How can I leave my comfort zone? Discover strategies to expand your unhooking skills and connect with values and goals for a more meaningful life.
As soon as we start to do something new, our mind will send us warnings. These consist of negative thoughts, disturbing images, bad memories, and uncomfortable emotions, urges, and sensations. This keeps us from doing what matters and we keep doing the exact same thing as we did before. We stay in our ‘comfort zone,’ or better our ‘stagnation space.’
There are two strategies for leaving this space:
- Â continually expand the range of your unhooking skills, and
- connect with something that makes it worthwhile leaving.
The second strategy is what this chapter is about.
Values and goals
Values are your heart’s deepest desires for how you want to treat yourself and others and the world around you. They are personal qualities you want to bring into existence in the things you say and do. Values can be our inspiration, motivation, and guidance. They help us do things that make our lives more meaningful and rewarding.
Goals are things you are aiming for in the future: things you want to get, have, achieve, or do. Most of them are either…
- emotional goals (describing how we want to feel),
- behavioural goals (describing how we want to behave), and
- outcome goals (describing what we want to get or have).
The empowerment capacity of values
Outcome goals are future oriented. As long as we have not achieved them, we can become frustrated, dissatisfied, disappointed, sad, or even hopeless. However, we can live our values right here and now, even when our goals are out of reach. That is why living your values is empowering; you can always ‘achieve’ it.
Exercise: finding your values
Pick an area of life you want to improve (e.g., work, health, leisure, relationships). Then consider which values best complete this sentence: In this area of my life, I want to be…
You can find comprehensive lists of values online that will help you in this process.
Exercise: finding your goals
Suppose all your difficult thoughts and feelings disappear…
- What projects, activities, or tasks would you start, resume, or continue?
- What or who would you stop avoiding?
- What would you start doing or do more of?
- How would you treat yourself differently?
- How would you treat others differently, in your most important relationships?
Thinking about these questions probably brought up negative thoughts, painful memories, and uncomfortable emotions. Again, this is completely normal. If anything, it is a good opportunity to practice your unhooking skills!
