Is Comfortable Discomfort a Part of Your Problem?
Do you know why only a tiny percentage of us ever get to live our dreams?
It has a lot to do with how much discomfort we feel.
Making a big change in life, such as taking a new job or leaving a bad relationship, is a huge upheaval. It’s the kind of discomfort that we dread.
We will go out of our way to avoid change, so long as staying has some degree of comfort to it.
Even just the low level comfort of familiarity is comforting.
Read that again.
In addition to this standard human drive to stay with the familiar, there is the issue of our childhood programming.
Those of us who grew up with messages about not being enough, or deserving the abuse we got, will be even more inclined to stay in bad situations.
A bad relationship hurts, but subconsciously it is reassuringly familiar. Being hurt over and over runs electrical signals along those neural pathways in the brain that we formed in childhood, making something wrong feel almost right.
Consciously, that doesn’t make much sense. But this is rarely about conscious choice. We are talking about habits- about our programming.
You can apply the same logic to any other uncomfortably comfortable situation:
- A bad job
- Being perpetually in debt
- Being used by toxic friends
- Addiction
- And my personal cross to bear… good old self sabotage.
Can you relate to this?
How to tell if this is you
So how can you tell if this is you? The answer is to remove all the other problems, such as money and responsibilities, and see what is left.
Of course, you can’t wave a magic wand and have all the real world problems disappear. This has to be a thought exercise.
Take some quiet time wherever you can get it, and ask yourself this simple question:
«If time, money and all other ‘real world’ issues were not my problem, then would I still chose the situation I am in?»
Let yourself think a while.
You may have convinced yourself that you are happy and comfortable with the work that you do, or the relationships you have. You may have told yourself lies to protect your sanity.
But would you really continue with the status quo if forces outside yourself, like finances, weren’t an issue?
It’s that small percentage of people who answer this thought experiment truthfully, who begin the process of breaking through to success.
Breaking out of your patterns and uncomfortable life, comes from admitting you are not comfortable and then taking action.
It’s those people who refuse to stay stuck in their programming who push hard enough to achieve their dreams.
I’m not talking about a little push, where you take a few steps forward, then get tired and slide all the way back to the start.
I’m talking about a long, sustained push, that breaks you out of your old way of being.
