“Researchers say, one’s comfort zone refers to the set of environments and behaviors with which one is comfortable, without creating a sense of risk.” Read on to know why it’s important to step out of the comfort zone to learn new skills and achieve higher levels of performance.
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Author: Satish Nair
“The comfort zone is a behavioural state within which a person operates in an anxiety-neutral condition, using a limited set of behaviours to deliver a steady level of performance, usually without a sense of risk” Alasdair A. K. White, From Comfort Zone to Performance Management”
Researchers say, one’s comfort zone refers to the set of environments and behaviors with which one is comfortable, without creating a sense of risk. A person’s personality can be described by his or her comfort zones. Highly successful persons may routinely step outside their comfort zones, to accomplish what they wish. A comfort zone is a type of mental conditioning that causes a person to create and operate mental boundaries; as such boundaries create an unfounded sense of security. Like inactiveness, a person who has established a comfort zone in a particular bloc of his or her life, will tend to stay within that zone without stepping outside of it. To step outside a person’s comfort zone, they must experiment with new and different situations, where they will not be feel secure and then experience the new and different responses that then occur within their environment.
To step out of the comfort zone raises the anxiety level engendering a stress response, the result of which is an enhanced level of concentration and focus. White (2008) refers to this as the Optimal Performance Zone – a zone in which the performance of a person can be enhanced and in which their skills can be optimised. However, White (2008) also observes that if the work of Robert Yerkes (1907) is considered in which he reported ‘Anxiety improves performance until a certain optimum level of arousal has been reached. Beyond that point, performance deteriorates as higher levels of anxiety are attained’, if a person steps beyond the optimum performance zone they enter a “danger zone” in which performance will decline rapidly as higher levels of anxiety or discomfort occur.
In terms of performance management or development, the objective of the trainer or manager is to cause the person to enter the optimum performance zone for a sufficient period of time so that new skills and performance can be achieved and become embedded. The same reasoning is used with goal setting: change the anxiety level and the performance will change. (However, it should be noted that in performance terms, the term incentive is used to describe the process of changing the anxiety level – an incentive being anything that causes a change in behavior.)
An example : if we receive a good job offer with a wide profile than the present in a good organization, but before we analyzing the offer, first of all we think about our present comfort zone, then we started to further think why we should leave the present job and we do not wish to stepping out of the comfort zone – we have enough friends, the boss – know each other well, familiar environment etc. etc. Also, we have the fear of doing so as it would result in losing the sense of security the individual derives from the present job. Comfort zone is similar to the homesickness, where one feels very comfortable at his home/ his current office, his current level of satisfaction, he feels insecure when he leave the HOME. The sense of security the individual perceives could be attributed to the mental conditioning formed initially.
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