Someone wrote me asking about suggestions for getting out of your comfort zone, so I want to quickly share two exercises I’ve done that helped me.
The first one was Lance Mason’s “Approach the hottest woman of the day” challenge. This was pretty effective for a while in getting me out of my comfort zone with approaching women.
It’s pretty self-explanatory: Anytime you see the “hottest” woman of that day, you MUST go up and approach her. It doesn’t matter how badly you do, but you just gotta do it. And after you make the approach, regardless of the outcome you are “done” for the day. Meaning you don’t “have to” approach any other women…unless you come across a woman you find more attractive than the first one!
The idea behind this challenge is it forces you to push your terror barrier up a level on the tension scale, and then it allows you to have a “reward” – the freedom from this tension. If you’ve never done it before, try it for a week and see how it feels.
Another challenge I would do was around homelessness. I used to have a lot of stories and fears from when I was younger about being homeless. My family used to move around a lot for financial reasons, so I was always worried about running out of money.
What I ended up doing was finding a homeless person and trading lives with him. We switched clothes (he was clean) and everything.
I started panhandling and asking for money. (After, I donated the money to charity.) I really got into it, trying to embody it and make it real for me so I could really face all my shit around it. At first, no one wanted to talk to me or look at me. People just walked by and completely ignored me. I had to learn to “relax” and find acceptance in the situation. Then I had to calibrate how I was asking for money… I was still scared and uncomfortable, so I came across as someone trying to “get” something. (Can you see the analogies to dating here?)
After I calmed that down though, it started to get a little easier and I wanted to figure out how to give value to people so they’d want to give me a dollar. I began changing my state and how I was being and watched the results change. That was fascinating for me. One of the most fascinating aspects of this whole challenge was my interactions with other homeless people who were incredibly generous with me! One man wanted to share the pizza he’d gotten with me. It was deeply moving to have this experience and I’ve been able to keep this level of gratitude with me afterward.
Once I changed my energetic state, everything in my environment shifted, even during this experiment with homelessness. It was a big help for me in getting rid of this story around money.
So those are two good examples of some of the things I’ve done in the past to break out of my comfort zone.
