Learning and Comfort Zones

Do you remember the first time you drove a car. From the nervous start to the fidgety gear shift to jumbled up clutch brake equation to sweat all over your brow. "Heavy traffic ? No, thank you. I am happy at my 15 kmph on the service road near Sector 29".

Cut to 15 days later, you'd be zooming around the bylanes of Delhi, thriving in the midst of all those foul mouth drivers and (ok, only the more enterprising types) even matching them twist for twist and word for word.

Or the first time you looked at your class twelfth mathematics books. "Ohh my God, trigonometric equations with unending streams of tan and cot and coordinate geometry of obscenely twisted figures and that weird symbol meaning integration". A year later, most of us are able to use those weird symbols and grapple with those undending streams of trigonometric ratios. In other words, we become comfortable.

Or the first time you went out to play cricket. "Bhaiyya, ball slow dena" (slow balls please!). You are extremely uncomfortable at the prospect of the red ball zooming in towards you at what you perceive as high pace. Three months and you start hitting the same bhaiyya over the top.

Or the first time you smoked a cigarette. Extreme discomfort at the smoke getting inside you while a couple more days and you look like your grand dad modelled for Marlboro lights 70 years back.

The idea is not that smoking is cool or all of us did finally learn to hit our friendly neighbourhood bhaiyya to huge sixes. Interesting is this transition from an extreme feeling of discomfort to being completely at ease, and in this process we ended up learning something new.

Now think of any instance where you learnt something new. It can be cooking a new dish, painting, singing, dancing, playing a sport, a new language, a new subject, anything. With each instance, you can clearly identify three distinct stages - a) the initial stage where you are extremely uncomfortable doing what you set out to learn, b) the transition and c) the final stage when it becomes second nature.

Infact, if your comfort level with something is the same before and after the learning process, it is safe to say that you haven't learnt anything.

Learning, in this sense, is always associated with moving from being uncomfortable to being comfortable, or expanding your comfort zone to include the earlier out of bounds areas. The direct corollary is that we only learn through stepping out of our comfort zones.

This is very interesting. We only learn through stepping out of our comfort zones. Still, so many of us go to extreme lengths to avoid having to step out. At times, yours truly too has been guilty of this offence.

While we are kids, we are systematically and even uncosnciously asked and required to step out of our comfort zones. The parents, education system, peer pressure, even our own instincts. We are still uncontaminated by the negative inputs the world incessantly gives us - the quagmire of limiting thoughts - it doesn't seem like a big deal. But ask us grown-ups (am not too sure if you can call 28 years all that "grown-up") - many a bright kid has lost the spark just due to hesitation to venture out of the comfort zones. At times, even I am afraid, if I will be able to preserve it.

Hesitation is the number one enemy of endeavor, comfort of comfort zones is the arch rival of learning. I want to believe that I never hesitate and never feel the trepidation in breaching my confort zone. If only, it was true always !!!