What is Your Limit??

By: Jason Marcle

I am currently on a work trip to St. Petersburg Florida, and a few things I have seen and heard has made me ask myself what is my limit? Everything has a limit of some kind. A motor vehicle will have a limit on how fast it can go, an airplane has a limit on how high it can fly, trains have a limit on how much weight they can pull.  I have a lot of limitations. I can only lift a certain amount of weight, I can only run a certain amount of distance, I am limited to what I have available to me. 

Limits help keep us safe most of the time. We don’t need to be traveling down the interstate at a speed of 120mph. That is why there are speed limits in place. We have a limit on the amount of money we can charge on a credit card to help us from going too far into debt. We are limited to what our bodies can handle.  While limits help protect us most of the time, there is a different type of limit I want to talk about. A limit that we can sometimes set for ourselves without knowing.

We all have a limit to where we have had enough and can’t take anything else.  Maybe you are doing everything you can possibly do at work, and they keep adding new things to you? Sometimes our mental health creates internal limitations, and we don’t even realize it. We all have a comfort zone of some kind. Nobody likes to get out of their comfort zone.  When I get out of my comfort zone, I get nervous and anxious.  If I am in a crowded area, I get anxious.  If someone is talking nonstop to me and I can’t get a word in, I get anxious.  I guess I have some internal limits I have never thought about.  During one of my meetings, in St. Petersburg, I head a man speak named “D.Y.”.  He said something that piqued my interest. He said we need to expand our comfort zone to help ease our anxieties.  Expand my comfort zone? I have never thought about it that way.  How do we expand our comfort zones?

We expand our comfort zones by removing limits we have set for ourselves. We need to go after that dream job instead of saying, “I can’t ever do that”. We can go back to school and expand our knowledge so we can get our dream job and still be in our comfort zone.  For me, going to college is past my limit. I have always felt like I wasn’t smart enough to try college. That is why I went the vocational route and got certified as an electronic technician. I’m not exactly sure what my dream job really looks like. I have been trying to figure that out for some time now.  But the point is, we don’t have to limit ourselves. We need to do right the opposite.

I limit myself in many different ways that isn’t good for my mental health. I mentioned earlier that at the time of this writing, I am at the beach. I am very ashamed and embarrassed about my weight, so I don’t feel comfortable at all with a setting where I take off my shirt.  I keep a shirt on in the summer. I will not swim in a pool where there are strangers. That is a limit I have put on myself without realizing it. I feel like I have been laughed at my entire life because I have never had the muscular jock body. I have never been able to run a mile in under 10 minutes.  Even though most of my weight is caused by some of the meds I currently take, I am still embarrassed. I don’t want people to look at me and say Ewww.  I limit myself when it comes to dancing. I have never learned how to dance. Because I have never had self confidence in any way, I never would attempt to dance. I was always afraid that it would just be something else somebody would make fun of me over.  Sometimes I am scared to just let loose and have fun. If I did that, I may do something dumb and get made fun of. I never tried out for sports due to the fact of being afraid that I wouldn’t be any good and others would make fun of me.  That’s right, I never played t-ball, baseball, football, basketball, you get the picture.

Those are bad limits I have put on myself. I have denied myself a lot of things that most have enjoyed in their life due to me limiting myself. I didn’t expand my comfort zone.  I have mentioned that I have never had the jock body. I don’t feel like I was ever found attractive by anyone while I was in middle and high school. I believe a lot of my anxieties are brought on due to the limits I set for myself in the past. To this day, I have no self-confidence. I don’t feel like there is much I do right.  I feel like a child with no direction a lot of the time.  I’m sad today because of all I have missed out on as a child. Nobody was to blame but myself. I wouldn’t expand my comfort zone.

To this day, I won’t hardly ever play any kind of sport with even adults. I am afraid of being out of shape and being made fun of. I also don’t want people looking at me and asking how did a guy like me get a wife like Amy?  I definitely married out of my comfort zone. Amy was way out of my league. That is one of the luckiest things that has ever happened to me. Never in 100 years would I have thought I would be married to Amy. She was a couple of years ahead of me in school. We didn’t talk much in school either. She was one of those I would shy away from because I knew I didn’t have a chance with her. That was another limit in my head.

I expanded my comfort zone after high school, and I asked Amy out on a date. The rest is history.  See what happened there? I have a beautiful wife and a beautiful daughter today because I expanded my comfort zone.  I expanded my limit.

Sometimes the limit is built into us.  I remember one night coming home from the hospital after spending all day with my mother before she passed. There was so much going on in my head. I was recovering from losing my father to cancer and my best friend to covid. I was reliving my fathers last week on this earth with my mother. I couldn’t process everything. I came home and Amy asked me how my mom was doing.  I said not well. She asked how I was doing. I just started laughing. I could not stop laughing for nothing. While I was laughing, tears were flowing from my eyes. I couldn’t stop laughing but yet I was crying. I was at my limit mentally. I couldn’t take or process anymore. My head shut down and I was so confused I honestly didn’t know the difference between laughing and crying.

Enough about me and my limits. What can you do to expand your limits?  You can:

1. Push through your limit and face your fear early so you don’t have regrets in the future.
2. Stop saying I can’t and ask how you can get the result you are looking for.
3. Everyday journal 5 things you like about yourself.
4. Write out a plan and stick to it no matter what tries to get in your way.
5. Don’t give into your negative thoughts. We all have them.
6. After you decide, write each step down and determine how long it will take to achieve your goal.
7. Never give up on life. Time is so precious. Please don’t waste it like I did.
8. Ask your higher power to remove your limits and to help you expand your comfort zone.

That was just a small list of things.  I am writing all this to show everyone that they are not alone. Many people have the same fears as me. Many have self confidence issues like me.  I wish I wasn’t afraid to have fun like Amy. She sings in stores. She sings loud with her windows down when she knows she can’t sing a lick.  She doesn’t care where I am the opposite. It is extremely hard for me to find something that I am good at. I feel like If I was really good at things, I would have a much better job than I have today.  I have a good job, buy my pay is mediocre for what I am in charge of.

Change is really hard for me. I like my routines. I am scared of expanding my comfort zone. I am trying to find ways to help me today.  I really hope this blog will help somebody. I hope everyone reading our blogs will take time and comment on them and share them from our website.