Comfort Zone Demolition: The Most Value Keystone Habit
The quality of your life is determined by how you engage with comfort zones. The ultimate outcome of many choices comes down to how you answer one question: Will you cave to discomfort or demolish discomfort?
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What is the best way to describe what happens when people stop succumbing to the limited range of choices in a comfort zone? Do you stretch or expand your comfort zone? Are you leaving or stepping out of your comfort zone? I chose to convey a combative tone–“demolish your comfort zone.”
Demolish reflects an attack on a hostile target. Since a comfort zone is a self-inflicted constraint on your freedom, it is the ultimate hostile target. Fear will never surrender. It must be demolished. By demolishing a comfort zone, you free up capacity to take unprecedented risks, expend massive effort, and build resilience.
Comfort zone demolition is the process of altering decision criteria to forgo immediate comfort in order to start doing the uncomfortable tasks required to achieve desired results. We grasp the vital significance of a heartfelt goal and do what’s required to succeed. Comfort takes a back seat to achievement. (check my earlier newsletter, “Comfort Zones Demolished: A New Type of Goal to Pursue”).
3 Big Reasons Comfort Zone Demolition is the Most Valuable Habit
In his book, The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg introduces the term “keystone habit” with this definition:
Small changes or habits that people introduce into their routines that unintentionally carry over into other aspects of their lives. They are habits that produce something of a ripple effect – in which one little positive change has the potential to produce other positive changes in all different parts of someone’s routine.
Exercise triggers people to eat healthier, experience less stress, and increase their energy to be more productive. A morning routine of meditation and jumping jacks often leads to adopting more routines like budget planning, time management, or journaling.
What is the most valuable keystone habit? Goal setting? Time management? Physical exercise? My hands-down answer is comfort zone demolition.
Comfort zone demolition earns top ranking based on three life-altering ripple effects:
1. Comfort zone demolition provides the motivational underpinning for all performance improvement practices.
Unless you’re uncomfortable, you’ll be setting realistic goals but not unprecedented stretch goals.
Unless you’re uncomfortable, you’re engaged in going through the motions practice, not deliberate practice that produces continuous skill improvements.
Unless you’re uncomfortable, you’ll accomplish urgent and easy tasks on your daily schedule but procrastinate on the vital and challenging tasks.
2. Comfort zone demolition transforms your relationship with discomfort from a pending disaster to avoid into a marvelous opportunity to capitalize on.
When comfort zone demolition gets locked in as a habit, the fun begins.
You enjoy being freed up from long standing comfort zones to achieve breakthroughs in performance!
You feel tremendous relief from addressing an uncomfortable situation you’ve been avoiding for months and months!
You gain enormous confidence from defying our cultures’ pathetic standards for what constitutes unreasonable effort by doing the uncomfortable tasks required to achieve your heartfelt goals.
3. Comfort zone demolition is a required habit to ensure you never have to wonder if you’re tapping into your full performance capacity.
Comfort zone demolition is a mindset skill that gets more proficient with deliberate practice. As you eliminate your self-limiting beliefs, you will approach your full performance capacity. You become unstoppable.
I will rest my case for proclaiming comfort zone demolition as the ultimate keystone habit.
Ruthlessly Honest Question
Most people adopt the unconscious habit of comfort zone creation. This destiny-shaping choice triggers a ripple effect for pursuing the path of least resistance over a lifetime.
I invite you to orchestrate a counter ripple effect. Given your top priority goals today and long-term ambitions, what value do you see in making comfort zone demolition your ultimate keystone habit?
Heroic Experiment for This Week
Before reading this blog, what did you consider your most valuable keystone habit?
How will improving your proficiency in comfort zone demolition increase the constructive impact of your current most valuable keystone habit?
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