Strong Women

Essay 1: Your Comfort Zone

This is part of a series of ruminations as I work through the chapters of my next book- Bump In The Road: Strong Women. This isn’t a chapter; just some ideas to help me organize the book chapters. I’d welcome your thoughts! Please feel free to share with your friends!

We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us. -Joseph Campbell

It all starts with your comfort zone.

Your comfort zone is something you create, consciously or not. It can be physical, social, academic, intellectual, political, or geographic. It can be from your family, school, employer, or friends. It can be in the form of ideas, goals, self perception, collective identities, and a million other factors.

However you’ve constructed your comfort zone, it’s habitual, hiding just beneath your day to day routines, and you may not even know it’s there.

Until, that is, something makes you feel uncomfortable. You are now being called to meet a challenge. Will you stay in your comfort zone or step out?

What are the pros of getting out of your comfort zone?

First there are rewards in the form of experiences and accomplishment. But along with that goes the risk of fear and failure.

Stop.

Re-read that last paragraph. There is a flaw in the way I’ve presented these options. Do you see it?

I’ve presented a binary option of win/lose. That’s not reality. The experience of getting outside your comfort zone is really a series of baby steps, with many wins and losses along the way.

Red Bull, the energy drink, has a terrific video series called Reel Rock. Season Ten highlights Australian climbing prodigy Angie Scarth-Johnson’s efforts to free climb a natural bridge over fast moving surf in Mallorca. A misplaced hand or a lost hold means falling into the moving ocean below.

The story is one of taking baby steps to face your fear, sometimes “failing”, but getting up and going again. And an interesting thing happens along the way: Angie’s comfort zone expands. Free climbing the rock bridge gets easier; the plunge into the ocean becomes less scary and eventually even fun; and Angie faces “her” fear of the water when she realizes that it was her mother’s fear, not hers at all! She even starts snorkeling to explore the beauty of the ocean.

Now Angie’s comfort zone may not be yours or mine, but the specifics don’t matter. What matters is the willingness, step by step, to identify the origin of our self imposed bounds and to unravel their story so we may move forward.

Strong women are willing to “fail” in order to move forward. They are willing to confront their fear, challenge their comfort zone and achieve their goals.

Martha McSally’s book Dare to Fly opens up with the perfect example of living outside one’s comfort zone as she climbs into the seat of an A-10 attack plane. It is a single seat plane and it was her first flight. Even though she’s already a pilot, she’s never flown (and landed!) a single seat attack jet like this before. There were no simulators and no one could teach her how to fly it. She simply had to do it.

“Do things afraid” is one of Martha’s sayings. It’s one I urge you to adopt into your own life.

An interesting thing happens when you do things afraid: you ‘re suddenly intensely present in the moment. You own the experience on every level: physical, spiritual, and intellectual. It becomes part of your repertoire, pushing the bounds of what was once your comfort zone.

Getting out of one’s comfort zone is a standard practice of strong women.

Caroline Paul is an adventurer whose comfort zone exists only to be challenged. She’s mountain biked the Andes, gotten a private pilot license and flies a multitude of aerial vehicles, worked as a firefighter and she’s even wing walked. Caroline is going into her sixties now and she poses an interesting question: Does society discourage adventure in women and what is the cost?

Many of us are defined and bound by external identities that don’t stretch our comfort zone very much. We live outside-in, handing our concept of ourselves over to an external identity. A school, a sports team, a relationship, a cause-these are all outside-in perspectives. They provide a comfortable bound for your comfort zone. They define that part of you. And there’s nothing wrong with any of these factors. Just be aware of them. There will come a time when they need to be challenged and even dismantled.

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakes. -Carl Jung

Looking back at my own life, at different times, I identified as the following: Ivy League grad, Wharton grad, Varsity squash player, wife, daughter in law. Then suddenly I found myself defined by an illness, myasthenia gravis. I was no longer someone going somewhere, as defined by job title or income. Eventually, I was no longer valued as wife, daughter in law or any of the key elements that made up my life. Everything, absolutely everything and everyone in my life fell away, none of it by my own choice or actions. At one point, my ex-father in law told me never to contact them again. Whatever was going on, I was in the dark, because this made no sense. These were the people I’d loved, and cherished and with whom I’d shared my life for nearly 15 years. Something was up and I wasn’t part of it.

My world was shattered. My entire life needed to be reconstructed. So did I.

Now for the upside: The loss of all this (and it was devastating) led to a life one hundred an eighty degrees away from my former life. I became a cross country sailplane (glider) pilot, adventurer, traveler, podcaster, writer. I discovered a deep connection to nature and an appreciation for beauty. I loved my single life.

Who knew!!! But underlying the entire journey has been an ever evolving reflection of myself, the roles I play and their actual meaning to me. I’ve had to dig pretty deep to start releasing myself from other people’s expectations and actions, to start to see myself beyond that of a rejected individual tossed away like some defunct item, without value, unworthy of friendship, care or connection. None of that was true, but it was how I felt for quite a while.

Facing my expulsion from what had been my family and tribe, I faced a fundamental choice. Do I identify with the role of victim, survivor or something greater? All had a degree of truth to them. But through aviation, I opened the door to an amazing world of adventure that had been sorely missing in my life. I hit the road with my sailplane and headed west, to Oshkosh, flying in Boulder, Heber, Truckee and other places along the way. I would go on to move across the country, not knowing a soul. It was the grandest of adventures and I’m grateful I had the guts to do it all.

I learned that the desire for adventure is deep seated in me. I’m insatiably curious and that leads me down rabbit holes which lead to interesting adventures, both big and small. I am accompanied by my personal mantra about life: “What can I learn”.

True life learning is experiential. And experiential learning is a matter of doing. Strong women experience their lives and learn along the way.

Joseph Campbell perfectly tackles our quest for the experiential and the idea of inside-out vs outside-in living:

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” -Joseph Campbell

The rapture of being alive!

When I chose aviation over the darker forces in my life, I directed my attention and energy into a new direction. It wasn’t as if the past was totally gone, but it was being replaced by a new one of my conscious choosing. In opting to soar (ie, fly sailplanes) I set my life on a course of adventure in courage, beauty and spirituality that I never could have imagined. I was truly living from the inside-out. I truly experienced that rapture of being alive.

And every step was outside my comfort zone.

What I discovered was that in that liminal space of uncertainty lies creativity and possibility and truth. In that space of the unknown, lives my life force, and that rapture of living.

Strong women find their rapture of living.

Our comfort zones can change with time. Christina Ramirez’s life story is one of resilience and the courage to go within to redefine her life more than once.

“I think it can be a really interesting journey, because you’re really talking about stripping away these beliefs that we all have that define our lives…ultimately, it’s such an adventure of self discovery. It’s wonderful. It’s sublime.” -Christina Ramirez

Christina Ramirez came from a very traditional Cuban background. Part of her family’s belief system was that happiness equals marriage equals kids. But as the years went on and Christina failed to find “the man of her dreams” she became convinced that she’d never be happy.

In her thirties, this bright, attractive, capable investment banker who spoke five languages hit a point of utter depression and turned to alcohol and drugs for relief. An attempted suicide landed her in a mental institution.

She got sober, clean and met the man of her dreams. But she was about to face another life shattering bump in the road when he died, leaving her with two young children.

At first, she says, the grief totally envelopes you. There is nothing else. Imagine it as a giant circle and it represents your whole life.

But slowly you start to pick up the pieces. Another circle is formed. It’s smaller than your circle of grief, but it’s there. And slowly over time it grows and the grief circle shrinks. The grief never totally goes away but it becomes proportionately smaller as the rest of your life grows. And your comfort zone grows too.

Strong women go within to cultivate and nourish their personal strengths.

Your comfort zone-and your rapture-can be just about anything. A mother with a new child, figuring it all out as she goes. The courage to go back to school when you’re the oldest in the class and acing that first test. A willingness to try something new, in a new place, where you may not yet know anyone.

One of my favorite stories about confronting one’s comfort zone comes from famed mountaineer Erik Weihenmayer. (Ok, he’s not a woman, but his story is great!) He went blind at 16, climbed Everest (yes, blind), the 7 Summits and spent 8 years working to navigate the Colorado River rapids, Solon a kayak.

Erik was an early guest on my podcast (how did I ever get him on this start up podcast?!!!) and he tells this story about Quitters, Campers and Climbers (I’m paraphrasing):

Erik divides the world into 3 groups. These groups are fluid. We’ve all been in each of them and we move between them.

The first group is Quitters. They’re self evident.

The second group is Campers. Campers are the vast majority of people and they want to maintain their comfort zone no matter what. They do not want adventure. They want the status quo. But in all fairness to Campers, they may be so beaten up by life that they aren’t willing to risk putting their head outside the fox hole any more.

The third group are Climbers. These are the people that live self actualized, challenging lives.

Now, Climbers can be Campers because you get to sit on the couch, watch Netflix and eat ice cream. No one could be a climber 100% of the time. It would simply be too exhausting.

We’re all quitter, campers and climbers in different facets of our lives. The question becomes where, when and how did you choose to be a camper (or a quitter). When did the bounds of your comfort zone become so rigid? And in your deepest soul, is that what you really want out of that part of your life?

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My next essay will be on Curiosity. Or liminal spaces. Or something else! I haven’t decided yet. But I’d love your feedback on all this! Please share this with your friends! The more feedback the better. Send your thoughts to the comment section.