Thermometer or thermostat?

Given our ever-changing weather, have you been messing around with your house thermostat? When it gets too warm, do you have the air conditioner on? Too cold and have the heater kick on?

In biology “comfort zone” means the range between 28 and 30 degrees Centigrade at which the naked body is able to maintain a heat balance without shivering or sweating. That’s a pretty narrow range!

Moving from the physical arena to the psychological arena, we often get stuck in particular grooves as old experiences, habitual thoughts, comfortable beliefs continue to keep us in our “familiar” zone. (Ever thought of those grooves as “ruts”?)

It often seems difficult to extract ourselves from them, even when we want to. We create excuses or justifications to either procrastinate or to utterly avoid the discomfort of new thinking and new behavior.

One of my proudest comfort zone expansions was over a decade ago! I asked my younger sister to join me in experiencing Tree2Tree Adventure Park in Oregon, with its myriad tree-top rope activities. And, not ever having been noted for my athletic abilities, I found this quite a challenge.

(Besides, having become a woman of “a certain age,” I figured I’d better do it before I no long could!)

And I (we) did!

I’m pretty sure I was the oldest person on the course then and I did make it through.

I learned, once again, that I…

• (we) can do more than we think;
• (we) can move beyond our self-imposed restrictions, and
• (we) can gain the deserved exhilaration of being more than we thought we could be.

How about you?

What have you learned when you’ve expanded your comfort zone?