I keep seeing profile picture updates from my former [private school] students who transferred out to another school. Each time I do, my heart leaps a little leap of joy.
This is not to be vindictive against my former employers. It's just that I love these students so much that I want them to explore their full potentials outside their safest littlest comfort zone — the school they grew up in. On retrospect of my student life, I know full well how detrimental thriving in a small comfort zone is.
It's a law of physics, "an object at rest tends to stay at rest unless an outside force acts upon it." It's the same with people. We tend to stay in our comforting little bubbles, because there's no one challenging us from the inside. We tend to become little robots, following only what's the norm inside our safe havens. Then, the moment we are forced out of our comfort zone after eons of staying in it, we falter. We trip and we fall, not knowing how to walk on a field with a different gravity with the place we were so comfortable with.
We tend to be complacent with what we do, exerting only the bare minimum to "survive." We do not exert our maximum efforts, thinking that "Hey, I was able to pass this way before; it turned out fine." When we are comfortable, we tend to laze away with the mediocrity. Because we were already triumphant with our bare minimum, we repeatedly act at exceedingly comfortable levels that we so often give creativity up in exchange for compliance. Yet we get rewarded. We get lionized just because we completed our tasks — tasks that were so routinely done.
Inside our comfort zones, we risk the danger of losing our sense of self. The more we are challenged, the more we know about ourselves. We learn what makes us tick, what requires us to quit. We find out the full potential of what we can contribute to the world we live in. Lounging too much in our comfort zones kills most of our opportunities to unleash our full potentials.
My students left their comfort zones... and that is great! This is not to vilify those who stayed, that is also perfectly okay. I just wish for their personal growth though, that they continually find ways to push outside their bubbles little by little. I wish that they try to push the walls they, and their environment, have built around themselves. I wish that they continually expand their horizons, making their comfort zones bigger and bigger as they grow older. #
