Do You Challenge Yourself?

I’ll be the first one to admit I live in a zone of comfort. Comfort has driven most of my life decisions, leading me to where I am today. I like the familiar, I like when things are easy, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But I very rarely challenge myself.

Allllllll the way back in 2011 (yupp, I’ve been out of high school for 10 years) I applied to colleges out of state, mostly in North Carolina. Then I applied to 2 safety schools in my home state of NJ because my mom pushed me to. I wanted to go to school out of state because I had a boyfriend at the time who said he’d come with me. I got into all the schools I applied to, but still ended up going to school in NJ.

Why? Because it was comfortable. I had family nearby, it wasn’t too far from home, and my boyfriend ended up living in NYC so I wanted to stay close to him.

I chose my major based off of comfort, it’s just what I knew how to do. And after I graduated, I took roles in social media/writing because I felt it came easy to me. Sure, there are certain aspects that I wasn’t great at – for instance, I hated pitching press releases to the media. But in my career, I don’t feel like I’ve ever faced anything that I would say was generally hard, maybe so with coworker situations rather than actual skills needed.

There have been times I challenged myself. I pushed for a promotion, moved out of state. Even getting back into finding a job after getting laid off was mentally taxing. But when I was writing this post about what I would do if I didn’t work in communications, I thought a lot about if I would ever actually change career paths.

That just sounds SO hard. I’ve found a level of comfort in my career and to go back to school and completely switch would be the biggest challenge I’ve faced in my whole life I think. Being in school is hard, getting into a studying mindset to learn completely new things and concepts is hard. Right now, I’m building all my knowledge on top of things I already know. I already have the groundwork laid.

To start over seems so scary, and it makes me question whether I should be challenging myself more in life.