Achieve Your Goals And Dreams By Challenging Your Comfort Zone

Goals and dreams have the power to keep you young at heart well beyond your 50’s. Unfortunately very few people get much further than stating their goals and too often become trapped in the reality between their plan and the boundaries of their comfort zone.

According to Psychology Today 45% of all Americans make at least one resolution a year. And nearly half of them break it within six months. For many of us the failure rate is within the first month.

The good news is there are three specific steps you can take to greatly improve your chances of realizing your dreams and goals.

Determine the WHY behind each goal.
• Statistically those that focus on the “why” behind each goal have the best chance for success. The rest of us? Not so much.

Write down your goals; exactly what it is you want to do or achieve in your life and revisit those goals daily.
• Believe it or not, writing down what you want gives you a whopping 300% better chance of succeeding.

Expand your comfort zone.
• Your comfort zone is “comfortable” because everything within it is known to you. There are no surprises, no uncomfortable challenges or unfamiliar boundaries. By their very nature, goals are outside of our comfort zone. The longer we’ve lived within our ‘zone’ the more difficult it is to move beyond those boundaries . . . familiar places, people and activities, even the habits we long to break.

Stepping outside of your comfort zone doesn’t mean completely changing your life or doing something crazy. It’s about showing yourself that you can do more than you thought you could. Every single step you take, no matter how small, has a profound effect on your self-confidence.

• Sign up for a workshop or class
• Go to a new restaurant
• Take lessons for a sport or activity
• Go to a movie by yourself
• Ask for help

Once you’ve begun expanding your comfort zone, slowly continue to stretch your boundaries with new and greater challenges. Making one significant change per month is appropriate for most people.

In the beginning each new challenge may seem daunting to you, but the more you nudge those boundaries, the more comfortable you’ll become with that temporary nervous state of mind that comes with doing something new.

You may not be able to change your life in a day, but you can change its direction overnight.