Are you feeling pretty comfortable in your life, but you feel the need to make some changes? Is your business at a plateau and you want to break through to the next level? If things are okay-but-not-great you can change your situation faster by creating discomfort within your present circumstances.

Comfort is the Enemy
Most people with the hardware and communications access to read this post have it pretty good in life. I’m going to make some assumptions here that probably apply to 99% of us: you have (more) than enough food to eat; you have a roof over your head every night; you have activities to fill your days; and you have enough money left at the end of the month for a small indulgence or two. In other words, most of the time, in most of the things you do, you are comfortable.

You may consider this a good thing. If you want to change, it’s not a good thing. Comfort is holding you back. If you are content with the way things are, you won’t be motivated to change.

A cat napping in a sunbeam is pretty content and comfortable. Generally, if you want to get that cat to move, you can:

• Wait for the cat to finish its nap and move on. Any cat owner can attest that this can take a loooong time!
• Spray some water on the cat, give it a nudge, or disturb it in some other way.

People don’t seem to be any different. Even though we may Plan to Change and Desire to Change, without enough motivation, we won’t take Actions Toward Change.

In thinking back on my post The Moment of Choice, I realized that I was able to make changes in my life more quickly at times when I was miserable. Here’s a personal example:

During my first semester as an undergraduate, I was a theater major. I had done some acting and writing in high school and really enjoyed it, so I decided to pursue formal training and see if I could make a career out of my art. The problem was, I didn’t really like the subject.

This was kind of an issue for a couple of months, but I was still new to college and having fun exploring my campus and new city. Plus, I did enjoy the discounted theater tickets and class outings that went along with my studies. I knew it wasn’t a good fit, but I just wasn’t motivated to do anything about it.

Until the Othello workshop.

I had a semi-crazy instructor for a theater class and one week our assignment was to memorize a monologue from Shakespeare’s Othello and workshop it. In this workshop, we were told to jump and run and skip and moan, and worst of all, Be The Punctuation. Now, I can “be” a lot of things – a baby, a rabbit, maybe even a car – but a semicolon?

How does that work, exactly? How does a semicolon act?

As I looked around the room filled with 20 other college freshman enthusiastically “being” the semicolon, I had an epiphany. Those people were not MY people. I had to change my major, immediately! And I did. By 5pm the next day, I had a new major (which is later changed, but that’s another story)!

Create Suffering to Create Change
I later realized that I could have save a lot of time by changing my major as soon as I began to feel like it wasn’t a fit. However, I was still far enough in my comfort zone that I didn’t feel motivated to do that. To get myself moving faster, I could have applied one of these techniques for increasing suffering and creating an effective mindset for change.

1. Take it to the Extreme. You may have heard of programs that get people to quit smoking by making them smoke so many cigarettes in a row that they literally turn green. That sounds kind of dangerous, but I think this could be applied to other behaviors safely. For example, I get annoyed by how much I say, “so…” to end a sentence. It makes me sound timid. To get over this habit, I could go around ending every sentence with “so…” for a couple of days which will aggravate me so much I will become totally self-conscious about it and quit.
2. Picture the Future. In this exercise, sit in a quiet room for five minutes and picture in painstaking detail what your situation will look like in five years if you continue on the same course. Imagine what type of people you will be around, what you will do, how much money you will have, how you will feel, even what clothes you’ll be wearing. Try not to exaggerate, just focus really hard on the behaviors and circumstances that will be present if you don’t make the change you are considering. I have definitely used this technique to decide if I wanted to continue relationships. At times when I have pictured the future, it wasn’t pretty! I realized that I needed to end a relationship to get more fulfillment out of my life.
3. Remove the Comfort Zone. At one point in my life I was very tight on money and realized that I needed to change my spending habits if I was going to stay out of debt. Because I didn’t have a lot of willpower to do that, I decided to put obstacles in place to make it more difficult to spend money. First, I stopped carrying more than $20 cash. I carried my ATM card, but it didn’t work as a debit card at the time, so I had to physically go to an ATM if I needed more money. I also had a very low limit on my one and only credit card. These obstacles helped me change my mindset over time, but I had changed my behavior almost immediately, which I had to do to be successful.

If you remove the tools, people, or circumstances that allow you to engage in an undesirable behavior, it becomes much harder to continue in your present path.

The point of this post is not to depress you. Rather, I hope I’ve inspired you to examine your own comfort zones and find ways to get away from them if you genuinely want to change. Of course, it’s okay to NOT want to change, but this should be an honest decision, and not a behavior brought on by entropy.

If you have other ways to accelerate a personal change, please share them in the comments below.

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