That famous comfort zone of ours – the one that so few of us are finding “comfort” inside of – isn’t it really more of a No zone? Every time you go to step outside its boundaries, don’t you get a big, heavy “NO!”? Seems like it’s always warning us away, shoving us back, keeping us from the adventures and exciting experiences we hunger for.

Let’s face it… this No zone of ours is not really a place that encourages change. We tackle all sorts of new projects with the firmest of intentions. We say we’re going to lose weight, learn French, play the flute, dance, get fit, sleep less, get out more, go skydiving, play golf, swim, do yoga, meditate… anything at all that involves change and self improvement. But our No zone tries to shut it down, stop it, smother it, discourage it, make us forget it, maybe regret starting it or fear continuing it.

Our No Zone

Let’s talk about this for a minute. What does it take to change something about yourself? Now, I’m not talking about a different haircut, or starting to wear different styles, although those can seem like pretty big change to some folks. No, I mean big, important alterations INSIDE yourself – not just nibbling around the edges, making an inch or two of progress, then gradually, bit by bit, drifting back into your old patterns. No, I’m talking about MASSIVE change.

What’s your experience? Have you ever dramatically changed anything about yourself or your life, or have you always just wished you could?

My guess is that you’ve experienced plenty of big changes over the course of your lifetime, but that when those changes occurred, you were never quite clear afterward about what – exactly – was the REAL cause. Many of our biggest changes are… well… they’re often less than intentional.

In those cases, we know something happened, and we know what the results were… but the cause – the how-to – of that change usually just totally eludes us. The truth is, this lack of clear understanding is what keeps us from making a change, any kind of change, anytime we want. If our No zone can’t prevent the occasional change, well then it’ll by-golly keep us from looking at the process too closely so we can’t do it again.

Maybe sometime in the past you’ve undergone a major shift in your personal philosophy or your beliefs, and while it was happening you were sure you knew what you had done to trigger it. But then afterwards, when you tried the same technique on something else, it probably didn’t work very well – or at all. This a pretty common experience.

Sometimes we wonder if we REALLY know what’s happening here.

So we stumble and fumble on, getting by, doing the best we can, living a hit or miss life that isn’t bad, but (if we’re honest with ourselves) doesn’t actually measure up to our hopes and dreams, either. Again, this experience is so common it has become a stereotype.

So, What’s the Solution?

I have a theory. And some suggestions. But first, a couple of stories that may help shed a little light on the question.

Back in my mid-twenties, I had just left a job working in the darkroom of a custom photo lab, and taken a job that was just about its polar opposite, selling brushes and cleaners door-to-door. I was a Fuller Brush Man, going around with my samples case knocking on doors, speaking with housewives, taking orders for products. And I loved it.

I was outdoors, after three years of working in the dark and breathing chemical fumes. Outdoors, in the clean air, under the early June sunshine. And I was actually talking with people all day long. Man that was heaven by comparison. As soon as I hit the street, my heart was singing with joy. In fact, I remember thinking over and over, “I am SO glad I’m out here and not shut up in that darkroom.”

And I sold like crazy. I had no sales training and very little experience, but from day one I was selling $100 to $120 dollars every day. My manager counseled me to stay out till nine o’clock selling every night, but I was knocking off at five or five thirty. (And by the way, hundred-dollar days were the holy grail back then – the elusive “successful day.”)

The first four days were great. I was selling up a storm. In fact, I was beginning to feel sort of confident. I was already totaling up how much money I’d make in my first year, and all the stuff I could buy.

Then, the fifth day – Friday – something changed. I got the same early, eight o’clock start. But people weren’t buying.

In the four previous days, I had hardly gone for fifteen minutes without a sale, let alone an hour. But the morning stretched out, barren and unproductive. No sales. On and on. By lunchtime I’d gotten exactly two very small, very grudging orders. Certainly not the friendly reception and enthusiastic orders I had seen up till then.

So I trudged to my car, pulled out my sandwich, my apple and my boiled egg, and I ate.

Changing Patterns

And as I ate, I simply sat and enjoyed the sunshine, the fresh air and the privilege of being outdoors. I could at least be thankful for that. The knots in my stomach and my neck loosened, and I relaxed.

That afternoon, sales caught fire again, and in the next four hours, I had my biggest day yet, selling more in that brief half-day than I’d sold in any of the full days before.

That’s when I first started suspecting that the secret ingredient wasn’t the words I was saying, wasn’t the choice of products I demonstrated, nor was it the houses or the neighborhood I was in. The only difference was in me.

The very instant I went back to simply being grateful and thankful, people responded to that feeling within me.

Over the next weeks I experimented, trying different approaches, different greetings, different everything I could think of. And no matter what outward things changed, the sales continued. The only thing that made any real difference was the feeling I was consciously and deliberately generating inside myself. With it I was a superstar. Without it, bupkis – nothing.

Of course, over the next few months I grew accustomed to being outdoors, and that became the new norm in my life. As that happened, I gradually lost touch with the feeling of contrast – the huge difference between the darkroom and the sunshine – and my feelings of thankfulness faded and dimmed.

And, as you probably guessed, my sales sagged, then slumped, then fell off almost completely. I’d lost my secret ingredient. I eventually left that job, took others, some better, some worse, but recapturing that secret eluded me for more than twenty years. Later I’ll tell you a bit about how I recaptured it. But first, another story, this time someone else’s.

A Seductive Idea

Four or five years ago a friend told me that he’d bought a set of cassette tapes from one of the “seduction training” gurus. He was so excited by them that he wanted me to listen to them too. The methods are based on NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), and I did have a strong interest in that subject, so with those self-justifying excuses in mind, I took his tapes home and started listening.

As I listened, I realized a couple of important things.

First, and most importantly, I wasn’t particularly interested in wholesale seducing. The idea of sexual intimacy with a string of total strangers somehow didn’t flip my switches (although intimacy of bodies is exciting, I seem to find intimacy of minds far more fascinating). Simply put, the instruction in those tapes never quite triggered within me a desire to change into a full-bore Casanova.

But I still got a lot out of those tapes because of my second realization. To help explain, here’s the second story I promised you.

In the recordings, the instructor at one point introduced a former student of his, a man who had reached legendary levels of success with seduction methods, and had now become a top instructor in his own right. We’ll call him Steve.

Steve got up and told his story, how he had started out as the most hopeless of non-sexy, non-seductive, losers with women. So he took the course, then started going to clubs every night, trying out the new techniques he’d learned.

And he was an immediate, total failure.

But he wasn’t a quitter. Beside, he didn’t know anything else to try, so he kept on going back to the clubs every night, every night.

And every night, every night, he continued to strike out, getting rejected, going home alone.

He told how he had grown numb to the rejection, so he just kept on running the NLP language patterns with every lady he’d meet. By now he was mainly just doing it for himself, seing how outrageous he could be. He didn’t even expect success anymore, but it didn’t much bother him anymore, either.

For months this went on.

And Then One Night…

As he tells it, Steve recalls chatting with this one young lady and nothing was happening – as usual – so he turned away and spent the rest of the evening talking with one girl or another, then at closing time he went outside to get in his car and drive home… still alone.

But as he was walking across the parking lot, he heard someone running behind him. You know the sound of high heels running on pavement. He turned around, and it was that first girl, the one who’d appeared so disinterested, and she was running after him. She literally slammed into his body and smothered his face and neck with kisses. It seemed she most ardently wished to accompany him home. In fact, she urgently insisted on accompanying him right there in the parking lot, on the hood of his car.

After that, ol’ Steve was a changed man. His life changed, and his sleeping habits altered drastically.

But when I heard that story on the tapes, my first question was this: what actually caused that change? Remember, he’d been running those same NLP language patterns for months, and they had NOT worked. The patterns had not changed, but suddenly they were working, and it was like flipping a switch. What was the real cause?

In my own mind, I’m fairly sure I know what that difference was. Just as in my own experience selling door-to-door, it was an internal change. Mine was not permanent, but Steve’s was.

Second Question – How Do You Make it Permanent?

Don’t these seem like logical, useful questions? Doesn’t it seem like, if we had some reliable answers – a few real, usable, repeatable techniques – we could probably begin choosing the changes we want to make? With that kind of method in our toolkit, we could begin changing things consciously, actually managing our personal growth, rather than the hit-or-miss affair it’s been up to now.

What if we could actually take that No zone in our mind and rewire it to become a Go-Go-Go zone that constantly urges us forward rather than always holding us back?

Well, the good news is, as we go through this course, I’m going to share with you a selection of techniques that actually do work. They really do produce results – not occasionally but consistently.

Of course, where there’s good news, we often also find some less-good news, so here it is: simply learning these techniques won’t do squat for you.

Remember, Steve learned all sorts of seduction techniques, but it wasn’t until he underwent some internal shifts – changes in his psyche, not just in his knowledge base – that he experienced change in how the world responded to him.

So knowledge alone isn’t the point (it never has been). It takes a deeper, more profound settling-in of that knowledge into your deepest inner mind. That’s what produces change. Nothing else.

Been trying to escape your No Zone by building some kind of Know Zone? Then understand this – it doesn’t work. It takes a real, honest-to-god GO zone to get you moving. And it’s this GO zone that we’ll be building over the course of the next few weeks.

If that appeals to you, raise your hand. (And if you just skimmed over that and sat there like a lump without moving your hand, there’s part of the problem. You not only need to think you’re ready, you have to demonstrate it by your actions.)

So raise your hand if you’re ready.

Are folks sitting around watching you, who’d probably think you’re weird if you suddenly go raising your hand for no reason? Then lean back and pretend you’re stretching. But find a way to DO IT, dammit. Do it!

Reinforce. Demonstrate. Act. Make your actions agree with your thoughts.

Cheers from warm and smiling Thailand,
Charles

Related Posts:

1. Stretching Your Self Versus the Flower Zone