As a passionate gamer for over 20 years and full-stack developer who has needed to continually put myself out there to evolve my skills and opportunities, I‘ve seen firsthand the incredible rewards that come from moving beyond one‘s comfort zone.
Stepping outside the familiar accelerates exponential personal growth – expanding your self-confidence, competence, connections, and fulfillment. But it also often triggers self-doubt and anxiety.
In this comprehensive 2000+ word guide, I‘ll break down everything you need to know about the real meaning of "putting yourself out there", why it matters so much, and how to step beyond your boundaries in a healthy, sustainable way.
I‘ll be drawing from my own experience as a passionate gamer combined with over a decade of coaching software developers on how to put themselves out there to rapidly boost their careers.
Let‘s dive in!
Defining "Putting Yourself Out There"
To "put yourself out there" means to intentionally engage with new people, experiences, opportunities and situations that push you past your comfort zone. It requires making yourself vulnerable by exposing aspects of your true self to others.
For passionate gamers, this can look like:
- Streaming gameplay live to build an audience
- Submitting speedrun attempts to leaderboards
- Joining clans and guilds to play collaboratively
- Competing in tournaments and conventions
- Making YouTube videos and guides to teach others
- Building an online community on Discord
Stepping beyond what feels easy and familiar can feel intimidating at first. But that discomfort is essential for growth.
As entrepreneur James Clear explains regarding the importance of an openness to being bad first:
“Good is the enemy of great. By design, consistent practice makes your work mediocre at first. Mastery and greatness only come after the thousandth ‘bad‘ rep, not the first good one."
Exposing your early attempts opens the door to skill expansion.
****Before we dive into the many benefits, let‘s first talk about…
Why Putting Yourself Out There Feels Uncomfortable
Venturing outside the known triggers our brains natural avoidance of threat and uncertainty. Millions of years of evolution prioritize keeping us safe by avoiding potential harm. Your inner primal brain asks:
- Will I look stupid if I try this new game live?
- What if no one watches my channel or thinks I’m not good enough?
- Am I ready compete at this level or just embarrassing myself?
Fear of the unfamiliar is 100% normal. The key is developing strategies to skillfully move forward anyway.
Understanding why discomfort arises helps release judgment about it. Discomfort simply signals you‘re stretching rather than confirming any actual danger or inadequacy on your part. Growth depends on redefining your relationship to not knowing and uncertainty.
Let‘s look closer at why this matters so much…
The Benefits of Putting Yourself Out There
Continually seeking challenges beyond your current skill level accelerates your progress exponentially across all areas of life. Stepping outside your comfort zone by putting yourself out there has profound effects on advancing your abilities, connections, self-image, and life.
Here are 5 major benefits:
1. Unlocks Your Full Potential
Exposing yourself to regular discomfort desensitizes your fears and builds confidence in your ability to handle more. What felt intimidating last month becomes warm up to even greater challenges ahead.
It expands what you believe you’re capable of as previous limits and assumptions continually evolve.
As pioneering psychologist Abraham Maslow said on self-actualization:
“One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.”
Conquering fears builds grit and resilience to keep advancing your potential. You realize more and more how much possibility lives untapped inside you.
2. Accelerates Competency Development
Putting yourself where you’re amateur accelerates your learning curve dramatically faster than staying comfortable. It exposes precisely the areas you need to improve quickly in order to level up. It forces adaptation, revealing new nuanced techniques that then integrate as second-nature.
Jumping into a tournament scene teaches nuances far beyond hours of practice mode. Collaborating with a skilled clan puts your strategies to test incubating new ideas. Teaching others requires crystallizing half-formed concepts into concrete wisdom.
Deliberate skill-stretching in areas slightly beyond your current capability compounds expertise, unlocking access to the next echelon.
As passion gamer and peak performance coach Jonathan Roux says:
"If you’re not uncomfortable, you‘re not growing. Staying within our comfort zones leads to stagnation and boredom. But being willing to try new things and fail along the way, allows for innovation and the cultivation of new skills."
Lean into the skills, styles and games you’re amateur in. That’s where your room for greatest improvement lives. Risk unfamiliarity, reward follows.
3. Builds Community
Accepting invites, engaging online, joining clans connects you to peers and mentors supporting your growth. Putting your voice and gameplay out there draws your tribe in.
Analytics show gamers who actively network progress faster in skill and career opportunities than solo players. [1]
As sociologist Keith Ferrazzi, author of “Never Eat Alone” writes:
“All of us need people in our lives who raise our standards and help us achieve our dreams. Relationships fuel growth. No one makes it alone.”
You don‘t have to walk the path alone. Community momentum multiplies individual effort.
4. Creates Opportunity
Continually putting yourself and your work into new spaces allows networking openings you’d never find by waiting for a safe invitation that may never come.
Tournament networks open doors. Streaming and speed running draw invites to new projects. Open source mod work builds reputation for professional chances.
As visionary game developer Jonathan Blow explains:
“If you want good opportunities, you pretty much have to make them yourself.”
Rockstar designers proactively create radical game ideas years before technology and markets mature to support them. Fortune favors bold makers.
Don’t wait for external validation. Put your game out there first and let communities elevate it.
5. Fulfillment & Wonder
Stepping beyond repetitive normality injects increased exhilaration, curiosity, presence. You ride flow states longer from greater challenge immersion. Richer obstacle meaning enhances sense of adventure.
As psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi writes in “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”:
“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult or worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something we make happen.”
We feel most alive when closest to our limits. Stretch yours.
Challenges Faced by Passionate Gamers
While embracing uncertainty brings great rewards, it can also open you up to new struggles. Being aware of hurdles passionate gamers often face can normalize them.
Here are 5 core challenges:
1. Imposter Syndrome
That persistent internal voice saying you’ll never be good enough. That someday you’ll be exposed as the fraud you must surely be.
But realize nearly every pro also battles imposter syndrome at times. Building supportive community helps validate expertise. Remembering early career fumbles of even the greats helps overcome self-doubt.
2. Harassment & Toxicity
Unfortunately as a passionate female and minority gamers you’re even more likely face discrimination just for showing up as your authentic self.
while muted/blocked list should be actively used, also connect to channels uplifting Gamedev diversity like POCGIGJAM. Building empowering spaces helps overcome toxic ones.
3. Fatigue & Chronic Stress
The intensity of scaling multiple areas of unfamiliarity concurrently can accelerate adrenal fatigue, burnout or repetitive strain if without careful pacing and recovery protocols.
Be honest with your human needs. Schedule relaxation, community connection, and creativity rebooting to balance increased competitive demands.
4. Impatience & Frustration
Leveling up skills takes years. Internalizing thisTimeline prevents impatience. Reframe setbacks as necessary feedback not personal failings. Celebrate small daily progress consistency over giant leaps.
5. Loss of Old Identity
Growth asks us to shed old skins. The difficulty adjusting to larger roles brings surprisingly grief. Feeling confused, adrift or lost is part of process. New mentors and spaces support establishing expanded sense of self.
Cultivating a Growth Mindset
Sports psychology reveals difference between great athletes and also-rans is largely mental approach. Developing a “growth mindset” dramatically accelerates capability gains.
Coined by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, growth mindset believes abilities grow through practice. It embraces failures as feedback.
Conversely “fixed mindsets” assume talents are innate ceilings. This thinking sabotages motivation.
Hallmarks of growth mindset include:
Overcoming Obstacles – Setbacks are opportunities to improve strategy, not confirmation you’re inadequate. Have grit.
Effort Over Talent – Consistency compounds. Showing up daily matters more than occasional flashy wins.
Learning From Critique – Critique reveals how to improve. It educates, not defines you. Hear it constructively.
Humanizing Idols – Those you admire today also started from scratch. They still work hard daily. You can too.
Patience With Plateaus – Skill building is nonlinear. Breakthroughs follow slow gradual progress. Trust the process.
Self-Compassion – Talk to yourself as a friend, not harasser. Internal kindness calms fears allowing greater risk.
Embracing Uncertainty – The messy unknown is where growth lives. Lean in with curiosity to unlock more potential.
Cultivating a growth framework dramatically accelerates capability expansion. It also makes the discomforts of leveling up feel far more motivating than overwhelming.
Healthy Tactics For Putting Yourself Out There
While leaning into discomfort is essential, self-care balances sustainable challenge versus unhealthy adrenaline overload. Making yourself vulnerable requires pacing so risks feel enlivening rather than damaging.
Here’s 5 expert tips:
1. Progress In Gradual Steps
Attempt unfamiliar projects in iterative increments to build confidence before giant leaps.
Maybe you:
- Stream yourself practicing games first before tournaments
- Develop microgames before tackling that dream MMO
- Comment on forums before posting original strategies
- Enter local competitions before evo championship series
Let small successes bolster bigger future leap readiness. Gain positive momentum from gradualist escalation.
2. Schedule Restorative Fun
For every unfamiliar endeavor, also calendar beloved activities that recharge you like friends, music, art, nature, sports.
Discomfort followed by joy amplifies both. Fun fuels fortitude.
3. Reframe Self-Talk
Catch negative self-narratives and consciously reframe them. “I’m terrible at this” becomes “I’m still learning, let me try some new tactics.”
Words influence emotions, emotions set possibility horizons. Language mastery magnifies outcomes.
4. Request Spotter Support
Ask mentors, peers and developers you respect to support attempts both as spectators and empathetic soundboards. We all need trusted spotters sharing helpful perspective from the sidelines.
5. Analyze As Information, Not Identity
View all results non-emotionally as data revealing where to improve strategy, not defining your worthiness. All feedback contains instructive wisdom for upgrading.
Healthy vulnerability balances courage, self-care and community. Do remember though — too much safety hinders growth! Discomfort is the currency of capability expansion. Spend it wisely.
Case Study
Jourdan Black rose from obscure streamer to celebrity pro-gamer by continually putting herself into unfamiliar situations online.
Initially nervous to even use a mic, she committed to engage regularly with platforms like Discord and Twitch to expose her play and personality.
Choosing supportive communities allowed her to risk sharing and learning without harassment for who she was. Over years she earned huge followings through perseverant vulnerability.
When interviewed on keys for her success she said:
“Don’t lock yourself in a cage because you think you have to be a certain way. Your differences are strengths so let them shine brightly!”
Black still battles anxieties but has built an empowering framework and community to expand through them. She focuses on uplifting peers too.
Final Thoughts
Putting ourselves out there beyond the comfortable zone is the master key that unlocks access to our highest potentials in skill, confidence, connections and opportunities.
But without advanced mental mindsets, tactical resilience practices and supportive communities, those discomforts can sometimes overwhelm more than empower.
By beginning with small gradual steps, scheduling enjoyable rests, reframing inner dialogues, requesting spotters and analyzing non-emotionally, you balance courageous leaps forward with sustaining self-care.
While momentary setbacks are inevitable, persistency reveals greater capability and meaning waiting just past previous limits. Consistency builds the grit thriving through volatility into eventual victories.
At its heart, the true meaning of putting yourself out there is committing to lifelong self-expansion, self-expression and unlocking radical freedom starting with freedom from your own self-limiting assumptions.
Continual self-liberation through the positive stress of embracing uncertainty, speaking vulnerably, daring greatly and sometimes failing greatly remains the central path to becoming who you wish to become.
The purpose is not any single win, but the ever-unfolding journey of growth itself.