I firmly believe this. You should jump straight out of your comfort zone from time to time. Maybe this means you should have the sort of night out that you'd not normally have, or maybe you should try a new recipe, or reading something you wouldn't normally read. Alternatively, maybe you should challenge some principal assumptions about your life. Look at sentences that being, "but I have to" and then plan a way for that not to be true.

Note: this doesn't work with child care.

I've been confident in some things and utterly clueless in others in my life. Some of my confidence is deeply misplaced - in these cases, I've often been better off for my delusion. I firmly believe that the world is almost totally founded on degrees of effective delusions. This is the interesting thing, though. I also believe that some lack of confidence is, in itself, a form of delusion. In other words, you can have self-fulfilling delusions in both directions. Example: I lack confidence in passing people in tight corridors because I feel myself to be large and unweildy - as a result, I act awkwardly in corridors and it's awkward... Yes, if I were to believe that I were normal-sized and that other people were relatively abnormal, and if I were to believe that body-space and touching a stranger were no big deal, then I would find myself finding moving through corridors easier.

Note: I don't really have problems in tight corridors.

There are some people whose behaviour we look at in amazement. They just don't seem to give a toss, or maybe they don't know what they look like. Yet they have a good time. I don't know where delusion and confidence truly have a border.

This is why I believe you need to get out of the comfort zone. Doing something that you can't do unconsciously is a good way to try out other parts of your brain. Maybe some things just aren't you. Though I've considered, intellectually, the possibility of courting a same-sex sexual encounter, just to tick the box, I know in my heart of hearts, that I would actually be traumatised by it and would get nothing out of it. That, I think, is in the category of "not me". On the other hand, there are some things which I used to believe you couldn't do. I used to think you couldn't walk up to the prettiest girl in the pub and just say hi - out of the blue - a complete stranger. That's an incorrect assumption.

So, if there's any message from this blether, it's this. Find ways to get out of the comfort zone. Give it a shot. You may not have the technique or even the vocabulary to be capable of doing things you've never done before. That's ok. Just try. It's okay for things to go wrong. It's okay to try again. It took over 100 gigs for me to become even a vaguely competent stand-up and even then, I would say that I only get it right some of the time these days... it's at its best, though, when I'm out of my comfort zone and enjoying myself.

So I've proved my own point with reference to myself. That's the narcissism of blogging.