Most of you reading this probably make a decent living and would answer that question, "Very comfortable."
The fact is, many people define comfort by the amount of money they make. If they make a "comfortable living," they profess to be comfortable with their jobs.
Money, the regular paycheck, is perhaps the most pervasive of the many "comfort zones" into which people settle and from which they find it difficult to move, no matter how great the need to move may be. It's a major reason why studies have found 80 to 90 percent of us are unhappy with our jobs.
I suppose a historian might see a very natural evolution of this attitude in America. This country was built on a pioneer spirit that pushed people to risk everything they had and brave incredible hardships in order to explore new frontiers. After a while, though, there were no other frontiers to conquer, and the pioneer spirit, with its survival instinct and rugged individualism, gave way to a settlement mentality. The pioneers ceased to be pioneers and instead became settlers.
Life may have been hard for the early settlers, but they developed the ethic that as long as their needs were taken care of, they had nothing to complain about. This is the same kind of ethic that has stayed with us to this day.
We settle for those job and career comfort zones that may be less than what we truly want because "they pay well," or "it's a nice place to work," or "I couldn't make this much money doing something else"
We settle into the comfort zone of doing what we've been educated to do because "I paid a lot of money to get that degree and to not use it would be throwing that money away." This, of course, is ridiculous. Our educational experiences help mold us into the people we are, regardless of what field we're in.
We settle into the comfort zones created by family pressure, particularly in the case of the children of professionals who feel that they must also be professionals, even if they are better suited to other options.
How can you define your own comfort zones? As with most career issues, it's a matter of stark self-honesty. When you merely settle for a comfort zone, you will have misgivings along certain lines - an awareness that there are greater challenges that could be met in your career.
Comfort zones also create routines, boredom and lack of energy in both personal and professional life. There may even be a subtle loss of self-esteem.
A person caught up in a comfort zone is someone who is simply not growing, as comfort zones do not permit growth. And the comfort of taking home the paycheck and getting those pats on the head from the boss while having our personal growth stifled may create additional internal conflicts.
Meanwhile, as technology expands and changes, we may find ourselves even more anxious to find comfort zones, as the pressure to keep up with the rapidly changing workplace may simply be too great.
Whatever state of mind we've grown into, comfort zones are something each individual needs to rethink. What's needed now is a new kind of pioneer spirit that allows, even pushes, an individual to plunge forward into new fields of endeavor - a new adventurism that allows us to use our talents more effectively.
One of the most eye-opening experiences of my life came many years ago during a four-day cruise up the Amazon River. Many of the people we saw and visited along the shore during that trip wore nothing but loincloths and carried what were, at best, primitive tools. Most Americans would consider them a back ward civilization.
But looking at them and reflecting on the pain I often hear from my own clients, I knew that in a certain sense they were far more advanced than we. There was a calm about them, a sense of peace. They were simply satisfied with their lives and confident in their ability to meet their daily challenges They had a deeply in grained and unchanged value system, and they had no need to seek and settle for comfort zones. Neither do you.
