LifeCircle 2012: Outside the comfort zone, but not what I was expecting

Once again, this was not the post I was intending to write. I have been working diligently on pushing my comfort zone and thought it was all in hand but I managed to pick something that was not totally under my control.

And then, earlier this week, I had the rug pulled from under me and I truly am out of my comfort zone. As a result, I currently have no regular work lined up for the foreseeable future and that is scary as hell. I feel I need to work on that but I didn't want to leave this post another week.

This may mean the end of Life Circle for a while. At the moment, achieving some kind of financial security for my family is my top priority and that may mean I can't commit to writing posts on particular days. I will do what I can, but I'm not going to promise. On top of that, I have a busy time for the next week or so as it is Nearly New Sale time again. To add further to this, I'm really not sure where to take Life Circle - I am wondering about whether just setting prompts to blog about and explore in your life might work better. What do you think?

I hope you have had a better time with this task than I have. I do look forward to seeing what you've done in the time we've been off. Hopefully, doing something slightly scary is good for you, it can kick start all kinds of things and who knows where it will take you?

As ever, the linky opens at 6am today and stays open for 2 weeks so you have until 17th May to link up your post.

Thanks for reading.

LifeCircle 2012 - Dealing with your comfort zone

Hello, and welcome back to LifeCircle 2012. Do you remember a while back when I got you to do something out of your comfort zone? Well, I promised a follow-up task to it but I needed to give you a while to complete it again. I was going to set this before the Easter holidays started but as you know, I was running late with the last one.

So now I'm going to set you almost the same task but this time, I'm going to share with you some techniques for pushing yourself out of your comfort zone so that maybe, you can push yourself a bit further and make some really radical changes.

The first step to dealing with a problem is to admit you have one. If you are stuck in a particular area because of fear (it's usually fear that holds us back), admitting it to yourself and the reasons for those feelings has to come first. Sometimes, we do not admit those things even to ourselves; we hide fears even from ourselves. Instead, we procrastinate and find other reasons not to tackle a project now. Acknowledging to yourself that you are scared and why you have those fears will make it easier to tackle them. You don't have to admit them publicly if you don't want - although I often think it helps to share a problem - but do at least write down your fears. The act of committing them to paper or a screen crystallises them and trying to explain them, even to yourself, helps you to understand them. Recognising the fears will help you to overcome them. Keep your plans realistic though (remember SMART?).

Of course, once you have admitted that there is a problem, you need a plan to deal with it. Think of ways to overcome what is stopping you - whether that is smaller tasks to build up to a bigger one, or practice runs of a bigger task. Even just opening yourself up to something by offering to do it is a good start. Then, recognise when those fears kick in and analyse them. If the fears amount to not being good enough or clever enough or similar, then realise they are serving no other purpose than to hold you back. Some fears are there to protect you but many others aren't. Think carefully which ones are holding you back. If you come up with an action that genuinely scares you, write it down. Commit to it! Facing fears is a great way to overcome them.

And then, another good way to stretch your comfort zone is push it all the time. Try doing something scary, however small, every single day. The more you do it, the easier it becomes to do the bigger scarier tasks.

The fear that is most likely to hold us back is that of failure. This is a tough one because everyone has to accept that we will fail at something sometimes. No-one can guarantee success. Try to change your point of view - accept you will fail but that not trying is more a failure, and so is giving up. Failure is not the problem, and we need to accept it as a part of everyday life.

It's important to focus on what you CAN do rather than what you can't. If you want to run a marathon, focus on what you can do and how you can get there. If you think that you can't run a marathon, then you won't. If you accept that you can run a mile, you can work on a plan to reach your goal. Try to learn from others who have done it before; don't be afraid to take advice or input from others; people are generally helpful and supportive and0 learning from their mistakes will save you time and energy.

Finally, go easy on yourself. If pushing out of your comfort zone stresses you, give yourself some small rewards or treats to look after yourself. If you have to abandon your task because your fears overwhelm you, don't beat yourself up. Be kind to yourself, analyse it some more and have another go. Have a reward in mind for when you do achieve it and enjoy it with impunity.

Now I've told you all this, here's the task. Look back at everything you've done so far and try to identify an area of your life that is holding you back but dealing with it scares you. Work through why that is and make a plan to deal with it. Set yourself a substantial task related to this area to complete within a month, and then tackle it, bearing in mind the points I've made above. Tackle it in any way you want. If you want to start by doing something scary every day and make the tasks bigger, then do so, but remember your overall goal is to tackle something that you think has previously held you back.

When you've done all that, you need to blog about it and come back here to link up when I post the linky. That will be Thursday 27th April and the link will then stay open until 10th May. That gives you 3-4 weeks to play with.

Enjoy your Easter holiday and I'll see you at the end of April.

LifeCircle 2012: The discomfort zone

I have to be honest, I'd actually completed this task by the time I set it, but it was the act of doing it that gave me the idea for the post.

On 10th February, I was on the radio.

A long, long time ago, I was involved slightly in student radio. I presented a music show on University Radio Nottingham in what can only be described as the graveyard hour - the two hours straight after the chart show had been broadcast on Sunday night, a time when people turned the radio off and turned the telly on. I'm pretty sure my main radio rival was Annie Nightingale and really, I couldn't stand up to her. Still, I had fun but it was a short-lived affair. I was talking to my peers effectively and I was probably too young to be scared. Now, it's a different thing - I am very conscious of how I sound and I don't want to end up coming over as an idiot.

LifeCircle 2012: Plus ultra

I think I intrigued you all in Thursday's post about what the task was about today. This is quite a biggie but I don't want you to be scared. In fact, what is under the microscope in this task is not the task itself, it's the process and how you deal with it.

You're probably wondering about the title. Plus ultra is a motto, which means "further beyond". You could call it "pushing the envelope" but that sounds a bit management speak to me. 

I'm talking about going beyond your comfort zone. We all have a comfort zone - things we are happy doing because they don't make us anxious. This is because they don't have an element of risk or if they do, we are happy with the risk the task or activity poses because we don't feel it's risky. It's different for different people - we all know daredevils who take massive risks quite regularly. 

The problem is, our comfort zone can very often hold us back. After all, if you don't take risks, how can you actually change your life? Testing our comfort zone is a good thing to do regularly, to understand how we respond to taking risks and how we can manage it. Taking risks shouldn't put us into a massive state of anxiety; certainly not for very long anyway. 

I've scared you now, haven't I? Read on. 

Your task is this: 

- I want you to set yourself a task that you know takes you out of your comfort zone. If you don't know what that is, look at the things you need to be doing now and pick out something you keep putting off, or makes you anxious or nervous just thinking about it. Make it one that is useful and relevant to the things you need to do on your plan so that you will feel like you've really achieved something by completing it.

- Commit to tackling and completing this in the time allowed for this task. Remember you have a long time for this one - the linky doesn't open until 23rd February and remains open until 8th March, meaning you have nearly a month to complete this although it would be useful to see as many posts as possible around the time that the linky opens.

- You might want to record how you feel after you've committed to doing this task and during the process.

- Complete the task as best you can and notice how you felt during the process.

- When you blog, explain what feelings you had, whether you showed any physical or other signs of anxiety at any point, whether you were able to control those feelings or signs.

- Note also how you felt after completing the task.

- I want you to try your best to complete the task but if you really can't, then mention that too, how that came about, and how your feelings changed from the point you committed to the task to the point where you realised you couldn't do it. 

Let me also make it clear - you don't HAVE to share with everyone what the task is or was. Obviously, we'd all love to share in the successes of these completed tasks but we don't necessarily need all the details. 

Go easy on yourselves - I want to make clear now that anyone that doesn't get their task completed is most definitely NOT a failure. What is important is for you to understand why that happened and how you reacted to the thought of doing the task, and how you felt after you realised you wouldn't complete your task. That is going to be just as important to me to this process as people pushing themselves and succeeding. By the way, if you do complete your task, ask yourself if your task was challenging enough. If not, why not? Is it because you don't trust yourself to complete it, or you don't believe that you are capable of more? Did you surprise yourself how you dealt with it? What have you learned from this task? This is as much about self-awareness as it is about finishing the task. 

Good luck, people. I'll see you on the other side. Twelve days and counting until that linky opens. You can do it. 

Courage

Sometimes, I wish I was brave. There are some things I just could not ever do because fear would overtake me and paralyse my limbs, robbing me of my ability to move or even speak. I shudder at the thought of throwing myself out of a plane for example and am in awe of anyone that can. And don't expect me to enjoy rollercoasters. I cannot think of anything worse. In that respect, I'm a coward.

I know that sometimes, it's good to push the boundaries. From time to time, I've done things that are, quite frankly, terrifying but I've taken the plunge, closed my eyes and gone for it - and it's worked out OK. Stepping into the void has turned out OK - but then, they haven't actually involved potentially falling at 100 feet per second with a cold, hard ground waiting to meet me. Although I learn to fire eat once, which was both fantastic and empowering and that didn't seem to bother me one bit. Odd.

Twelve years ago, I took what seemed to others to be a brave decision - to move, lock stock and barrel, 200 miles north to Lancashire, knowing very few people in the area and no family to turn to. My Dad was ill at the time and barely knew my name, but in a way, I did it for him. I know that, as a child, he had wanted to move from the town where I grew up, maybe to a new life. He didn't. The house where I grew up is still the family home. He lived the last years of his life in a home 7 miles away. That's the furthest he got to move. Maybe it's no coincidence that both his daughters moved away - my sister lives in Devon, whereas my two half sisters live much closer to "home".

I took a risk. It worked out. The job I took to move here didn't. It lasted just over 3 months and it made me so stressed that I dreaded work every day and it made me ill. I had to take another risk, go unemployed and work casual until I secured a contract for several months and then got a permanent job - although for a while, it looked as if my new life would be over shortly after it had begun. Of course, it worked out. I took a risk but it came good for me and I love my life here now.

That's what courage is, isn't it? Everyone has limits. Things they would never do. They are just different for everyone. I lived in Hampshire for 7 years and although I decided to move away for other reasons, I loved living there. I knew I could make my second move work for me. Perhaps I wasn't quite so courageous - although it was double the distance from family and friends, and what I knew. Relocating was still part of my comfort zone. Isn't courage about going beyond that? I don't see what I did was brave.

As I said, I'm a coward. I don't think I've ever risked life and limb to save someone. Perhaps I never will. I've never done anything particularly remarkable in my life. Maybe I've just hit upon the answer.

Those who demonstrate true courage to make a difference, they're the ones that get remembered.