Today’s post is part 4 of a 10 part series: “10 Ways to Conquer Your Comfort Zone”

Halloween is only 4 days away so let’s discuss a spooky strategy today!

Spiders and snakes terrify me. The sight of multiple legs extending from a scaly body are enough to do me in. A long slithering shape sliding along the way freaks me out with the best of them! I am also scared to death of being startled. You know when anything comes at you unexpectedly it causes your heart to skip a beat. It could be a friend approaching you from behind. It could be a dog chasing you until stopped in its tracks by an electric fence. That feeling of “oh my gosh its going to get me….just kidding its not!”

What scares you? Is it something that crawls, jumps, barks, hisses or is it an image or a sound or a particular situation. I want you to picture whatever it is that frightens you. We can keep the subject of this post on a shallow level by focusing on scare tactics rather than fear. Fear is real and legitimate where fright tends to be more circumstantial. What I want to help you do is to redirect the things that frighten you to your comfort zone. How might you scare your comfort zone..that is where I’m going with the remainder of this post.

Think about the surroundings and circumstances that your comfort zone craves. I am guessing that they all center around predictability and patterns. The goal is to scare the predictability out of your patterns by introducing outside influences. Let’s say that you love to fall asleep by watching TV but realize that reading is a far better alternative. Could you somehow turn the TV to a horror channel and place the remote control out of reach before getting into the bed? At first, you are doing nothing out of the ordinary as your routine involves TV before sleeping. Could you try this scare tactic? Could you deprive yourself of actually changing the channel when things get super-scary? If you could, you might find that your desire to watch TV before bed might decrease. Watching a gruesome death or a cat jumping out from behind a bed is enough to make me quit the TV routine all-together. How about you?

Of course this is just one example, but my hope is that you can make application to the relevant areas in your life.