I have a confession to make.
Up until about 3 years ago, I was kind of crusty. I didn’t try many new things, I didn’t step out of my comfort zone too much, and I’d often be the person who turned down opportunities that had the potential to make me look stupid.
The things I’d choose to do were exclusively ones I
kind of knew I’d be good at, like teaching group fitness classes or taking up the rowing team in college or even doing a figure competition for the first time.
Mostly, I did things that naturally came easy to me, and said 'no' to things that I could potentially fail at. And I surrounded myself with people who liked the same things I did. Comfortable, and lots of easy wins.
Is this a good model for life?
Well, it worked
for me for 30 years. So I don’t know that it’s bad per se, but what it definitely is is limiting.
A few years ago, I started getting some itches. I wanted to create more, make a bigger impact – in both my personal and professional lives – and I was kind of sick of sitting on the sidelines scared to try anything new out of fear that I’d fail.
But here’s the thing about getting out of your comfort zone: you don’t want
to.
By nature, our comfort zone is well, comfortable and so doing things outside of it naturally makes us feel scared, vulnerable, silly, embarrassed, unsure, nervous and many times even defeated and discouraged.
So why even bother?
Getting out of your comfort zone is one worthwhile thing: transformative.
It takes you to the
next level in your personal growth because without that, there are zero chances to fail. Trying new things gives you the opportunity to struggle. Which, sounds kind of ridiculous, like, “Why would I ever want to struggle, Jill?”
Because the struggle is where the good stuff is. It’s where the lessons get learned, the insight gets had and the elevation takes place. It’s where you go from knowing this much to knowing this much. It’s where you go from being
this much to being this much. And it’s where you go from having this much to having this much.
Struggle is how we get better. And yet, by nature, we don’t want to struggle. If course we don’t!
So how do you start saying ‘yes’ to things that are uncomfortable? And how do you stratify which things are going to be beneficial and which ones are just going to be miserable through and through?
A story
...
Two years ago, I went to visit my friend Jen Sinkler, owner of Thrive with Jen Sinkler, an incredible lifting coach and whose lifting style and experience is pretty much the exact opposite of mine. She’s into power lifting and Olympic lifts, while I’m over here doing biceps curls trying to get my veins to pop ;) My experience is mostly in bodybuilding-type movements and metabolic conditioning.
So during my visit, Jen and I go to her gym,
Movement Minneapolis, where she tells me we’re going to deadlift and snatch. Huh? I mean, I kind of knew what a deadlift was though I’d never done one. And a snatch? Well, that could be anything …
So she’s teaching me these full-body lifts and ... I suck at them. I have zero mobility in my shoulders, my lower back is all jacked up and I am trying to purely muscle through the movements with zero technique because well, that’s what I do – I muscle
shit.
But that old M.O. isn't going to work with these new lifts. And so I'm a beginner again.
And being a beginning at something that you think you kind of should be a badass in is not fun. It’s humbling. And uncomfortable. And makes you want to give up or just pretend there’s nothing there you really need to know.
It would have been easy to relegate these more technical lifts into the category of, “well, I just don’t do
that,” and continue on with my same old routine. In fact, that was my initial reaction. I was a bit of a baby about it.
But over time, the itch continued. And I wanted to get better. My interest was piqued until I kind of had to pursue it further.
And so over the last 2 years, I worked on these movements, struggled, got a little better, struggled some more, took some beatings, missed lifts, then got a little better, and on and on. Now, I love
them and incorporate them into my weekly routine regularly.
Day 1:
