Are you stretching yourself? 

While I do hope you take the time each and every workout to stretch your muscles, today I don’t want to talk about physical stretching, rather I’d like to talk about mental stretching. 

We humans are pretty peculiar.

We all too often choose a familiar misery over an uncertain future—one that could potentially be filled with amazing adventures and experiences that level us up and bring us greater happiness. And we choose this familiar misery because we fear the possibility of loss 10x more than we get excited about the potential for gain.

And so we often stay in situations that are mediocre, that make us feel stuck, and we choose comfort over risk.

Tim Ferriss says, “People will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.”

And I get it. I do! Unfamiliar is scary. Risk is dangerous. I’ve been there. I have been stuck myself and afraid of the unknown.

And this all happens when we don’t fully believe in our own ability to handle any potential struggle or barrier. 

I hear from women constantly who say they want to do something different, something bigger, something to bust out of their rut, but they just can’t seem to get over their fears and the possibility of discomfort.

Unfortunately, the only way to get over this feeling of fear and discomfort is to slowly stretch yourself so that what was once scary becomes easier to recognize, aka – the feeling of stretching yourself starts to get more familiar. You can go, “Here it is again! I recognize this feeling – it’s fear, it’s familiar. And I know what to do, even though it won’t be easy. I know I can make it through.”

It’s never super comfy in the beginning, but you start to accumulate wins and a show of evidence that you can do hard things, and that you can trust yourself.

In my experience, no matter how still we stand or how much we try to control and check off all the boxes of “safe,” life has a way of handing us some stuff to deal with—it forces our hand even if we don’t seek it out.

So the question becomes, how uncertain and uncomfortable are you willing to become to EARN trust and confidence in yourself?

In the long run, will it be better to stay the same or rip off the band-aid to go after change?