Break Out of This Today

Each afternoon at 4:45 p.m., just before I stop working for the day, one of my final tasks is to review a set of daily inspirational and motivational documents. I call these my “Daily Guiding Documents”. One document that has been in the rotation for over four years of this habit has been The Kekich Credos, by Dave Kekich. It’s a list of 100 mantras for life and business.

The first Credo might be the most important. It starts, “People will do almost anything to stay in their comfort zones. If you want to accomplish anything, get out of your comfort zone.”

He probably listed that one first because it is so powerful. You see, unless we get out of our comfort zone, the reality is that we won’t make breakthroughs in our lives, our businesses, our relationships, or our health.

You simply can’t coast through life if you want to get better.

However, getting out of the old comfort zone is something everyone deals with and struggles to overcome. When you have bad days, you’ll be tempted to return to your comfort zone habits, but it’s also the time when you need to fight against that the most.

My comfort zone habits stem from my childhood. There are days when I wish I could become anonymous, get a factory job, and hide out in front of the TV every night.

You see, I grew up in the country, on a farm. My parents worked all day and watched TV all night. During the summer, my dad would work late in the fields while my mom tended her garden and I played sports, but by 8 p.m. we were all back in front of the TV.

When I grew up, that was my comfort zone. Staying home and watching TV.

Eventually I got my first job off the farm in 1988 at age 13 for $3.10 an hour and I’ve been working almost every week – if not every day – since. I’ve worked in factories, gyms, offices, and schools. I’ve had dead-end jobs and I’ve also built the life of my dreams through an information marketing business helping people improve their health and fitness.

But there are still those days where I wish I had the 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. factory job so I could go home every day and sit in my comfort zone watching television. I sometimes wish I could take every weekend off to play golf instead of working, researching, and studying fat loss and motivation. I sometimes wish I could just, “Clock in. Clock out. Tune in. Tune out.”

I fight that desire many days. I wanted to tell you this because I know you probably feel the same way about your business some days.

It would be easier to go back to your comfort zone. It would be easier if you could give up and go back to doing whatever you wanted and skipping the time you devote to building your second income.

But we have to fight it. Every day we MUST fight it.

You fight it by getting up early to devote a few minutes of time to getting ahead on your second income stream before you have to go to work. You’re fighting the good fight. And you’re going to win.

I might wake up some mornings and want to quit. You’ll do the same.

But we won’t quit. We never will.

Because the day we quit is the day we start living a life of regret.

That regret will be far more painful than any daily struggle we face while we work towards a better life. Whatever your goal, you must continue to learn and grow and have the discipline to do the things you don’t always necessarily want to do.

As the first Kekich Credo continues, “Strive to increase order and discipline in your life. Discipline usually means doing the opposite of what you feel like doing. The easy roads to discipline are:

• Setting deadlines
• Discovering and doing what you do best and what’s important and enjoyable to you
• Focusing on habits by replacing your bad habits and thought patterns, one-by-one, over time, with good habits and thought patterns.“

For my goal of helping one million men and women transform their lives, I need to build a team, spend time creating systems, and improve my sales and persuasion skills to convince more people to believe I can help them. That’s not going to happen if I’m not willing to change and get out of my comfort zone.

(In fact, everyone here at ETR is stepping out of our comfort zones to bring you the ETR $100,000 Transformation Contest in early 2013. It’s going to be our biggest challenge yet, but we know it will change hundreds of thousands of lives. Stay tuned for more details.)

For you, getting out of your comfort zone will require setting goals with deadlines, taking time for self-reflection to identify specifically what it is that you want to accomplish, and then to focus on creating the daily habits and positive thought patterns that move you closer to your goals each day.

It’s not easy, but you can do it if you are willing to change. Of course, change is a scary word. As the old saying goes, “people fear change”.

But that’s not completely accurate. After all, if I gave you $100,000 dollars, you wouldn’t be scared of that life change, right? Of course not. In fact, humans embrace positive change. What we really fear is negative change.

So you need to look at what you might think are negative changes, and re-frame them as positive changes to your lifestyle.

You have to focus on the small, but consistent increases in your second income you achieve from taking action every day. You’ll need to have gratitude for the new business partners you meet at seminars. Both of those take effort but bring with them great benefits as well.

Trust me, there will still be a time and a place in your life to slip back into your comfort zone activities, but that will be as a reward, not a daily habit.

If we want to make those big changes in our lives, then we need to break free from our comfort zones. We need to challenge ourselves. We need increase the organization, planning, discipline, and implementation in our lives.

If we do this consistently, we will develop new, stronger habits that will allow us to reach our goals.

Start by…

1. Setting deadlines for your new positive habits.
2. Making small changes every day.
3. Preparing for those days when we feel like doing the opposite of what we should be doing.

You can do it. You can break free from your comfort zone.

If you believe in yourself as much as I believe in you, you will succeed beyond your wildest dreams. Never, ever, EVER give up on something that is important to you.

It may not be easy, but you can and will do it.

Stay strong and never give in. In fact, promise me that you’ll stay strong and break OUT of your comfort zone.

We’ll be right here supporting you every step of the way.

[Ed. Note. Craig Ballantyne is the author of Financial Independence Monthly, a complete blueprint to helping you take control of your financial future with a web-based business that you can operate from anywhere in the world – including a coffee shop, your kitchen table, or anywhere around the world where there is Internet access. Discover how you can achieve the American Dream and your financial independence here. You’ve never seen anything like this before.]