You’ll Never Know Until You’re Pushed

When I took up Krav Maga almost three years ago, I thought I was in decent shape. I’d been running since high school, had spent the past few years weightlifting, was no stranger to hiking steep mountain trails.

I had no clue. No clue.

That first class was free, and I spent the first 20 minutes wondering what I’d gotten myself into. It was a stark lesson in the meaning of “shock to the system.” But another 40 minutes later, I was putting a jittery signature on a contract for a year.

And still I had no clue.

The rudest awakening came at the first Saturday morning conditioning class I attended. In the Krav classes there are ebbs and flows, periods of downtime when you can catch your breath and tapped-out muscles can reboot.

Conditioning is almost devoid of such mercy. After a warm-up that constitutes some people’s entire workout, it’s usually a rotation through a dozen or more strength and cardio stations. Two or three minutes at each, 30 seconds pause in between, for the bulk of the hour.

The first time, I spent the rest of that Saturday feeling like a building had fallen on me. All of Sunday, too.

There were two reasons for the divide between where I thought I was and the dismaying reality:

(1) Lack of drive. Regardless of what I’d been doing previously — running, lifting, hiking — I’d been doing it entirely at my own pace. If I felt like taking a breather, I took one. I hadn’t heard a coach urging me to step it up since high school.

(2) Lack of vision. I’d been on a path of maintenance, at best. You couldn’t really call it improvement, and it certainly wasn’t a path with an eye toward excellence. Instead, I’d spent years contentedly ambling along a comfortable plateau.

Flatlining, really.

Suddenly, though, I was being challenged. After years of setting my own pace, I was being encouraged to follow someone else’s. Someone who was pushing me to do more, work harder, go faster.

And now? Now Saturday mornings are no big deal. I crave Saturday mornings. I’ll work harder than I was ever capable of three years ago, go home, and then it’s on to something else, instead of lying splayed out in the floor like roadkill. All it took was two things:

(1) Showing up on a regular basis.

(2) The willingness to let someone forcibly evict me from my comfort zone.

Yes, There Is A Connection To Creativity Here

As creators, we can find ourselves in a similar sort of comfort zone. A place where things may be happening, but it’s not really anything that makes us yelp with astonishment that we were capable of it. That bolsters our confidence for what we might do next.

This isn’t to make a hobgoblin out of consistency. Consistency is a vital trait to cultivate, and it’s been the key to how a great many prolific writers and other creators have generated that big body of work. Two pages a day, every day. 1500 words a day, every day. Four hours at the easel, every day. Whatever it is, it can’t help but add up.

Then again, it can also get to feeling awfully … comfortable.

And sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is smash out of that. Just to affirm to yourself that you can. And to see what’s on the other side.

It isn’t necessarily about quantity. Maybe, for you, the issue is qualitative: prose that sings more lyrically, or cuts to the point quicker. Maybe it’s about doing work that goes emotionally deeper than you ever have. Or taking on a project unlike anything you’ve done before.

Or anything else that, no matter how much you want to do it, also makes you a little uncomfortable.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Comfort Zones

Here’s the thing about comfort zones: They exert a potent gravitational force to keep you in the middle of them.

It doesn’t matter if what lies beyond their boundaries is good for your heart, soul, or bank account. Growth involves change, and change, as it turns out, frequently runs head-on into powerful opposition that not only comes from within, but comes from an even more primal place than the desire to go beyond.

In his book Mastery, Aikido black belt and former World War II flight instructor George Leonard identifies the comfort zone as a basic survival technique that keeps us alive and content by making us resistant to anything that deviates too far from what we’re already accustomed to:

“Our body, brain, and behavior have a built-in tendency to stay the same within rather narrow limits, and to snap back when changed … This condition of equilibrium, this resistance to change, is called homeostasis. It characterizes self-regulating systems … and it applies to psychological states and behavior as well as to physical functioning.”

But forewarned is forearmed. Just having the awareness that, for all your uniqueness, you too are a system with these see-sawing fluctuations can help a lot in breaking out of the comfort zone.

For the rest of the way, try tapping into a set of equally primal avoidance factors:

Like shame. Fear of failure. Losing face.

Enter The Discomfort Zone

When you want to exceed your status quo, it’s not impossible to do it in a vacuum, where you and you alone know what you’re up to. Still, when you’re the only arbiter, consider how easy it can be to renegotiate with yourself.

Bring in someone else, though, and now there’s a sense of accountability in play. Most of us genuinely dislike letting someone else down, in part because we don’t want to look bad in their eyes. And so, whether they know it or not, their presence pushes us.

Here are a few possible forms this can take in the creative realm:

(1) A deadline. Whether it’s a submission deadline, or for something you’ve already contracted for/committed to, few things light a fire under you better than a date circled on a calendar. Especially one that looks impossible.

(2) A writers or artists retreat. Why uproot yourself from the familiar everyday and immerse yourself in a different environment? Because it clears the way for you to be whoever and whatever you want to be while you’re there.

(3) Someone you want to prove wrong. Two of the most powerful words in the English language: “You’ll never…”

(4) A writing group. Because nobody ever needed to set up a mutual support network for slackers.

(5) A pact with a like-minded friend. The best kind of friend to have, or be, is the one who knows when to cut you some slack and when not to let you off the hook.

(6) NaNoWriMo. Short for National Novel Writing Month. Held every November since 1999, this is a challenge for the stout of heart: a pledge to write 50,000 words in 30 days. The good news is, you’ll have way over 100,000 other bleary-eyed fellow crazies pulling for you.

I’ve utilized nearly all of these, sometimes by choice and sometimes by circumstance. They lie behind most of the truly gratifying projects I’ve done — the ones whose turmoil I’ve forgotten and whose experiences now seem suffused with magic. The ones that involved hitting a deadline or achieving a standard that made me both welcome the challenge and squirm with panic.

Even if it’s not the level you’re at every day, it shows you what you’re capable of.

Then again, who’s to say it can’t, for you, define the new normal.

[Photo by pheezy]