30 Comfort Zone Quotes – The Danger, How Far “Outside” To Go, and Strategies

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Excerpt: Our list of 30 Comfort Zone Quotes is split into four parts: The Danger, Where You Are, How Far ‘Outside’ To Go, and Strategies to Implement.

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Introduction: The Art of Leaning Into Your Fear

“When the human body is put under exceptional strain, a range of dormant genes in the DNA are expressed and extraordinary physiological processes are activated.”

Anders Ericsson

The only way to reach your full potential in life is to continually step outside of your comfort zone and do that which challenges you physically, mentally, and spiritually. You have to do the things that are hard, even when (especially when) you don’t feel like doing them. You have to follow your fears and walk into situations where you might ‘mess up’ and make mistakes—sometimes even in front of people. You have to overcome your doubts and step onto stages and present yourself in situations that give you ‘butterflies.’ It is through this act of doing the uncomfortable, that these extraordinary physiological processes and capabilities that Ericsson mentions above are activated.

A good rule of thumb is to look for the situations when everything in your body is telling you to turn around and sprint in the opposite direction (unless it’s for a legitimate safety threat)! This is where you have to find the courage to calmly step forward and into discomfort despite sweaty palms, a pounding heart, a racing mind, and weak knees. In fact, as counter-intuitive as it might feel in that moment, these are all indicators that you’re likely heading in the right direction. As much as we might feel that it would be better to stay away from these scary situations to avoid ‘looking bad’ or ‘embarrassing ourselves,’ we need to realize that the bigger sacrifice we’re making is missing a chance for growth.

Growth is the secret to life and longevity. Where growth stops to occur, life ceases to exist. If we want to keep our body young, we have to keep our muscles growing through exercise—not necessarily in size but in capability and capacity. If we want to keep our mind young we need to keep our brain growing by reading and engaging in critical thinking activities and conversations. If we want to keep our spirit young we need to keep growing our understanding, our inner beliefs, and our value systems. If you choose to let these growth opportunities pass you by, then these amazing processes and capabilities will lay dormant and will never truly be activated nor realized. And what a tragedy that would be.

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Part 1: The Danger of Living Inside of Your Comfort Zone

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“Comfort imprisons us in a low-grade fear of suffering. We naturally shy from things that hurt, not understanding how much this pattern debilitates us and keeps us from experiencing life at its fullest. We must define our comfort zone, and then get the heck out of it!”

Mark Divine, The Way of the Seal

“The reason I want you to focus on stepping out of your comfort zone is this: staying in your comfort zone is the surest way to never grow. By staying in your comfort zone you actually increase the chances of being unhappy and falling into a rut.”

Raphael Huwiler, The Pain of Comfort

“Many people try to avoid pressure, yet the absence of any tension or pressure usually creates a sense of boredom and the lackluster experience of life that so many people complain about.”

Tony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within

“You can risk being wrong or you can be boring.”

Seth Godin, The Icarus Deception

“The biggest rewards in life are found outside your comfort zone.  Live with it.  Fear and risk are prerequisites if you want to enjoy a life of success and adventure.”

Jack Canfield

“Too often, convinced of our own intelligence, we stay in a comfort zone that ensures that we never feel stupid (and are never challenged to learn or reconsider what we know). It obscures from view various weakness in our understanding, until eventually it’s too late to change course. This is where the silent toll is taken.”

Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy

“Some men fear the feeling of fear and therefore don’t even approach their edge. They choose a job they know they can do well and easily, and don’t even approach the fullest giving of their gift. Their lives are relatively secure and comfortable, but dead. They lack the aliveness, the depth, and the inspirational energy that is the sign of a man living at his edge. If you are this kind of man who is hanging back, working hard perhaps, but not at your real edge, other men will not be able to trust that you can and will help them live at their edge and give their fullest gift.”

David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man

“When we are living only a portion of what a human being is capable of, our lives are incomplete. I don’t mean that we each have to do everything possible in life, but that the more possibilities we can imagine, the richer our lives will be. Defending ourselves against the stranger is a way of keeping out our own potentiality. The diminishment of our acquaintances is a diminishment of ourselves. The most challenging stranger is life itself, or the soul, the face and source of vitality. Life is always presenting new possibilities, and we may fear that bountifulness. It may seem safer to be content with what we have and what we are, and so we cling to the status quo. But in these matters there is no convenient plateau. When we refuse a new offering of life, we develop emotional calluses. The habit of acting from fear sets in quickly and becomes steadily more rigid. Refusing life, we become attendants of death.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

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Part 2: Are You Living Outside of Your Comfort Zone?

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“When we become comfortable, do you know what happens around us?Absolutely nothing. Each day becomes just like the one before. We do what we have always done, therefore we get what we have always gotten.”

Kip Davis

“Put yourself in places that make you nervous. Nerves are really the only way to know that you’re being stretched. If there hasn’t been a moment of nerves in your life for a month, it might be worthwhile asking if you’re pushing hard enough.”

Nick Crocker, Medium

“We are all fighting the same battle. All of us are torn between comfort and performance, between settling for mediocrity or being willing to suffer in order to become our best self, all the damn time. We make those kinds of decisions a dozen or more times each day.”

David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me

“If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader.”

Seth Godin, Tribes

“Role models who push us to exceed our limits, physical training that removes our spare tires, and risks that expand our sphere of comfortable action are all examples of eustress – stress that is healthful and the stimulus for growth.”

Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek

“No one likes to move beyond their comfort zone, but as the saying goes, that’s where the magic happens. It’s where we can grow, learn, and develop in a way that expands our horizons beyond what we thought was possible.”

Andy Molinsky, Reach

“There’s an importance of keeping an open mind. The brain is programed to protect us, and that can mean imposing limits on what it thinks we can or should do. Constantly push at those limits, because the brain can be way too cautious.”

Chrissie Wellington, A Life Without Limits

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Part 3: How Far Outside of Your Comfort Zone Should You Go?

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“We all had dreams as children, but very few of us are living them. Limitless isn’t about turning everyone into a rock star or a professional football player. It’s meant to demonstrate that by escaping your comfort zone and reprogramming—if not shattering—your beliefs you can push the limits of what you thought was possible in your life and multiply your daily contentment and satisfaction.”

Patrick King, Limitless

“In any given moment, a man’s growth is optimized if he leans just beyond his edge, his capacity, his fear. He should not be too lazy, happily stagnating in the zone of security and comfort. Nor should he push far beyond his edge, stressing himself unnecessarily, unable to metabolize his experience. He should lean just slightly beyond the edge of fear and discomfort.  Constantly. In everything he does.”

David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man

“Frustration is a very positive sign. It means that the solution to your problem is within range, but what you’re currently doing isn’t working, and you need to change your approach in order to achieve your goal.”

Tony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within

“To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one’s self… And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one’s self.”

Soren Kierkegaard

“Adventure should be 80 percent ‘I think this is manageable,’ but it’s good to have that last 20 percent where you’re right outside your comfort zone. Still safe, but outside your comfort zone.”

Bear Grylls

“It may be more important to be awake than to be successful, balanced, or healthy. What does it mean to be awake? Perhaps to be living with a lively imagination, responding honestly and courageously to opportunity and avoiding the temptation to follow mere habit or collective values. It means to be an individual, in every instance manifesting the originality of who we are. This is the ultimate form of creativity—following the lead of the deep soul as we make a life.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

“A free man is free to acknowledge his fears, without hiding them, or hiding from them. Live with your lips pressed against your fears, kissing your fears, neither pulling back nor aggressively violating them.”

David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man

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Part 4: Strategies

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“By leaning just beyond your fear, you challenge your limits compassionately, without trying to escape the feeling of fear itself. You step beyond the solid ground of security with an open heart. You stand in the space of unknowingness, raw and awake. Here, the gravity of deep being will attend you to the only place where fear is obsolete: the eternal free fall of home. Where you always are. Own your fear, and lean just beyond it.  In every aspect of your life. Starting now.”

David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man

“Whether we’re talking about mental or physical effort, the first step to embracing the suck is to step up and face your fear of suffering. We all share this fear, which stems from a deep-rooted need for certainty and security. Pain is your body’s way of telling you that security is threatened because something is out of whack. However, when you consistently experience the personal growth that accrues from deliberately putting yourself out of balance, such as with hard workouts, you begin to embrace that temporary pain for the rewards it brings. The fear recedes into oblivion as you embrace the suck.”

Mark Divine, The Way of the Seal

“When things get tough or uncomfortable, we tell ourselves: it’s OK to quit, it doesn’t matter, we’ll do it next time, we’re not disciplined enough, we suck at this, we can’t do it, it’s too hard, it would be nice to take a break, life is too short to struggle, we deserve a reward, just this once won’t matter, we’re going to fail, it’s better to fail quietly, we just don’t feel like it right now, let’s not think about this, hey a squirrel!  So what can we do if our story is working against us?  Change the damn story. Create a song to sing about yourself at the epic hero of your dreams. Sing this song daily, and be proud of it. Go after the dream, fight the forces of distraction and dullness and self-doubt, rise up to be your best self. You are the writer of your story, the composer of your song, and every moment is a chance to rewrite it, a new draft ready to be crafted into something better.”

Leo Babauta, Blog

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

Eleanor Roosevelt

“Give yourself an even greater challenge than the one you are trying to master and you will develop the powers necessary to overcome the original difficulty.”

William J. Bennett, The Book of Virtues

“Something in human nature tempts us to stay where we’re comfortable. We try to find a plateau, a resting place, where we have comfortable stress and adequate finances. Where we have comfortable associations with people, without he intimidation of meeting new people and entering strange situations. Of course, all of us need to plateau for a time. We climb and then plateau for assimilation.  But once we’ve assimilated what we’ve learned, we climb again. It’s unfortunate when we’ve done our last climb. When we have made our last climb, we are old, whether forty or eighty.”

Fred Smith

“We hold on to jobs we dislike because we believe there’s security in a paycheck. We stay in shitty relationships because we think there’s security in not being alone. We hold on to stuff we don’t need, just in case we might need it down the road in some nonexistent, more secure future. If such accoutrements are flooding our lives with discontent, they are not secure. In fact, the opposite is true. Discontent is uncertainty. And uncertainty is insecurity. Hence, if you are not happy with your situation, no matter how comfortable it is, you won’t ever feel secure.”

The Minimalists, Everything That Remains

“It’s okay to be sad when you mess up, but don’t dwell for too long. The mistake has already been made, and you can’t erase the fact that it happened. You can either learn from it or mope about it. The choice is yours, but remember, we are only human; we were born to make mistakes.  Simply put, if you have never made a mistake in your life, then that means that you have never taken a risk. Taking risks means that you go outside of your comfort zone—that you go outside of your boundaries. The most successful people are the ones who are not afraid to give it their all and possibly humiliate themselves greatly in front of others.  It’s like that one saying, ‘The person who asks a question is a fool for five minutes, but the person who never asks and remains silent is a fool forever.’ You choose the way you want to live your life.”

Cynthia Amy Tang

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Application Exercises:

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Application Exercise #1)  If you could place yourself anywhere on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is having security and comfort and goals within easy reach, and 10 is taking risks, struggling, and reaching for great achievement, what number would you like to be at, and why? …Where are you now?

Application Exercise #2)  When’s the last time you remember getting ‘butterfly’s’ in your stomach? How did you handle it? Did you rise to the occasion or did you step down and let the opportunity pass you by? What could you do next time to best capitalize on ‘butterfly occasions’?

Application Exercise #3)  Think of a time when you stepped outside of your comfort zone and succeeded. Think about how nervous you may have felt before hand and how amazing you felt afterward. Think of the biggest moments of your life. Were they outside of your comfort zone? How would your life be now if you hadn’t participated in those moments?

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Comfort Zone Picture Quotes to Share:

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