How to Get Out of Your Comfort Zone

Yesterday's letter was a heavy one, and I have been thinking about you since I hit publish. If it landed on something tender, I hope you were gentle with yourself last night.

And if you have read all fifteen of these, I want you to take a moment and notice it. Fifteen days of showing up for something nobody made you do.

Pat yourself on the back. I am not joking. No one else is going to do it for you.

What I did with the blank

I told you yesterday that I had nothing—no feeling to report.

So here is what I did with it.

I went to a yoga class. Then I came home, sat down in the calm, stayed still, and let the blank be there without trying to talk myself out of it.

I did not fix it. I did not journal my way to a breakthrough. I did not go for a walk and return a new woman.

I just sat in it and let it run.

And this morning I woke up looking forward to packing. I leave Monday morning. Wow, I am getting excited—today's goal: not to pack the kitchen, lol.

Monday, I get on a plane.

Which brings me to what I want to talk about today.

What actually scares me

Everything I have been building toward over the past ten months happens tomorrow morning.

And I want to be honest with you about what scares me, because I think you could be expecting the noble version.

It's not about the walking. It's not the miles, hills, weather, or sleeping in unfamiliar places.

It is the airport.

Midlife worries are different

It begins with security. I haven't broken any laws, and my bag is empty. Still, whenever I reach that line, I freeze. A flood of anxiety tightens in my throat, though I can't quite explain where it originates.

Once I get to the gate, I feel a sense of relief until I hear now boarding.

Then it's the overhead bin. I genuinely dread taking too long to stow my suitcase when there's a line of people behind me. I have to remind myself, you've done this a thousand times, you're fine, and it's okay to take a moment to get settled.

And this one is honestly the hardest to admit: the bathroom on the plane. I hate them. Somewhere along the way, I picked up a fear of getting locked in one, even though it has never happened to me or to anyone I have ever met. Maybe I have watched too many Lifetime movies.

Traveling internationally alone for the first time in my life brings its own kind of anxiety.

I know how those fears may sound to some, as silly. I have had people laugh when I talk about them. Now I am comfortable with who I am and with my fears, even the silly ones.

I am a woman about to board a plane and walk across northern Spain, and I am concerned about the overhead bin.

But that is what fear actually looks like for most of us. Not a mountain. A bin. A line. A door.

I am still choosing to go.

How I got here

Here is why I am telling you the ridiculous ones.

Every time I do one small, uncomfortable thing and make it through, I have more evidence for the next one.

That is how I got from where I was to standing in my kitchen the day before I fly to Spain.

• Moving outside my comfort zone is how I discovered this community.
• It is how I wrote the book.
• It is how I ended up writing you letters this intimate, something I would not have believed I was capable of two years ago.
• It is how I started posting.
• That is how I found my voice.

None of them was comfortable. Every single one of them felt like too much before I did it, and now they are just things I do.

She may still feel afraid. She may still doubt herself. She may still wobble. But she cannot unknow what she knows now.

Silent to Spoken: A Woman's Journey Through the Pause

I wrote that about somebody else, and it turns out I was writing about myself.

The fear has not gone away. I am still working on my confidence and will keep doing so for a long time.

What changed is that I learned to move anyway.

I learned to keep moving even when I felt unqualified.

That sentence is the entire thing.

I have never felt qualified, whether for the podcast, coaching, the book, these letters, or even tomorrow.

Growth does not wait until you feel ready. It begins the moment you are willing to be uncomfortable.

The Camino is not a leap for me.

It is simply the next step on a ladder I have been climbing for years.

Camino History

There is something about this road that I did not understand until recently.

It has never been a comfortable journey, and no one has ever pretended it was.

The Codex Calixtinus, a twelfth-century guide for pilgrims, does not sell the experience. It warns you. It tells you which rivers will kill your horse if you drink from them. It names specific ferrymen who overload their boats. It describes the people of certain regions in terms that would not survive an editor today.

It is a guidebook written by someone who assumed you were going anyway.

And that is the part that gets me. Nobody wrote it to talk pilgrims out of going. They wrote it so people would know what they were walking into and go anyway.

The discomfort was not evidence that they were on the wrong path.

You do not walk five hundred miles to remain the same person.

Did You Know

For many pilgrims, Santiago is not the destination.

Many keep walking west for another three days or so, out to Finisterre on the Atlantic coast. The name comes from the Latin finis terrae, meaning the end of the earth, because that is what people once believed.

The kilometer markers along the way count down. At the coast, one of them reads 0.0.

There is a tradition of watching the sunset there, and some pilgrims burn or leave behind a piece of clothing they wore.

I find it interesting that after walking all that way to a cathedral, many people are still not finished. They keep going to the edge of what the old world thought was everything, and only then do they stop.

Scripture Study

Exodus 4:10 through 13

Moses tells God he is not eloquent, that he is slow of speech and tongue. God asks who gave a person their mouth and says He will help him speak and teach him what to say. Moses answers anyway: please send somebody else.

I love this passage because Moses argues.

He does not have a crisis of faith. He has a competence problem. He believes God is God, but he does not believe he is the right person for the assignment.

So he lists his qualifications, or rather, his lack of them.

God does not simply remove what Moses is worried about. God reminds Moses who made his mouth, promises to help him speak, teaches him what to say, and later provides Aaron to speak for him.

Dig Deeper

Read it again and notice the order of the excuses throughout the conversation.

Who am I? Who are You? What if they do not believe me? I am not a good speaker.

It starts with his identity and ends with his skill set, and every one of them is a version of the same sentence.

I am not qualified for this.

Then comes verse thirteen, which is the most human line in the passage. After God has answered every objection, Moses says, please send somebody else.

Moses is still reluctant, but he goes anyway.

It is not a story about a man who suddenly became confident. God answered him and provided for him, yet Moses still began the assignment as a reluctant man.

Here is the thing I keep coming back to.

The next forty years of his life were the assignment. All of it happened after the moment he still felt unqualified.

Reflection

Write honestly or do not write at all. Nobody is reading this but you.

1. What is the small uncomfortable thing I have been avoiding?
2. What have I already done that previously felt impossible?
3. Where have I been waiting to feel qualified before I begin?
4. What is one step I could take this week that would be genuinely uncomfortable?
5. If the fear does not go away, am I still willing to move?

Prayer

Camino Challenge: One Rung

Write down two lists.

• First, list three things you have already done that previously felt impossible. Be specific. The conversation you finally had. The job you applied for. The boundary you set. The day you told the truth about something.
• Look at that list. It is your evidence. It is the ladder you have already been climbing.
• Second, write one uncomfortable thing you could do this week. One. Small enough to actually do, and uncomfortable enough that you would rather not.
• Then do it and add it to the first list.

That is the entire method. There is no better one.

Tomorrow We'll Walk...

Tomorrow I fly.

Seventeen letters in, and the last two are going to be written from a different place than the rest.

Tomorrow, I want to talk about leaving room for God to surprise you. I have planned this trip down to the confirmation number, and I already know the best parts will be the ones I did not schedule.

What have you already done that previously felt impossible? Write me back below. I read every one.