Stepping Outside Your Comfort Zone: Trying a Thing in Spain

What my first few days in Spain reminded me about discomfort, reflection, and shrinking toolboxes

Four days ago, I arrived in Spain.

Which means that for the past four days, almost everything I normally rely on to move through the world—language, routines, small social cues—has stopped working the way I expect.

Originally, the plan was much simpler: get out of Minnesota in February.

I’m 51 years old, and I’ve spent enough winters here to know that by mid-February my emotional stability is hanging on by a thread. Dark. Cold. Gray. The kind of stretch that makes the entire month feel like one long version of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

So when the opportunity came to leave for a while, I took it.

But the trip didn’t start as a solo adventure.

The plan was to bring my youngest son with me.

He graduated last year and is taking a gap year while he figures out what comes next. Like many people standing at that threshold, he’s navigating the mix of possibility, pressure, and uncertainty that comes with trying to decide who you’re going to be.

My thought was simple: start with a smaller leap.

Instead of jumping straight from home into a full study-abroad program in a foreign country with unfamiliar rules, unfamiliar people, and unfamiliar expectations, we would go together. Four weeks in Toledo, Spain—the city where I studied when I was his age.

It felt like a perfect full-circle moment.

But life does what life does.

He got a job. He started thinking seriously about building momentum in his life. Eventually he decided that stepping away for an entire month didn’t feel right to him.

At my age, I can see the fallacy in that thinking. A month abroad would barely register in the span of a lifetime. But the journey he’s on right now is his, not mine.

So we canceled his ticket.

And I came anyway.

Being Somewhere New

I’ve only been here a few days, but something has already become very clear.

Being somewhere unfamiliar forces you back into your body.

Everything that usually helps me move through the world smoothly—language, routines, social cues, even simple things like paying for a coffee—suddenly requires attention.

My Spanish still exists somewhere in my brain, but it’s buried under years of disuse. The words come back slowly. And the Spaniards, it turns out, talk very fast.

The result is that my usual toolbox gets smaller very quickly.

And I’m realizing how familiar that feeling is.

When I don’t fully understand what’s happening around me, my instinct is the same one I see in workshop participants all the time: hide a little. Stay quiet. Avoid the interaction.

But the only way forward is the opposite.

Try the thing.
Speak the language.
Risk getting it wrong.

In other words: practice being uncomfortable.

A Small Experiment

So here I am, in Spain, trying a thing.

I bought a journal. (Anyone who knows me well will appreciate how unusual that is.)

But something about this moment—this time, this quiet—made it feel like the right tool.

Already a few thoughts have surfaced that I’m fairly certain would not have appeared if I hadn’t slowed down long enough to write them down.

I’m a writer, usually about ideas and work and systems. Not so much about myself.

Still, I’m being reminded that reflection works the same way conflict work does: there isn’t a final destination. Just layers. Stops and starts. Moments when we dig a little deeper because something new needs our attention.

For Now

For now, though, I’m here.

In Spain.

Trying new things, getting lost occasionally, remembering Spanish words slowly, and writing in a journal I never expected to own.

It turns out that sometimes stepping out of your routine—whether by design or by accident—creates space for reflection you didn’t know you needed.

And right now, that feels like exactly the right place to be.

Maybe the most surprising thing about stepping outside your routine is how quickly you remember parts of yourself you hadn’t realized were missing.