Tuesday 1 May 2012

Hidden talents: more on Comfort Zones.


Ever think you might be missing out?

Recently I’ve made a bit of a catchphrase of: ‘Constantly defying assumptions.’  No-one expected me to be a half-decent singer/songwriter; no-one expected me to be learning Modern Jive dancing (aka Ceroc).

But I am.  (There’s some other stuff about people imagining I’m a clean-cut sweetie, and I’m making damn sure to blow those opinions apart too...)

To be honest, I never expected myself to be some of those things either.  I was never one for dancing and, as a kid, I was the shyest little thing around.  If you’d told my parents or teachers I’d be standing at the front of a pub singing songs, they wouldn’t have believed it.

But I tried it and found I could do it.  Perhaps not as well as some, but well enough to enjoy it, and that’s all that matters.  You don’t have to be the best in the world at something to have fun with it.

Something about a Comfort Zone is, if you don’t expand it, it shrinks.  We might be happy with our little friendship group, going to the local pub, but what happens when those friends are not available?  We might feel we have to stay in.  And then we might think those friends don’t want to see us and, before we know it, that settled place in our Local is not so comfortable any more.

Yet, if we try something new, perhaps a new place or, horror of horrors, a dance class, we might suddenly discover something we thought was way out of our Comfort Zone is now right in the middle of it.  We’ve pushed the boundary and our operating space is much larger for it.

So go on...what’s to lose?  Who knows – you might find yourself on Strictly in a few years.  You never know...

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