Around Summer/Autumn 2013 I was stuck in a rut. My weekly routine would be something like the following: cycle to work slightly later than planned, work, cycle home from work later than planned (and a lot later than then girlfriend would like), eat one of the 3 or 4 meals I can make, crash and watch tv probably breaking bad, rinse repeat for 5 days. Meet friends for coffee on saturday morning then usually waste the afternoon doing something pretty unproductive and eat to much in the evening. Sunday would be a mix of tidying and trying to stay away from the hamster that we lived with and I was allergic to.
I started to realise that I needed to be doing something other than working (programming) and learning about programming in my spare time. My friends and I had been to and enjoyed jumping off a pontoon and that put the idea of learning to (springboard) dive in my head. I mentioned being interested to my friends and they kindly got me a set of lessons for my birthday. Having weekly diving lessons were the start for me of routinely being forced leaving my comfort zone.
The great thing I found about learning to dive is that learning as an adult puts you into a situation that is extremely different to most peoples day to day life and you are always very close to making a mistake and hurting yourself. Not hurting yourself severly but enough that you can be really crapping yourself before you try something new. What is really good is that as you get better the new things that you are trying to do are higher and harder so being scared about what your are trying never really goes away (or at least for the 18+ months I have been doing it so far that has been the case). This means that you can be thourghly out of your comfort zone for anywhere between 30mins and an hour and half several times per week.
There are a lot of articles on the benefits of leaving your comfort zone then a little bit on how to do it I find they tend to fall into one of two camps nicey-nicey eg. why not try walking a different route to work? and unrealistcaly extreme for most eg. I spoke at TED. I think they often ignore that your "comfort zone" is really multiple different areas with which you have a individual level of comfort and that the areas you would probably benefit most from streaching (if not all) are the ones you are still least comfortable with.
My belief is that if you really want to grow as a person and to stretch your comfort zones the best way to do so is to make leaving your comfort zone part of your routine. I think there are few key elements to having that be successful.
So below I have listed a bunch of areas that I can think of that constitute different comfort zones that most people have and some activities you can do that will meet the criterea above.
I really struggle here.
Probably the easiest to leave in a small way but the hardest in a substantial way. A small step you could do is simply to try eating new foreign foods with some regularity. Listen to another cultures music or go on holiday somewhere that is not very touristy. However to make a significant dent in this area the most simple thing would be to learn a new language however that does require a very large time commitment. Or move to another country which would be an extremely large life change for most people and probably impractical.
One thing to be aware of is that the more interesting things that you do the more you might find it difficult to talk/relate to other people. Generally the best converstions with others are about something that you have in common but have different perspectives around. These new things you have tried and probably found fascinating and want to talk are probably not something you have in common and if that is the case then when you start to see that blank look on the other persons face change the topic of converstion as they really probably don't give a shit.