Why Getting Out Of Your Comfort Zone is the BEST Thing You Can Do For Yourself in 2013

This is a guest post by Ariel Hyatt of CyberPR. Ariel is founder of CyberPR, a New York based digital PR firm that not only helps but also educates artists. 

Imagine if you could measure the likelihood of your financial and personal success by measuring your comfort zone?

I had a taste of the medicine that all the artists must swallow on a consistent basis this holiday season. I decided to give away my book Music Success in 9 Weeks in exchange for e-mail addresses using NoiseTrade. When I committed to doing it, I was uncomfortable.

I collected 1,100 e-mail addresses to add to my list. If I work hard to engage, captivate and earn trust in the long run it will be a good.

However in the short run it really hurt.

I usually sell my e-books for $27.99 – over 1,100 people downloaded it and the “suggested donations” I received equaled a measly $79.00. If I had charged my normal retail I would have made $30,789.

That’s a lot of money lost.  Really uncomfortable.

But the truth is, a very small percentage of the artists that downloaded the book would not have paid $27.99, because they don’t know me and I haven’t earned their trust.

It is unfair that we have to give away our intellectual property and life’s work as a “calling card” in order to build up trust and engagement hopefully a sale in the future. Especially since earning that sale takes a Herculean amount of work and effort and time and marketing knowledge and social media savvy…. Something most musicians I know don’t have the patience to learn.

They don’t want to learn it because it’s completely out of their comfort zone and it’s much easier to just play your music.

I’ve been thinking a lot about comfort zones lately because I’m currently in the middle of a crowd funding campaign, which is confronting and makes me so uncomfortable that it took me almost a year to get up the guts to launch it.

At this point I’m at 46% and I don’t know if I will make my goal, but I do know this:

It’s the best risk I’ve ever taken.

While I was putting all the pieces of my crowd funding campaign together and freaking out about whether or not I would have the guts to go ahead and do it, I came across this fabulous 5 minute video by my colleague and friend Marcus Taylor who is an entrepreneur, thought leader and runs The Musicians Guide UK.

It starts like this: If you have never done anything that made you nervous where would you be right now?

1. “If you want something you don’t already have, you have to do something you haven’t already done.”
2. “We all have this comfort zone which determines what we believe we can and can’t do and if you are not being proactive in pushing your boundaries and getting outside of your comfort zone, you are effectively SURRENDERING all of the possibilities that exist outside of your comfort zone.”
3. “There is correlation between how much we get out of our comfort zone and how much money we earn!”

What are you looking for?