This happened when I was seven...

"Come on, you can do it" my cousin, a year older than me was shouting. He was egging me on to jump from the top of a bunk bed. I was afraid.

At seven years old, I had not been adventurous enough to make that jump. All sorts of thoughts rushed through my head. "What if I fall and break my leg," worse "what if mummy finds out and is upset with me." And other thoughts, "if I don't jump T won't like me anymore or want to play with me again."
I jumped.

I didn't break my leg, instead I knocked my head on the corner of a nearby cabinet and drew blood. I screamed.

Many years later, (don't ask me how many...) I realized something about fear. I realized that jumping out of our comfort zone while experiencing fear can go either way. There was a chance that I could have landed beautifully and gained more confidence about jumping. But fear made the likelihood of something going wrong greater.


Looking at it through my Law of Attraction lens, I can see that the concept of comfort zones is one of the most misunderstood concepts in the field of personal development.

Staying within your comfort zone is not necessarily a bad thing, if you are increasing the size of your comfort zone on a continuing basis. When we invest in ourselves, our learning and our skills, we expand our comfort zone. This gives us greater confidence. If I had practiced jumping I would have felt confident and made a flawless landing.

On the other hand, jumping out of our comfort zone comes from a place of fear. Action taken from a place of fear does not bear the same quality of fruit as action taken from a place of confidence and certainty.

Borrowing other people's confidence in our ability to jump, is temporary and will only help us increase our comfort zone and grow if things go well. Increasing the size of our comfort zone so that we always take action from a place of confidence, high on the emotional scale is a much better, more certain way to go.
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All things are possible, so we can always get there, all we have to do is ask for the next step in our preparation to get there.