When people talk about learning and change, the idea of ‘moving outside your comfort zone’ often comes up. However, the concept never really resonated with me. We all love our creature comforts, and why would anybody really want to move outside their comfort zone anyway?
When it comes to learning, babies are great learning machines. They don’t learn in a place of discomfort. Nobody really does. Babies learn in a context where they feel curious and at ease to play and explore. It might not always be particularly safe, especially when they stick their fingers into electrical plugs. Still, babies are the great explorers, the great discoverers, moving outside the world they know to incorporate new information.
So, I think there is an important distinction to be made here. For me, learning is not moving outside your comfort zone but more about moving outside your familiarity zone.
If we take the example of going on holidays, very few people will want to go on holidays to a place where they feel uncomfortable. Nonetheless, lots of people are very motivated and get a lot of fun and enjoyment out of going on holidays to new places, places that are different and places that are unfamiliar to them. In addition, those holidays can be great learning experiences in a variety of different ways.
As a result, I feel that ‘moving outside your familiarity zone’ is a much more useful concept to consider for effective learning and change.
It is essential to consider how we can move outside our familiarity zone, how we can do things differently, how we can get ourselves into contexts that are less than familiar for us to become more flexible in the way we act in the world.
Being more flexible, adapting to the changing world, going into unfamiliar territory, seeing new horizons, discovering new perspectives, evolving and growing in awareness as you do so; that is learning!
“Once a year, go somewhere different.” Dalai Lama
