Social freedom exercises were something that I did to help me move out of my comfort zone on a daily basis for 30 days. For those of you who haven’t watched any of my YouTube videos, let me explain what it is and why I did it. When I attended a conference in May, one of the speakers told us to do stupid things in public to remove the fear of being judged. In my head, I told myself that I didn’t care what other people thought. Of course I said it in my head, but when I actually did an imaginary motorbike exercise (I will explain later) in front of people I realized that I cared a lot about what other people think. Basically, social freedom is an exercise that you do in public; the objective of this is to be judged by people by doing really crazy, embarrassing things. Some exercises include; doing push-ups in front of people, as you walk, for example, you start doing push-ups, the other exercise is going up to a stranger and asking a random question and picking your nose, then once they answer your question, give them the hand that you picked your nose with and say thank you without laughing. Some people will give you their hand and some will not. This made me realize how we as human beings are ‘programmed’ by society to do things. My favorite exercise is the imaginary motorbike; riding an imaginary motorbike in front of people. You can watch all these exercises below or on YouTube.

This helped me a lot to become more authentic, to move out of my comfort zone daily, to develop empathy, to do things that I’m scared of in my business and personal life, to tell the truth to myself and other people, to push myself even when I didn’t feel like it.

Of course people judged me a lot; in their eyes they saw an idiot doing stupid things in public. There was one lady that shouted and asked me what drugs I was taking. There is a saying that says don’t judge a book by its cover, yet we all still do it every single day.

I can honestly say that I developed my empathy a lot and I stopped judging people in the same way as I did before. You never know why a certain person acts in a certain way. There are a lot of things that I did in those 30 days that I was scared of. The biggest achievement for me was calling my step-father after 14 years of not speaking to him. I was scared of calling him and thanking him for everything that he did for me, so I used the 5 second rule and I called him. We had a pleasant conversation. I said to a couple of clients what I truly believed about certain things that I was scared of saying before. I realized that fear is and was holding me back a lot in my life. Today, I’m thirsty for the truth like a man in the middle of the desert who is thirsty for water.

The other thing that I learned from social freedom is about being alive, about being in the moment today. I never felt so alive in my life. I felt excited every single day. I revised a lot of things in my life and my business; what matters most to me, my values, my purpose in life – and of course I realized that being in our comfort zone doesn’t help us at all. After 3 weeks of doing social freedom, I realized that I wasn’t scared any more to do certain exercises because I got used to them; as anything in life, the beginning is always hard but once we do something a lot of times it becomes easy. The beginning is always hard. There were days that I didn’t feel like doing social freedom and I created different excuses; it’s too hot, it’s too cold, I don’t have time, I don’t feel like it and on and on and on. That’s because our brain wants to be comfortable, the chimp (as I call the emotional part of the brain) wants to feel safe and comfortable so he doesn’t think. I can’t say it was easy but it was very rewarding after doing every exercise. I always told myself that I would thank myself after doing the exercise and I would learn something new. Every day I pushed myself to go beyond my comfort zone.

Today, I’m looking for new ways to push myself and to move out of my comfort zone. I want to create a habit every day to make myself do things that I’m scared of so I can feel alive and live a passionate and fulfilled life. Moving out of our comfort zone really gives our life a meaning. There are a lot of quotes on Instagram about comfort zones but  we have to ask ourselves; what do we really do every day to push ourselves out of our comfort zone? Once we look in the mirror and ask ourselves this question, I think we will start doing things that we are scared of.