Or the subtitle, “Get Out of Your Comfort Zone.”

I subscribe to Writer’s Digest magazine, which published a recent article entitled, “Make a New Commitment to your Writing.”  For the sake of our purposes, let’s substitute the word “Retirement” for “Writing.”  

How can the two be related?  The article’s author, Elizabeth Sims, proposes a “10-step plan” to take writing to a new level.  Her first step is “Take Leaps of Faith.”  That’s also a pretty good first step to taking retirement to a new level.  

In our retirement life-planning workshops based on our book, Your Retirement Quest, coauthor Keith Lawrence and I urge attendees to get out of their comfort zones.  Sure, by definition, that’s a comfortable place to be.  But the magic happens outside that zone.

Sims writes, “You leap, and you don’t know if your hands are going to curl around the trapeze bar or just thin air.  You’ll get either the cheers of the cxrowd and the rush of glory, or a spectacular crash.  You’ll definitely learn from the crash.”

I leaped out of my comfort zone when I decided I was going to write my first novel, design my own web sites, start a consulting business, startup a mentoring program at U City High, return to playing baseball after hip-replacement surgery…  You get the point.

What will take you out of your comfort zone?  What are your leaps of faith?