Your Comfort Zone (Part 2)

Do you find yourself seeking out people very similar to you to surround yourself with? Do you feel like some people are "your" sort of person and some are not? Have you ever ending up feeling that you were wrong in this assumption?

It's a fine, knowing when we are being judgemental or playing it safe and when we're being genuinely sensible to remove people from our vicinity if they're rude, selfish, toxic or have such different values to us that being around them is extremely stressful. But do we sometimes put up unnecessary boundaries because some people put us out of our comfort zone? Like whenever Louis Theroux goes to meet people on the extremes of some culture or group, he usually finds some unexpected kindness or humanity about them.

I followed this "people like me" logic for a while with a particular yoga teacher who I respected for his knowledge and approach on some things but who I could never really make my mind up about. (You've got to be pretty careful with yoga teachers - there are some serious power, authority and ego issues on show in the kind of intense relationships that can develop between a teacher and a devoted student.)

After a while I realised I felt uncomfortable about this person because he wasn't in my favoured category of a "warm" person. He was distant to an extent, sometimes awkward and maybe a bit eccentric, and didn't go to lengths to make me feel particularly "liked". Perhaps you could even say he wasn't in the least bit interested in making me feel warm and fuzzy or was even interested in what happened when he actively didn't make people feel like this. When I realised that it seemed sort of weird that I would expect it was someone's job to make me feel extremely comfortable.

If people are described as "warm" it means they're going to some lengths to make everyone feel welcomed and happy. It can be very tiring to be warm. Does anyone owe this to us? Don't get me wrong, I love warm people: my parents are both in this category and I am too, perhaps why I value it and seek it out and feel so comfortable around those people.

Overall it benefits me to be around people like this, but it also feeds my people-pleasing tendencies - I want to be liked and these people expend their energy on making me feel like I am liked. I noticed recently how when I meet a new person, I find it hard not to push myself forward and try to be particularly funny or interesting so they like me. Any new person, not even one I'm particularly invested in: I mean, how insecure is that?

Anyway the end of the story: this person was actually a good person, caring and thoughtful if not unconventional, interested in kindly pushing people out of their comfort zones in order to allow them to grow. I think there is probably a whole category of these yoga teachers. It was a good reminder to me to keep a more open mind, to remember that someone who I didn't feel totally coddled by could actually teach me something.