The 11 vital segments of your life
Last time, in an article published in The Innovation, I introduced “Life Zones.”
From these Zones, you live, work, and enjoy the rewards of a productive life.
They are:
1) Your Comfort Zone: It’s where you rest and recharge your body, mind, and spirit.
2) Your Discovery Zone: This is where you learn things, meet new people, and discover the hidden nooks and crannies of possibility.
3) Your Achievement Zone: It’s where you are fully engaged in the process of creation, production, and generating results.
It’s time to dig deeper into these “Zones” to see how you can benefit from them as you invest in yourself and your future.
Today, our focus is on the hidden power of Your Comfort Zone.
Despite its bad reputation, your comfort zone is not only necessary but vital to your health and well-being. It includes your home, loved ones, and all manner of comforts.
It’s true that if you only stay in your comfort zone, your chances of achieving what you want are severely limited.
Yet, there’s a productive aspect to your comfort zone.
It provides you with a safe place to rest, recuperate, and recharge your spirit.
It helps keep you alive!
Your comfort zone is a place for reflection, relaxation, renewal, and planning your quest to reach higher, into your discovery and achievement zones.
Instead of seeing your comfort zone as a psychological aspect of your life, look at it from its physical characteristics.
It encompasses the following 11 segments of your life, each of which is an area that can be improved:
1. Shelter — The place or places you call home. It can be a king’s palace or a box under the bridge. It’s your space for living as best you can. (Hopefully, if your home is that box under the bridge, you will be able to get out of there and find or build a better shelter, for we all need shelter, a place to rest and recharge our spirits.)
It’s your home, either permanently or temporarily.
You need a place where you can be yourself, treat yourself, and enjoy the benefits of your work.
You can eat, sleep, relax, read, plan, and enjoy the benefits in a place of your own.
Careers and industries were created by supplying and catering to this essential need.
Consider home builders, architects, designers, real estate agents, property managers, not to mention the lumber dealers, hardware manufacturers, stores, furniture manufacturers, and the plethora of industries set up to make your home a place to savor and enjoy.
“Everybody likes to have a place to think, to meditate, to eat a burrito.” — Sherman Alexie
2. Love — Your spouse, significant other, and those you value most, including your pets. It’s what makes life better. It’s your emotional, physical, and spiritual grasp of what you value most in the world.
Without love, life loses its meaning. Grab onto the things that matter most to you, especially the individual or individuals you value most.
“All love for others is an extension of the love one has for oneself.” — Aristotle
3. Sex — Sexual pleasure given and received, including the possibility for creating other human beings.
Sex is the life force personified. When matched with love, one delves into the essence of life itself.
When sex is not paired with love, it’s robbed of its unique power, and instead, becomes an exercise of fleeting pleasure.
Yet even then, sex has the power to transcend its physical limits and enter the zone of the love of life.
“The sexual embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.” — Marcus Aurelius
4. Food — What you eat and drink for survival and pleasure. It’s a necessity of life.
As humans, we have created a culture that values the enjoyment of food and drink, especially in the company of those we love and value.
But no matter whether you eat with others or alone, food can revitalize and rejuvenate your body and mind.
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well if one has not dined well.” — Virginia Woolf
5. Health — Your physical fitness and well-being.
Without health, your life loses one of the essential things for living the best life possible.
Rich people who lose their health might as well be poor.
But a poor person with good health has the power to live a better life, including the possibility of getting rich.
“Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.” — Jim Rohn
6. Clothing — It’s your outer skin that provides warmth, comfort, and style.
Clothing offers you the chance to look and feel the way you want. You can show off to the world or settle into your comfortable clothes.
Whole industries have been built on creating clothes and styles that enhance your ability to look your best.
“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” ―Mark Twain
7. Grooming — Your hair, skin, and body — looking, feeling, and smelling good. As with clothes, grooming has inspired industries that create products that help you do that. Grooming is your way to cater to your body, making it an essential aspect of your personhood.
“We’re a walking billboard…” — Chandler Parsons
8. Memories — Your ability to remember, savor, and benefit from your past.
Also, a recognition that you have the power to create new memories each day of your life.
Memories allow you to visualize special moments from your past.
Good memories give you instant feedback of love, joy, and pleasure.
Painful memories give you instant feedback of the fear or pain you once experienced. As such, memories can not only be experienced but analyzed and reconsidered in light of what you know now.
Memories can also look to the future!
How? By the knowledge that you have the power to create new memories from this day forward.
“No one can ever take your memories from you — each day is a new beginning, make good memories every day.” — Catherine Pulsifer
9. Music — Melodic creations that renew your spirit.
You experience music instantaneously as you listen.
It can revitalize your spirit.
Great musicians, singers, composers, and conductors create works that literally can move one to tears or cries of joy.
Enjoying music is a fundamental aspect and joy of being human.
Music can stoke your passion for getting things done and living the best life possible.
“Without music, life would be a mistake.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
10. Recharge — Unique to you, it’s what renews your body, mind, and spirit.
It can be reading a book, hiking in the forest, climbing a mountain, roaming city streets, looking at great art, going to the theater, camping by a lake.
You name it; it’s what gives you a chance to renew and recharge your body and soul.
It can be a mini-vacation or a flat-out trip around the world.
In war zones, the army allows soldiers at various times to go on “R and R,” meaning rest and relaxation. Even in fighting a war, men and women must have the opportunity to recharge their bodies and spirits, renewing their ability to carry on the job.
“I have a drum set in my dressing room. I play drums to relax and have some fun.” — Queen Latifah
11. Mental Stamina — It’s keeping your mind functioning at optimal levels so you can enjoy life more and be more productive.
It’s how you as an individual create the means to achieve everything you want in life through thinking, planning, doing, changing, redoing, and doing again.
Then you’ve got something more to think more about.
Mental stamina is your superpower that can bring you to the next stage of your development as a fully functioning human being.
Thinking leads to doing.
Mental stamina is a healthy thought process.
“A strong mind is one of the key components that separates the great from the good.” — Gary Player
Parting Thoughts on Your Comfort Zone
You may not have experienced each of these in your comfort zone, yet they are components of the ideal.
Some are essential, such as food, shelter, and clothing.
But the more you encompass all eleven segments, the more you will experience the benefits of a well-balanced life.
Your comfort zone is your home base from which you can set out into the world to get what you want in life.
In the next installment, we’ll delve into the place where you can discover opportunities and possibilities — the 9 components of Your Discovery Zone.
