the wisdom from all the ones that didn’t work before it.

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