Topic: The Craziness of Comfort
So this really goes to a wide variety of things in life…just apply the information where necessary. Thanks to a friend’s product line (Shout out to Stephen Carpenter @ceostephen), I proudly wear my Comfort Can’t Progress shirt. It’s a reminder that growth doesn’t come in a place that I choose to sit in that goes with the flow and/or the status quo. So why the title when for most people comfort doesn’t really feel terrible? I’ll explain…
Comfort can be described as something that feels good and reminds one of home. If we’re discussing food, it’s about the feelings received while partaking that are synonymous with enjoyment and pleasure. The problem is you don’t get new experiences from the same thing if you do it over and over again. And if you read anything associated with health and wellness, you’ll notice that having too much comfort food is actually bad for your health. How can something that feels/tastes so good be bad for you? Like anything else in life, there has to be variation. When you go on vacations you aren’t necessarily attempting to go to a place that reminds you of home, unless you plan on being there for an extended period of time. Typically this is the case because you want a different experience. When choosing something to eat if you’ve had something several days in a row you’re going to want to change it up a little bit for variety. Doing the same thing over becomes monotonous and eventually you’ll get “bored.”
Here’s usually where the craziness comes in. While the past two topics are only home and food, how many other places can this be applied? I’ll speak from a personal place here: there were a ton of relationships, friends, heck even jobs I should have moved away from but stayed out of comfort. I lessened my own wants and desires to maintain “comfort”. Truth is, in those situations I wasn’t comfortable at all. I didn’t feel supported or like I really mattered, but since change is hard I tried to stick it out. If I’m honest, those seasons of sitting in comfort were more about my areas of lack being given too much highlight. My insecurities, doubts, and fears were placed on a pedestal versus me believing in me and going for what I said I wanted. Funny thing is I gave more trying to make it work versus just walking away. Now that I’ve grown emotionally and mentally I recognize that it takes so much more effort to try and make a broken thing work than to start something new.
While they’re are so many people that walked away easily and never struggled with this sort of thing, that was NEVER the case with me. I have always given relationships a high priority in my life and me not having better self awareness often times lowered the bar on what I allowed to have people in my life. Thankfully I’m not there anymore and I recognize the importance of being able to identify warning signs and take appropriate actions. Just like this in relationships, I also apply this logic to my entire life. When I’m becoming too settled in (whatever “it” its), I do some heavy evaluation. I check on the return on investment of almost everything now to ensure I’m not always giving myself the shorter end of the stick. This has helped me tremendously when it’s time to encounter something new because my focus is more on the expected results than the difficulty of the work. Is there any place in your life that you’ve allowed yourself to become too comfortable? How will you change it?