I expand my circle of discomfort slowly...

[Note: this post was originally published on Substack September 3, 2024] 

...to allow myself to grow into it a little bit at a time

Part 9 of 10 in the series, “How do I launch a business while on my burnout recovery journey?”

It may seem crazy to launch a business after going through burnout. Where does all the energy come from? How do you manage the stress? How do you keep going? This is post #9 of a 10-part series.

As a burnout survivor in recovery, I have had to re-discover what I can tolerate, what I can’t, and where that boundary is. This means moving slowly and purposefully into that area on the edge of discomfort where we learn the most. 

This is a concept known as The Learning Zone (references listed at the end of this post). It’s a popular education theory, and you may recognize the illustration above. There are a couple of models of it out on the Internet. This is the one that resonates most with me.

The basic premise is that we have our comfort zone, where we know things will work as expected, where we don’t have to worry about things not going as expected, or at least we know how to recover if they do go awry. It’s a cozy place, but a place where there is almost no learning.

Learning is all about exploring with curiosity into the unknown. Not so far that you feel out of your depths and out of control, but just enough so that you can maintain your curiosity. Creating scaffolding that attaches our new learning to our comfort zone allows us to gradually expand our comfort zone, and thus, our learning zone. [There are also overlaps with Carol Dweck’s growth mindset work, so if some of this sounds familiar, it’s very possible you’ve seen it in that context.]

Our learning zone differs by situation and every person has different experiences that help them determine their own comfort and learning zones. If we go, or are pushed, too far, then we wind up in the panic zone. We feel stressed, out of control, and overwhelmed.

It honestly reminds me of what a lot of my burnout felt like. It was almost like the stress and overwhelm I was experiencing in burnout shrank my comfort and learning zones so much that almost everything was now in my panic zone.

While the graphic shows very clear boundary lines, in real life, these boundaries are often blurred, so that we can’t see where one zone ends and another begins. That’s part of why it can be hard to know where our own zones are for any given situation and nearly impossible to guess where someone else’s zones may shift.

When I started my healing journey, I had to relearn how to manage my stress and overwhelm so that I could slowly adjust the boundaries of my comfort and learning zones outward again. All of this learning requires stepping back into the unknown, except this time at my own pace, and going only as far as I felt safe to go, then coming back to my comfort zone.

Working on burnout recovery, we have to explore most aspects of our lives over again. Figuring out where my learning zone was in post-burnout recovery has been a lot of my work over the last couple of years, but it’s also a huge part of my new resilience. It hasn’t been easy, but it’s been necessary for me to be able to grow, and eventually, thrive in this recovery phase, and it’s still an ongoing process.

It’s all part of being a lifelong learner and staying in recovery from burnout.

Reference 1: The Learning Zone Model blog post (not an endorsement of this company’s product, simply a good blog post and video about the Learning Zone model)

Reference 2: The Learning Zone Model, social pedagogy article

Reference 3: Growth Mindset (not an endorsement of this company’s product, simply a good blog post and video about growth mindset)