Something occurred, circumstances not particularly relevant. What is relevant is my reaction, awareness of my mind set, what I did with feelings and outcome.

This person I know and respect, with his wisdom and experience, sent out a message to his list. It was so brilliant (to me!). I wished I had forethought to do it and immediately thought, "Why can't I do that?". An instant feeling of jealousy arose. I'm not proud to admit it! I'm not jealous type. Those of you who know me personally could attest to that. These feelings completely caught me off guard. I am, however, very proud of process I put myself through to work it out.

Because feeling of jealousy was quite foreign to me, it was rather easy to instantly acknowledge feeling was not me, rather I was a person experiencing feeling. This enabled me to allow it to run its course.

This involves sitting with feeling and all its discomfort. Oh, yeah, it was uncomfortable. Did not want to be feeling what I was feeling. I kept saying to myself, "This isn't me, this isn't me..." It did make me wonder what it was all about, though. Rather than block it out and ignore it, I decided to discover what it meant to me and my current situation. So I sat with it. Treated it like a new friend. Well, you know what I mean. Not chummy chummy, but a new acquaintance.

Eventually, after allowing it to turn, toss in my head, allowing it to just be there (and this comes with KNOWING without a doubt that all these feelings which come up serve as a purpose to our higher selves), a truth was revealed.

The self-development market is inundated with tips, techniques and treasures on visualizing your success. Leaders in this field encourage us to picture a successful outcome to a performance, sales presentation , or difficult situation. They encourage us to feel success, see it clearly in our minds, over and over and over. This creates a comfort zone, a known reference point. When actual situation arises, one effortlessly steps into comfort zone, and voila! you are prepared to carry out your mission.

There is a time and purpose for this technique. It's also important to not rely on it entirely. Consider for a moment, benefits of stepping away from this comfort zone. What?! Isn't comfort whole point? Well, yes and no. Comfort with a situation allows you to execute a task with relative ease, with little thinking of situation on your part. You've made task into an automatic response to a situation. There is a risk involved, however, in that automation and it's called complacency.

Complacency is defined as "A feeling of contentment or self-satisfaction, especially when coupled with an unawareness of danger, trouble, or controversy." - The American Heritage® Dictionary of English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.

We become complacent when we are overly comfortable with a process, situation or even lifestyle. You may believe whole point of life is to seek comfort. It's not. It's to grow. You know, life? To live? Comfort is a settling in. To continue in growth is to inject a little dis-comfort into one's life. Move out of your comfort zone. Sound scary? All more reason to do it.