Last Saturday I attended a group reflection session where people shared their best and worst moments from 2025 and what they wanted to carry forward into 2026. When it came time to discuss goals for the year ahead, many people listed “stepping out of my comfort zone” as a key objective.
I offered a different framing during the discussion. Stepping out of your comfort zone is the standard advice, but I think it’s fundamentally wrong. Your comfort zone is where you’re confident, convincing, and influential. Outside it, you doubt yourself, you stutter, you burn energy faster trying to prove you belong. That’s not a sustainable strategy for growth.
My view: the goal shouldn’t be to step out of your comfort zone. It should be to expand it.
Why “Stepping Out” Doesn’t Work
When people talk about stepping out of their comfort zone, they’re treating comfort as the enemy. As if being comfortable automatically means you’re stagnant, complacent, or avoiding growth. But that’s backwards.
Your comfort zone is where you operate at your best without burning through energy just to function. It’s where your expertise lives, where you’ve built credibility, where you know what works. Walking away from all of that in pursuit of discomfort is brave, but it’s also inefficient.
I’ve seen people try the “step out of your comfort zone” approach in countless ways. They take on projects completely outside their expertise, move to cities where they know no one, or force themselves into social situations where they’re constantly struggling just to keep up.
Sometimes this works. Some people thrive on complete disruption. But it requires enormous reserves of energy, resilience, and often a support system to fall back on when things go wrong. You’re exposing yourself to failure, exhaustion, and the real possibility of retreating right back to where you started. If you’re already drained, uncertain, or lacking support, stepping out can do more damage than good.
The advice to “get uncomfortable” assumes everyone has the same capacity to handle chaos. They don’t.
What Expanding Your Comfort Zone Actually Means
Expansion is different. When you expand your comfort zone, you’re taking the confidence, competence, and influence you already have and extending it into adjacent territory. You’re not abandoning what works—you’re applying it in new contexts.
To be clear: this isn’t fundamentally different from stepping out. You’re still doing something new, still facing uncertainty, still risking failure. But it’s a mental and emotional reframing that can make the process of change easier to handle.
When a client tells me they need to leave their comfort zone, I ask them to describe what they’re actually good at and where they feel most effective. Then we look at how those same strengths could apply in slightly different contexts. It’s not about becoming someone new—it’s about taking who you already are and what you’re already good at into new situations.
I worked with someone who was unhappy in his administrative job and aspired to one day have his own business. The change felt too daunting to face and the idea had never come out of the starting blocks. By talking about his current comfort zone and what part of himself and his skill set he could carry into new territory, he landed on starting a food business. Cooking was his passion and he was good at it. Using that as a stepping stone to venture into new areas gave him confidence, enabled quick wins and allowed for a less bumpy road.
That’s the distinction. Stepping out means abandoning your foundation and hoping you can build a new one from scratch. Expanding means strengthening your foundation while extending its reach.
Growth Requires Energy
If you’re spending all your energy just trying to survive in unfamiliar territory, you have nothing left for actual learning or development.
Outside your comfort zone, everything costs more. Simple conversations require preparation. Decisions you’d normally make quickly become agonizing. You’re constantly second-guessing yourself, managing imposter syndrome, burning through cognitive resources just to appear competent. That’s not growth—that’s survival.
In your expanded comfort zone, you have energy to spare. You’re confident enough to take strategic risks. You understand the context well enough to spot genuine opportunities. You have the credibility to experiment without losing trust. That’s where sustainable growth actually happens.
If you’re trying to figure out what expanding your comfort zone looks like in your specific situation—where your genuine strengths lie and where they could apply next—drop me a message or schedule a chat.
