We originally developed the Comfort Zone Model to understand horses, but it applies to human behavior too and can help us to understand ourselves and others.
The “Oh shit I’m dead zone”. No thinking takes place in what I call the Oh Shit zone – only reactions. That’s the neural pathways in the brain that you’ve heard me talking about. They were formed as ways to cope when we were under stress, usually as small children.
These neural pathways produce automatic reactions to similar circumstances that act as the trigger. Those automatic reactions can be useful to us, or they can be downright damaging to ourselves or others or even dangerous to ourselves or others – depending on the circumstances.
This is important – these are automatic reactions in the oh shit zone. There is no control over them – EXCEPT as a contrast that makes us think “Far out, I don’t want to go THERE again!” and decide that we want to behave or react differently.
I don’t like to say always or never, because sooner or later some exception jumps up and bites you on the bum and God knows I don’t know everything! 🙂 But when we want our own or someone else’s automatic behavior or reactions to be different, in my experience, the Comfort Zone – in fact the Deep Comfort Zone – is the only place to achieve that easily.
When it comes to influencing someone else’s oh shit zone behavior and reactions – we’ve already talked about the co-creation possibilities in the first week of the clinic. If you try and create FOR them, that is, doing stuff TO them, judging what they want from your point of view instead of theirs, you’re setting yourself up for struggle and heartbreak. You can only create WITH them.
Outside of co-creation, the most powerful way to influence someone else’s desire for change, is to BE the change that you want them to be and hold the energy of the paradox for them, from that angle.
Have a think about how you might do that. ONE way… 🙂 ONE way is think about your or someone else’s behavior or auto pilot reactions that you think are a “problem” , allow yourself to notice in your body everything that you feel about that, with a willingness to understand what’s BEHIND these behaviors and auto pilot reactions, knowing that everything you feel is unlikely to be all yours – and keep peeling away any layers that might exist until you find the energy, the expansive sense of rightness, that is at the heart of the paradox.
The “Not Too Sure Zone.” You’ll hear in the video below as I’m talking about horses, that longer than two minutes in the Not Too Sure Zone, too often, can produce chronic low grade stress in a horse. I have no idea how long and how often people have to be in the Not Too Sure Zone, to produce the same chronic low grade stress and its consequent habits and reactions, but it IS clear that people experience it similarly.
The Comfort Zone. I’ve heard it said that you have to step out of your comfort zone to achieve anything positive.
That has sooo… not been my experience.
I’ve found a place in the Comfort Zone where learning new things is exciting and feels good. In fact, it’s been my own personal experience and observation of others, that the profound changes I talked about above, can be and are made in the Comfort Zone.
Our paradox again.
I wrote up a big example of the paradox at work in the Comfort Zone Model and I’ve just deleted it, because I don’t want to get in the way of you seeing those patterns of Comfort Zone, Not Too Sure Zone and Oh Shit Zone, in your own reactions and your own life and in your loved ones, your clients and patients AND perhaps even more importantly, in the people you have a problem with. Just one reminder… the energy at the heart of the paradox, the energy which has infinite possibilities within it, is to be found in the RIGHTNESS behind the WRONGNESS and when you think about it – that’s the heart of the Comfort Zone itself – hey?
Here’s a video that I made of the Comfort Zone Model as applied to horses – have a think about how the paradox might apply here… 
There’s a bit of a blurb about the application of this to horses and a written version of the video below.
Troubleshooting
If you have trouble playing the video on my website, click here and watch it on Youtube instead.
The Comfort Zone and its relationship to Feel
It’s difficult to HAVE Feel without paying attention to you and your horse’s Comfort Zone.
You’ll be hearing a lot about the metaphor of the loud vacuum cleaner sound, drowning out the noise of the telephone ringing. The tension of the Not Too Sure Zone for too long and the mindless fear reactions of the Oh Shit Zone are the vacuum cleaner going so loud that you can’t hear the phone ringing. Either you and / or your horse being in the Not Too Sure Zone for too long or in the Oh Shit Zone regularly, risks drowning out the sensitivity of your Feel. Makes sense?
Start by observing and noticing the Comfort Zone Model in everything that you do with your horse. What zone are they in? How can you support them back to their Comfort Zone? We’ve got lessons coming later that will have you thinking more about HOW you can do that with Feel and more about WHY you want to be doing that too…
Written Version of the Video
The most important job you will have with your horse from now on, is to notice when your horse is afraid AND TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT to help your horse to feel safe and because of the way you feel your connection to your horse, your own feelings of safety will depend on it.
It doesn’t matter that you don’t understand how they could be afraid of this thing, it doesn’t matter if you think their fear is irrational – it only matters that you do whatever action it takes to help them feel safe.
Here’s a diagram of the Comfort Zone Model that will help you to understand how to do that. I got this from a gifted Tasmanian horseman called Philip Nye.
Towards the centre of the circle is the comfort zone. The comfort zone is where your horse feels comfortable and relaxed – where everything is familiar and feels good and learning takes place easily in the comfort zone.
This narrow band outside the comfort zone is what we call the Not Too Sure Zone. In the Not Too Sure Zone, your horse feels a bit of tension, even a slight anxiety.
The oh shit I’m dead zone, from now on known as the Oh Shit Zone, kind of speaks for itself. I think every horse rider knows this feeling. It’s a place where our horse cannot think, they can only react with survival reactions many of which are not useful to us as riders and some of which are downright dangerous.
Spending too much time in the tension of the Not Too Sure and flipping out far too often into the fear reactions of the Oh Shit Zones is the reason that so many people think that horses are dumb creatures of routine and habit – when in fact they are amazing, thinking, responsive, co-operative beings when they are not afraid.
Us humans aren’t too smart in our Oh Shit Zones either!
Phil used to say that working mostly in the Comfort Zone and spending no longer than two minutes in the Not Too Sure Zone was a good learning program, but he is a seriously gifted horseman.
If you have a happy relaxed horse learning something new, then no longer than two minutes in the Not Too Sure Zone can work. LONGER than two minutes in the Not Too Sure Zone is a no no. Longer than 2 minutes in the Not Too Sure Zone and we are in danger of creating a HABIT of our horse feeling tense and anxious – even in a relatively relaxed happy horse.
In fact, because nobody ever told us this stuff, it’s a sad fact that MOST horses already have the habit of feeling tense and anxious in many situations that are actually routine in their lives. And it happened because they spent way too long in their Not Too Sure Zone. This chronic tension not only gets in the way of their performance, it adversely affects their ability to carry their bodies freely, causes muscle and joint problems and eventually adversely affects their health.
We can actually RELEASE old tensions from even chronically scared horses, by understanding this model, listening to them in all the ways that I talked about in the Key to the Kingdom of Horses and working their Comfort Zone with connection and sensitivity of Feel. And we’re going to talk more about how to do that in the next lesson.
The practical application of this Comfort Zone Model is that EVERY TIME YOU NOTICE YOUR HORSE IS AFRAID, YOU DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO HELP THEM FIND A COMFORT ZONE AGAIN – ideally in seconds.
You back off, slow down, take the pressure off, change what you are doing, get off, turn around and go back to the paddock, to the field or the barn, go back towards their horse friend – whatever it is that you have to do to help them find a Comfort Zone again.
When your horse feels OK, you can stop there and wait for The Chew – that’s the validation that I talked about in the First Key – that signal of shared communication.
When you take this action EVERY TIME YOUR HORSE IS AFRAID, then the Comfort Zone will get bigger and bigger until it covers everything that you want to do with your horse.
And it gets much, much faster to put new things into the Comfort Zone as you go along and it is sooo worth it.
I apply the Comfort Zone Model to everything that I do with horses – all the time – so that relaxation and thinking and curiosity and learning easily becomes the normal thing for my horse to experience. And I take whatever time it takes for that to happen.
And believe me, once you and your horse get the hang of working like this it is sooo much faster to learn new things with your horse’s active co-operation.
It’s absolutely delicious to have your horse’s active co-operation in learning new things. It’s a very special experience.
Today’s photo:The cartoons in this clip are by the very talented cartoonist Kim Wong, who spent some time here with us as a WOOF’er a few years ago.