Happy Friday, everybody! It's the weekend already!

I hope you're up to something exciting this weekend.

Well, actually that's a lie. What I hope is that you have the sort of weekend that you want.

That might be exciting? It might be really quiet.

We don't all need to be jumping out of aeroplanes every weekend in order for life to feel good, do we?

Much as I quite like the idea of stretching my comfort zone, not everybody does.

For some folk, just moving to a different desk at work is overwhelming, let alone being forced to change jobs.

But it's no secret that, generally speaking, stretching our comfort zone to include more situations

is a good idea.

But it's called a comfort zone for a reason, isn't it?

It's comfortable there. But there comes a time when we've got

to face our anxiety and slowly take steps to stretch our comfort zone out more and more.

And I'd like to share with you a simple technique to help people with that today. And it helps by thinking of our comfort zone in a slightly

different way. Most of the time we think about our comfort zone as being a specific space

and that if we're anxious, then our comfort zone is too small, like it's just our house

or even just our bedroom. And in order to be less

anxious, we need to make our comfort zone bigger. But maybe you can think of your comfort zone

as being something that you can take with you everywhere you go, like a magic hula hoop that only you can see, that you can shrink it down

and hide it in your pocket or something until you need it. This magic hula hoop that you can pull out,

put down on the floor, step into it and feel more comfortable, and magically let it move around

with you, reminding you of how to feel calm.

It's important that you recognise that most of the time what makes something comfortable or uncomfortable

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