Magic Happens Out of Your Comfort Shell

“Every time you choose to do the easy thing, instead of the right thing, you are shaping your identity”, writes Elrod.

The world, whether you like it or not, is always quick to tell us who to be and what we should want, mostly setting an involuntary and unnecessary course of actions for what defines accomplishment. The culture of these unintentionally created external forces may conflict with what we believe, creating a havoc of thoughts. What becomes your shield here is your strong sense of self. When you have a strong sense of self, most of the time you save yourself from these destructive external forces and pay less attention to what they have to say. 

What is your sense of self exactly? People often confuse personal identity with a sense of self. Whereas the perception of you, how you perceive yourself is your personal identity. Sense of self is established on your power of making decisions, what you believe, how you create your boundaries that serve you, it’s more like your internal compass. Now if you have a strong sense of self you would always want to be a challenge for yourself rather than being ruled by your comfort bubble, which means you would most likely choose the right thing over easy. Making the right thing easy would be an irrational approach because you are still not ready to leave your comfort zone, try to make your comfort in doing the right thing.

Now here are a few tips to strengthen and challenge your sense of self.

·         Make Independent decisions, here is when you accept yourself and your unique identity.

·         Self-Awareness, it comes with admitting your flaws and always being open to newness.

·         Boundaries are essential and keep you away from pleasing people.

·         Flexibility being open to newness is important because change can be unsettling.

Points mentioned above help you to recognize your sense of sense better and brace it.

Now if you have a frail sense of self and you are hardly aware of your essentials, you would more likely go for easy over right, because easy is within our comfort zone. Easy doesn’t bring newness, it is easy because we already know what to do. It is easy to stop learning. We are not challenged when we choose the easy way.

Life is not a piece of cake and through the course we need to decide first, decide what kind of person you want to be? Ask yourself because when you are well aware of what kind of person you want to be you don’t just settle and act per convenience or accessibility, you strive to identify your Whys. Define your values. You want to do it because of how it will make you feel. Know your why and the how will follow.

To begin to do right over easy here are a few tips.

·         By removing the temptation, now what happens is when you remove the temptation altogether you are getting it out of your reach, when you intentionally keep things distant from you, your sense of self toughens and stops you from simply acting on your nerves. Sometimes you do things just because they are accessible.

·         Make it hard to procrastinate. Don’t free your mind enough to reconsider the decision of doing easy over right.

Life is constantly transforming you as you grow and learn. So holding the concept of sense of self can be difficult to clutch when you are constantly transforming.  But keeping a check and balance between who you are and who you want to become. Understanding the factors affecting your sense of self is a vital task, so is setting healthy boundaries. Setting healthy boundaries is not always easy but you need to come out of your comfort zone, you need to choose right over easy, you need to choose it to protect your internal compass. The key to setting healthy boundaries is starting small and focusing on what you want as clearly as possible. Become an observer of your own life, connect to and explore yourself first, explore how these boundaries impact your life, make it comfortable for yourself and people around you, inspire them to explore their sense of self and strengthen it.  Setting healthy boundaries effectively takes time, be patient and welcome the newness.

So sit with yourself and ask, what choices are you making right now that you know are bad, but you make them anyway because it's more convenient?

How could you twist things so the right choice becomes more convenient?