The 28 Day Challenge

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Day 12 - Step outside your comfort zone today

Most of us do the same things day in day out, which becomes our comfort zone. Today go and do a familiar task in a completely different way. Drive to work along a different route. Try a different place to eat at lunch time. Watch a program on TV tha you would never watch. Read a magazine you would never buy.

I made one very minor change but its effects were surprising. I swim every morning and for at least two years I start from one end of the pool counting as i go - so i have now come to identify one direction with an odd number and the other direction as even. I thought I'd reverse this routine as a way of stepping outside my comfort zone.

Day 12 - Step outside your comfort zone today
1	How did you feel?	Not so much uncomfortable as alert. I was unable to switch off in quite the same way.
2	In what way did you find the challenge useful? Remember even if the challenge was negative this is an excellent learning for yourself.	It seemed to clear the well worn pattern and I had to think from scratch, in a way. I couldn't rely on automatic pilot to do the job and so I had to think through the process as if for the first time.
3	What did you gain from the experience?	A sense that doing things in a different way can offer new ways of thinking about it - a new perspective on something that's seemingly written in stone.
4	What discoveries did you make about yourself?	Although this is only one example of change, I did enjoy doing a familiar thing in a different way, and maybe where I'm controlling the type of change, I can quite enjoy playing with it.
3	Would you do it again?	Yes, I intend to reverse my swim directions on a random basis, depending on whim. I'll also experiment with other routines.