You Can’t Go Forward While Relaxing in Your Comfort Zone
Can you imagine a man driving backwards while hoping to get to his destination? You planned to travel to Onitsha from Lagos but you’re reversing towards Badagry and praying to get to Onitsha very early. That is how some people live their lives.
Have you been driving your car and suddenly realized you had left the emergency brake on? Did you continue the journey hoping to overcome the drag of the brake? Of course, not. You simply released the brake and the car started moving effortlessly.
People get duped daily because they want something for nothing. They want to drive the latest Mercedes Benz car, but they are not ready to put in the effort to make the money. Some people want to live in Manhattan in New York, but they sit idle at home daily wishing that someone will give them a key to a mansion.
Doing the same thing and expecting a different result is purely insanity. You want to move forward, but you are doing everything possible to remain backward. You want to become a billionaire, but you deliberately developed the habit that will ensure you remain poor.
This story will explain the true meaning of the comfort zone.
A baby elephant is trained from birth to be confined to a very small space. Its trainer will tie its leg with a rope to a wooden post planted deep in the ground. This confines the baby elephant to an area determined by the length of the rope—the elephant’s comfort zone.
Though the baby elephant will initially try to break free from the rope, but the rope is too strong, and so the baby elephant learns that it can’t break the rope. It learns that it has to stay in the area defined by the length of the rope.
That rope stands for many things. Some people are limited in life by the rope of fear. When they look at the required price they must pay to be wealthy, they shudder and stay back, choosing instead to stay within the length of the rope.
Some people are limited by the rope of laziness. They want a better life for themselves and their loved ones, but they can’t get up and get out to make it happen. They can’t get out of bed by 5:AM in the morning to make their dream happen.
They sit ideal at home gossiping about wealthy people. They say things like, “Forget all those wealthy people, they are all ritualists.” “You think it is hard work that helped that man to build that mansion? He is using his company as camouflage. Everybody knows that he is a swindler.” To every lazy man or woman, wealthy people are criminals.
The rope of laziness is one of the strongest ropes that turns potential world changes to local champions. The rope of laziness confines people to abject poverty and pennilessness. It turns dreams to nightmares. The rope of laziness has turned many to beggars and borrowers.
Because the rope of procrastination confines them to a certain length, they keep generating fantastic excuses. “Oh, things are difficult.” “I am too tired to think.” “I will start tomorrow, then another tomorrow, then yet another tomorrow.” They keep postponing it until they wake up one day and discovered that they are now too old to do anything.
An important concept that successful people understand is that you are never stuck. You just keep recreating the same experience over and over by thinking the same thoughts, maintaining the same beliefs, speaking the same words and doing the same things.
Too often we get stuck in an endless loop of reinforcing behavior, which keeps us stuck in life. Our limiting thoughts create images in our mind, and those images govern our behavior, which in turn reinforce that limiting thought.
Rearrange Your Entire Life.
Nothing will change around you this year until you rearrange your life. If you don’t have a plan on what to do right now, you will remain at the same level.
If you keep doing the same thing, you will keep getting the same result. 1+1 will always be 2. If you want a different result, you must use a different formula. If you want to loose weight but you keep eating the same junk that made you overweight in the first place, no matter the weight of your prayer, you will not generate any positive result.
Stop wishing and start working. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Stop saying, “one day I will become wealthy.” There is no day in the calendar that is called one day. The actions you are taking today reveals what your future will look like. If you keep doing the same thing, you will keep replicating your past results. Kindly rearrange your life. Order my books, Twelve Pillars of Financial Success and 15 Laws of Money to learn more.
Set a Goal for Yourself
One of the easiest ways to break out of your comfort zone is to set a goal and discipline yourself to achieve it. Give yourself something to look forward to in life. Let it be so big that it can drag you out of your comfort zone.
Your ability to discipline yourself to set clear goals for yourself and then to work toward them every day will do more to guarantee your success than any other single factor.
You need to have goals to accomplish worthwhile things in life. You cannot hit a target that you can’t see. If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there. The very act of taking the time to decide what you really want in each area of your life can change your life completely. That’s the power of goal setting.
Only about 3 percent of adults have written goals and plans, and this 3 percent earn more than all of the other 97 percent put together.
The easiest way to assassinate distractions is to set goals and work towards them on daily basis. Goals will help you to have a track to run on every single day. Instead of being sidetracked by distractions and diversions, getting lost or going astray, more and more of your time is focused in a straight line; from where you are to where you want to be.
The tragedy is that most people think that they already have goals. But what they really have are hopes and wishes. However, hope is not a strategy for success, and a wish has been defined as a goal with no energy behind it.
Goals that are not written down and developed into plans are like bullets without powder in the cartridge. People with unwritten goals go through like shooting blanks. Because they think they already have goals, they never engage in hard, disciplined effort of goal setting and this is the master skill of success.
Your brain has both a success mechanism and a failure mechanism. The failure mechanism is the temptation to follow the undisciplined path of least resistance, to do what is fun and easy rather than what is hard and necessary.
While your failure mechanism functions automatically, your success mechanism is triggered by a goal. When you decide on a goal, you override your failure mechanism. You go from being a ship without a rudder, drifting with the tide, to being a ship with a rudder, a compass, and a clear destination, sailing in a straight direction toward your goal.
For more on goal setting and strategic planning, sign up for our Productivity Strategy Coaching right now. Call or chat with me via 08064143363.
What did you learn today? Share your thoughts with others at the comment section below.
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