Journey To The Soul

Why Growth Happens Outside Your Comfort Zone

• Jacenda Villa

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The journey of self-discovery often requires us to step outside the comfort zones we’ve built for ourselves. In this enlightening episode, we challenge our perceptions around discomfort and explore the indispensable role it plays in our growth. Tune in as we share insights on how embracing discomfort can ultimately lead to profound transformations in our lives. From understanding the dynamics of our "discomfort zone" to reframing failure as valuable experiences, we provide actionable tips and thought-provoking perspectives to inspire personal evolution.

Join me in recapping childhood's innate bravery—how can we channel that audacity today? We’ll also unveil how human design insights can deepen your understanding of your unique growth journey. By letting go of limiting beliefs about failure and recognizing every step as a vital experience, you're ready to brave the discomfort and soar toward your dreams. 

Are you ready to embrace your growth edge? Subscribe, share, and join the conversation. We’re in this together, heart and soul!

Generate your Human Design Chart HERE

Instagram: @jacendamarie


Speaker 1:

Hi, loves, welcome to the Journey to the Soul podcast. I am your host, jacinda Villa, a spiritual life coach and holistic health coach. Every week, we will be diving deep into all things purpose, wellness, spirituality and creating the life that you dream of. This space is meant to be safe and transformative for you to dive into the deepest parts of yourself. I will share what I have learned from my journey along this path years of research and mentors along the way. Having spent many years living life out of alignment and afraid to go after my dreams, I know firsthand what it means to take the first step down, living a life authentic to you. We are on this road of self-discovery together. It is time for you to live the life you imagined. Hello, my loves, welcome to this week's episode of Journey to the Soul. I am so excited to have you here with me this week as we go into the episode. I hope you are all having a beautiful day wherever you are tuning in from. It truly blows me away to see how people from all over the world tune in to listen to this. It means so much to me that you do People from everywhere, wherever you may be. Thank you so much for being here with me and just being on this journey of life with me. It means so much, so I'm sending you all a big hug. So I'm sending you all a big hug this week we are talking about getting out of our comfort zone, and a lot of people talk about this in so many different ways.

Speaker 1:

In the personal development space, in the spiritual space, in any aspect. You can hear so many people talk about getting out of your comfort zone, and I wanted to talk about this as well, because I feel like it is something that is so important and it's really also something that can keep us kind of stagnant in our life if we choose to stay where we are and not really go through the life that is intended for us. And I've learned so much about getting out of my comfort zone, too, and these are all things that I wanted to share with you today, because your comfort zone if you've heard this before is essentially where you are comfortable. It's how you are accustomed to living, to being, to experiencing certain things, and in your mind, in your body, in your being, it's comfortable. There's no discomfort here, and when we look outside of our comfort zone, we can think of the opposite of that, right. What is opposite of our comfort zone. That is discomfort, right.

Speaker 1:

Our discomfort zone we could call it if we wanted to, and it's essentially anything that is not in our comfort zone, anything that could cause us some kind of discomfort, and you can see how that could also be very different for each and every one of us, because our comfort zones are all going to be different, right, and that means that what we find uncomfortable is also going to be very individual to us as people. But the discomfort zone is going to be anything that is just uncomfortable to you, anything that doesn't quite feel good, right. Anything that makes us feel just not as centered, not as sure about ourselves, anything that makes us second guess ourselves. These are all things that can pop up when we are slightly in our discomfort. But, like I mentioned, our comfort zone is not necessarily somewhere that we want to spend our entire life in. I want all of us to learn how we can best lean into our discomfort zone, and I like calling this our growth edge too, that edge that we meet sometimes in different aspects of our life. That is uncomfortable, that is our growth edge and, as humans, evolving and wanting to grow, it is so important for us to be able to lean into that. So we need to know that having a growth edge and feeling that discomfort is a part of life and it is so essential for us to lean into that in order to step out of our comfort zone.

Speaker 1:

And so many of us are so uncomfortable doing this. It could be due to so many different things, right. Some of us are brought up to be more resilient with things like uncertainty and failure and things like that, because it could have been how we were brought up or people in our lives or just other life experience that made us be more resilient to that. But other people, many of us, are also super uncomfortable with this, uncomfortable with uncertainty, uncomfortable with failure, uncomfortable with the unknown. But that keeps us in our comfort zone, right, because all of those things are essentially keeping us in the same place and our comfort zone psychologically, physiologically it is meant to keep us safe. That is why when we do something that is outside of our comfort zone is why, when we do something that is outside of our comfort zone, we feel some kind of discomfort and that can show up in so many different ways and many of the times that's physiologically right, our body could respond. We could feel a little uneasy, some nervousness, some clamminess. Our body is telling us like, no, this doesn't feel safe to us anymore, but this is not where we're meant to stay in order for us to live this incredible life that is intended for us.

Speaker 1:

Life is truly an experiment and there is no turning away from that. The sooner that we accept that, the freer we will be, and some of us will have a harder time accepting that or coming to terms with that than other people because, again, certain upbringings, life experiences could have not supported that reality for us. Learning to embrace that life is truly one big experiment has been one of the biggest freeing things for me, and I always love looking at things from the lens of human design. If you listen to my other episodes, you can see how I love tying in human design to different aspects of different things that I discuss, because I think it could help us really understand ourselves at such a deeper level, at such a deeper level.

Speaker 1:

So if you are familiar with human design, if you have a profile with either a 3 or a 6, what we're talking about today will be especially true for you, because if you have a 3 in your profile. That means that you are meant to learn through experience that everything that you do in life is going to be based off of your life experience. It is inevitable for you and with the six if you have a six in your profile it is broken up into three aspects of life. So your life is going to be broken up into three timelines, essentially, and the first part of your life is going to be as if you have a 3. So there will be a lot of experimentation, a lot of you figuring things out on your own, trying things out on first size, you seeing what sticks to the wall right, figuring out things for yourself. That's really going to be part of your process too.

Speaker 1:

And when I found my profile for the first time because I am a 1-3 in human design I really struggled coming to terms with the 3. The one I could see so clearly in me because it is about learning, about going deep, about researching, about going down my rabbit holes and wanting to build a solid foundation and understanding on different things in my life. I am a knowledge seeker and I always resonated with that. But with the three I had certain reservations about it, because I could see my life experience popping up on there. But what this also meant to me when I first came across it was that that also meant that I needed to fail in life. Right, because I was meant to go through my trial and error process, which is so vital to being a three is. You are meant to go through that trial and error process and for me it's like, okay, trial and error, but that means that I'm obviously not meant to succeed in everything that I was meant to do and that kept me frozen in fear and not actually being able to put my knowledge out into the world because of my fear of failure, because I was so afraid of failing to any regard, and there was so many other things in my upbringing that made that fear of failure even more prevalent.

Speaker 1:

But it's something that so many of us struggle with is we want to be good from the get-go. We want to be as good as everyone else from the get-go. We don't want to have that very uncomfortable period of learning and growing and not being good, of not knowing enough, of not feeling like you have it all figured out. So you could see how these two sides of me had very like different ideas of what it needs to feel safe. Essentially, my one has a core fear of not knowing enough and never feeling like they are enough, and the three just wants to experiment and throw things out to the wall. But because I had that huge fear of failure, I just never allowed myself to actually go try and do anything right.

Speaker 1:

And that's a lot of us, that is, so many of us that make ourselves small, that is just too afraid to put ourselves out into the world. But that is keeping our life small. That is a disservice to ourselves. And something that we can do is reframing this experimentation right, this failure that we could tie to it as knowing that it is part of our process. And it doesn't matter if you have a three or a six in your human design. This is something for all of us, right, because most of us will stay in our comfort zone, because that is what feels good to us.

Speaker 1:

But leaning out of that and being brave enough to step into that growth edge and lean into discomfort so that we can grow and expand and actually have that wondrous life that we want, is also us realizing that sometimes what we set out to do won't work out the way that we envisioned in our head and that is what many of us call failure and, I think, reframing failure, because that word has such a negative connotation in many of our heads. It's just something that we were constantly told that shouldn't be done. Right, failure is not something that we are meant to strive for. It is not a sign of success right, being successful it's just not something that we are ever told to do. But we need to be able to reframe failure and knowing that it is experience and changing that verbiage has been so supportive for me is that you are simply gaining more experience, and that experience just built upon itself. So when we think of all the things that we have failed at, there is no failed relationship or marriage or career. It is simply an experience that we have gone through, that has been gifted to us so that we can learn from it and gain something that we would have otherwise not been able to gain, which is this experience of the pros and the cons that came from it.

Speaker 1:

And when we think about failing at anything that we've done, if we think about you know, you can pull up an experience now in your mind and most of us will probably think of not wanting to do that again. It's not the first thing that we want to go off and do is basically repeat an experience that didn't work out, and you can see how that inhibits us from opening our hearts to having another experience like that again. That is why we need to let go of the word failure, and for some people, it could work and it might rev them up as being like, oh my gosh, yes, well, it might feed certain people Like, if you're listening to this and you have no problem with the word failure or moving past failures, then this might not be for you, but for most people, failure paralyzes us and keeps us from stepping into the life that we're meant to, and this is where I am inviting you to experiment with replacing failure with experience, because it will allow you to really open yourself up to all of these different experiences that are being placed in your life, for you to grow, become better, learn something new. And this has been one of the most life-changing things I ever did for myself, because it freed me to go do what I wanted to do. Because it freed me to go do what I wanted to do, those things that were deep in my being, that I craved of doing but was so afraid of putting myself out there, of not getting it right, of not knowing enough, of it just not being what I thought it would be.

Speaker 1:

This podcast was one of them. I sat on doing this podcast for so long. It was probably like almost a two-year process in my head between thinking about wanting to do it and I did all the work to actually do it and had it all figured out. But between me actually recording the first podcast episode and putting it out into the world, that was almost like a year, because I was so frozen in just my fear of failure. But it was not aligned with the life that I wanted for myself. I had been wanting to do something like this for so long and if another year or two had passed, I would still be in the same place, not doing what I wanted to do right. Not doing this, not being able to share with you or have these conversations with you, which is something that my soul craved for so deeply. So it really just allows you to spread your wings, to go, do all of those things that you are meant to do, that you know deep in your psyche, that you feel, that you dream about that you write about. That is what this is showing you. That is what this is showing you to step out of.

Speaker 1:

And the most successful people that you see in any arena of life are just people that are comfortable being uncomfortable. Uncomfortable this is artists, people that create the most incredible things from their mind, entrepreneurs, people that build these incredible businesses that you know, create such innovative things. It could be athletes. The discomfort is always there for them. These are the people that have just learned how to lean into it and to embrace that, and these are the people that know that this is always there. There is no going around this. You just become comfortable being uncomfortable and you accept this as a part of life, as a part of your evolution, and most of us just turn away from it. We feel the discomfort and we immediately want to look the other way, step back, close that door, not feel that, because that is physiologically how we are meant to function. It's something that was instilled in us when we were in a more primitive state as a way for us to survive, but that is not the reality of the world that we are living in anymore.

Speaker 1:

Just think about anything that you set out to do that you have set out to do in your life before Anything new. Think about how your body may have responded. Maybe you felt nervous, maybe you felt some butterflies in your tummy, maybe a little shaky, maybe your breath has become a little shallow, your hands got a little clammy, and this is because we are stepping away from the unknown and you're going to feel this. If you want to start learning how to play an instrument this, if you want to start learning how to play an instrument, how to play a new sport, how to speak in a new language, if you want to start a new business, as you're going through different aspects of that, it's like you are going to feel kind of the brakes wanting to stop you, of not going down this path because it doesn't feel as good as where you were. Anything new and unknown will prompt you to feel some of these things. But the key to moving past this and not feeling this is to keep doing it, keep going out of your comfort zone, to keep pushing yourself in many different ways. It's like a muscle you build, but this is a true feeling of growth and we've all felt it at some moment in our life, and as a child, we were so much more familiar with it.

Speaker 1:

It was a part of our process, right, our trial and error process Every single day. We never second-guessed it. When we fell trying to walk, we just got back up. When we hit ourselves trying to do something, we just didn't do it again, right, if we touch something hot, we quickly learn that that wasn't what we were supposed to be touching. But children are so brave. If you were to just observe a child, typically like below the age of five, where they still have this innate trial and error process, you're going to see how they just go from one thing to the other to the other without really thinking about, oh, I'm not doing this right, or oh, that didn't actually work out, or oh, I fell, I couldn't make it to the other side of the room as I was walking. Right, they may cry a little bit, they may this, they may fuss a bit, but they're just going to keep doing it until they figure it out.

Speaker 1:

And as we grew up more and more and became a part of society, we began to be told, directly or indirectly, that failure isn't allowed. You might have grown up in a family that didn't support failure If you didn't get anything other than an A in school or, you know, in your classes. That was not acceptable, and from an earlier age you learned that failure really wasn't allowed and slowly you began to aim for staying in your comfort zone, because that meant that you weren't going to be failing. You knew what to expect from this and you knew how to perform in this. And for others it may have come later, when we started becoming more of an adult and trying out different things and different career paths. And it's just, failure is something that is not accepted in our society. It is frowned upon If you are failing in anything. It is frowned upon If you are failing in anything. It's typically a sign that we're not successful, that we don't know enough, that we are not doing the right thing in life. It's just.

Speaker 1:

There are so many different stories that have been fed to us about what it means to fail, but none of that is absolutely true and the feelings that we get when we go through something uncomfortable. We also need to work on reframing these feelings to something more positive the next time that you feel that you are stepping into something that is super uncomfortable for you and you don't really want to do it, or you feel like you're failing in something in life. Now what if you told yourself this is part of the process, or this allows me to expand in a new area of life, this is bringing me one step closer to the life I envisioned for myself, or this is an experience that is teaching me so much and I am so grateful for the knowledge and experience that it is gifting me. The next time you go out and step in to do something that is not in your comfort zone, I invite you to tell yourself one of these affirmations before going to do that thing, because this is how we are going to reframe those physiological feelings that show up, but also the mental stigma, the negative connotations that we have around failure and around experimentation, because the other thing with experimentation is that some of us can feel like by experimenting, we're not committing to something or we're not going all in. So there can be also negative connotations to the experimentation. But I just want us to embrace that, whether you are fine calling it failure or you want to call it experience, is that you are just building on that, that this is a part of life and it is truly such a gift to be able to experience it, because you are learning from this and the you today is going to be so grateful, in a year when you have leaned into those growth edges Every single day, that you show up and you do something that pushes you out of your comfort zone a little bit, towards what you want to have in this life, in the direction that you want to go. That you, in a year, is going to be so grateful to the you now for doing it. So we just need to open ourselves up to that and do it with an open heart. Right, because if we come from the side of not allowing us to fail or to never feeling like we need to have it all figured out from the get-go, just not letting ourselves be a student of life, right, and feeling like we need to be the teacher immediately, that's just not reasonable and that's gonna constantly make us feel like we are inadequate. But the only way you are going to feel like you are adequate is by continuously doing this and again, flexing that muscle, gaining that strength. It's by doing the thing. So I invite you all to do the thing, to step out of your comfort zone to brave, because we are all worthy and deserve to have that incredible life.

Speaker 1:

In any aspect of life that we look at, right, there's going to be some aspect of our life that makes us uncomfortable, whether it's the relationship that we want and it requiring us to, you know, go out and meet people and talk to people so that we can have the partner that we want or the friends that we might want. Right, it's the same thing. It's going out, meeting people, putting yourself out there. It's wanting to start that creative project. It's wanting to learn how to paint. Again, it's your first couple of paintings are not going to look great. There's going to be a lot of time between now and then of you just sitting in front of a canvas and you putting the paintbrush and the paint to the canvas, and that's going to be your process as you continue to flex that muscle and gain the experience of creating these amazing paintings. But this is part of your process. There is no shying away from that.

Speaker 1:

So I hope you all took something away from this episode. We need to be kinder to ourselves as we go through our process, as we continue to step into who we are meant to become, and it's going to be such a lighter journey if we do that from a place of love and understanding, knowing that we're not perfect, that we're not supposed to have it all figured out. That's just going to make this journey a lot easier. I'm sending you so much love and light. I look forward to talking to you all in my next episode. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please make sure you subscribe so you never miss an episode and share this message with any friends and family. I'd love to hear your takeaways, so share them with me by leaving a comment below or heading over to my Instagram at jacendamarie. I am sending you all so much love.