Why You Should Step Beyond Your Comfort Zone

I swerved hard to the left.

Not nearly enough to wake my three year old dozing in the back, but enough that my oldest knocked about in his seat next to him.

That could have been a disaster, and it reminded me of why I became interested in writing in public…because I started out with almost no idea how to influence others, much less have a curiosity about what they were thinking.

No matter who you are or how technical you become, studying this just may save your life in ways you won’t realize until something like this happens to you.

Breaking free of the silo system

I’ve been in the high tech industry for over a decade at this point, and I’ve noticed something a bit worrying: it’s something called “EPD”: engineer personality disorder.

Our kind are brilliant thinkers, tinkerers, and innovators. We are the engines that drive humanity forward and make things possible that were only fiction even a few decades ago.

But we can’t socialize, communicate, and have a passing interest in the soft skills to have others appreciate our contributions.

The sad truth is that this hurts us on many levels that we don’t appreciate.

Ignorance is bliss for sure, but it’s self-inflicted.

My parents always told me that learning to navigate the real world was something that would come easily after I got all the degrees I needed to succeed in life.

A white lie to keep me focused. Also one that I realized as such much earlier on than they hoped.

So what did I do to kick myself far out of my comfort zone?

• I joined a multi-cultural dance team composed of English majors, economics majors, people I otherwise would have never met on campus.

• I enrolled in theater classes, cultural anthropology courses, and even a history of war course.

• I lead an a cappella group for a semester that performed Korean, Japanese, and Chinese pop covers.

All those things got me started on forging a separate path outside of engineering and pursuing a doctorate…the double life that I continued to nurture as I became a young professional after graduation.

• I participated in local children’s theater productions and Shakespeare in the park.

• I performed and competed up and down the East Coast in Swing Dance competitions.

The pivot towards cyberspace

Eventually, I started a YouTube channel and began writing across multiple platforms and honing my awareness of identity, its impact on how we choose to express ourselves, and how it guided our self-improvement processes.

Becoming interested in psychology and marketing and personal branding has saved my life on the road like the example that I shared at the beginning of this article.

How? Because it started making me consider what people thought, how they behaved, and why they responded to the world in the way that they did.

My entire life had been about the technical, the physical, and the mental realms and learning the flow of each aspect. I had never really given too much focus to what I considered to be the less relevant portions. I just did what I was told was the best course of action, what was the acceptable thing to do…

The longer I did it, the less fulfilling it became.

You can bend reality to your will if you understand how electrons move, how the body works, why computers require training to function properly. Unfortunately, you can’t make a girl like you, you can’t motivate someone to change their view, and you certainly can’t get a potential customer interested in your work because of these things.

If you aren’t interested in learning how to the world works in this area, then you’re pretty much bound to the service of others within a company for the rest of your life. You won’t anticipate a response or predict how your industry will change with market forces or competitors or current events.

You certainly won’t have an inkling as to whether or not the car behind the truck will try to turn into your lane.

The world beyond your mind

When I started studying the motivations behind why people do the crazy things they do, a lot of the world started to make more sense to me. I began to see that the logical action is the safest action, but it’s often not the one that people will take when they’re blasting music loud enough that the bass reverberates in a ten foot radius. I could see more possibilities other than the reasonable ones in life.

I could imagine a lot more, further, and to more extremes.

As a result, I could empathize more with the people I read about in the news, and the situation that we find ourselves in right now in the world.

I judge less and strive to connect more.

It’s made all the difference in my mental health, not to mention my chances of avoiding potentially fatal situations on the road.

This is why you should never think you’ve learned “enough” in life.

Expanding beyond your comfort zone isn’t just a powerful advantage, it’s essential for long-term survival.

What are instances in your life where you were grateful for learning something that wasn’t relevant at the time but helped you out of a tricky spot later?