Photo by Priscilla DuPreez for Unsplash

How To Make 2023 The Year You Break Out of Your Comfort Zone

It’s time to get comfortable with being uncomfortable

Ellen Goodwin
5 min readJan 6, 2023

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Last week husband and I went to a new restaurant in our neighborhood that friends had been raving about.

At first, I hated everything about the place. The chairs were uncomfortable. The menu was odd. The interior was crowded and loud.

But as I sat thinking about how I would never go back there again, it hit me: there was nothing wrong with the restaurant. It was me.

I was entirely out of my comfort zone.

I’ve gotten so used to going to the same few restaurants that I know what to expect from them, and there are no surprises. This restaurant had unceremoniously forced me to come face to face with the new and unexpected.

It had actively pulled me out of my comfort zone and required me to embrace things I wasn’t used to.

We all have comfort zones that we unconsciously depend on. While they are pleasant, they can quickly become, well, a little too comfortable. When that happens, new things don’t get tried, and changes don’t get made. You are figuratively stuck going to the same restaurant over and over.

Happily, it doesn’t have to be this way. Your comfort zone isn’t a tightly locked isolation chamber…

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Ellen Goodwin

Productivity Consultant, TEDx Speaker, Podcast Co-host, Author of DONE: How To Work When No One Is Watching. Learn more at Ellen@EllenGoodwin.com