Micro Class: Romancing Your Discomfort Zone

Hi, this is Brian.

Welcome to another micro class.

This one is on romancing or bromancing, if you prefer your discomfort zone.

This is inspired by the Mindful Athlete, George Mumford's great book. Thank you, George.

So romancing your discomfort zone.

This is a big idea.

George tells us that elite athletes have a great relationship between their comfort zone and their discomfort zone. Now what they do is they learn to play right here in between their comfort zone and their discomfort zone.

Now, a couple things to pay attention to here.

Now, we're all pretty aware of the fact that we've got to get out.

Of our comfort zone if we want to achieve anything.

Great. But too often, those of us who haven't quite figured it out yet try to go up here. We try to go even past our discomfort zone. We're tough guys or gals, and we're going to change our life drastically and immediately. Check us out.

Bam.

And what does that lead to? That leads it to burnout and other such unpleasant things. The elite performers realize they don't need to make these huge quantum leaps in their life every other day. We what they need to do is show up right here, stretch outside their comfort zone, but not so far that they're in uncomfortableness too much. Their discomfort zone, they play in what scientists call eustress. Healthy, adaptive stress, not in distress. Another way to look at it, we'll bring a prop in.

Ooh, we have a rubber band.

Now I'm stretching that rubber band. That rubber band gets tension as I stretch it. But if I kept on stretching it and stretching it and stretching it, which I've done outside of the screen, but I'm not going to continue doing that because if I do it, it's going to snap in my face. That's not fun. That's what we do too often when we stretch too far past our.

In.

Through our and past our discomfort zone. Think of it like that rubber band. You want to stretch it, but you don't want to snap it. Give yourself a nice exit out of your comfort zone, but don't go nuts. Here's what's exciting when you embrace that. He calls that the middle path. Right. Middle path. You're not in your comfort zone. You're not in your discomfort zone. You're right in the sweet spot in between. That takes a level of maturity and patience. As the Buddha says, little by little.

One becomes good as a water pot.

Is filled with water. Don't try to fill up your water pot with a fire hydrant hose, blowing it all around the room.

I talk about that a lot in my work.

Here's what happens when you do this, when you embrace incremental growth. Let's say this is your current edge of your comfort zone. And you go right here, right? Bam. Nice. Well, now, once you've gotten there, you have a new comfort zone edge, and you go right beyond it and boom, you've got another comfort zone established. Then you go up again outside of your comfort zone incrementally. You're not snapping, you're stretching here. And then what happens? Well, you guessed it. Your comfort zone expands. You keep on doing that incrementally growing. And all of a sudden, sooner than you may think, but maybe not as fast as you'd like, but faster than you think it would happen. You're way up here and your next stretch is here. And you look back at the version of you that was right here and you say, wow, I can handle that easily. My comfort zone is way up here. And that's way inside my comfort zone. Now that's what we see when we're willing to embrace incremental gains compounded over time equals geometric growth. That's we're all about in this work, diligently, patiently, persistently expanding our comfort zones and continuing to grow.

That is a quick look at how.

To romance your discomfort zone. Play and use stress rather than distress, stretch rather than snap.

How can you do that a little bit more? Are you playing in your comfort zone.

A little bit too much or.

Or are you playing beyond your discomfort zone too much? Think about that. Optimize it. Hope you enjoyed. Look forward to sharing more soon. See ya. Hey guys, this is Brian. A lot of people don't know what I do beyond these YouTube videos I put up. So I thought I'd give you a quick tour of our membership platform. Thousands of people have joined us already. 10 bucks a month get access to a ton of stuff that's in addition to what I put up on YouTube for free. So the basic idea is you just watched a micro class. Hope you enjoyed that. I share. I just started doing these micro classes, but I Now share over 50 of these per month. We've shared dozens so far and it's.

Basically a quick class on my absolute.

Favorite stuff across the different domains of optimal living. 2 to 3 maybe 5 minute little micro classes on how to optimize your life. In addition to that, you get access to every single one of our philosophers notes. We now have over 250 philosophers notes on some really, really good books, a lot of them in each one of them. You're familiar with the PNTV videos if you've watched many of those.

But we also have pictures, PDFs and.

MP3s of our Philosopher's notes. So here's let's take a look at what a PDF looks like. This is an example of a Philosopher's Note. It's a six page PDF where I basically share some of my favorite thoughts, riff on it, talk about how other teachers say the same things, and give you a nice playful kick in the butt to go out and apply the wisdom that is a Philosopher's Note. I record that as an MP3 that you can download as well and 250 of those. I produce 10 of those at least per month that I share with you in addition to the micro classes and then you also get access to all of our old classes. We have the five day immersion, reboot, habits 101, confidence 101, getting stuff done 101, meditation 101 and then future classes including relationships 101, energy 101, purpose 101, biz 101, goals 101, etc. So there you go. Really blessed to have some extraordinary support and I will share with you where you go to sign up. I'll put a link to this, but basically cruise on over here. You can sign up and this is the kind of response we've gotten so far from our members.

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I've made more positive changes in my life my brief membership only 3 months so far than I did through years of counseling. Yes. Brian Johnson, you rockstar. Thank you very much. That's very kind of you. And I'm making huge strides in optimizing my life as a result of your philosopher's notes and optimal living classes. I spend $19 a month on my gym membership to take care of my body. A mere $10 a month on an optimal living membership is the biggest value investment I've ever made in my emotional, mental and spiritual health. Thank you for the incredible work you're doing to inspire us to be rock stars in our own lives. Unbelievably inspiring and humbling. In 24 hours we received hundreds of extraordinary notes from members around the world. So there you go. That's a quick look at what we're up to. $10 a month. Hope to astonish you. There you go.