If you are like most individuals, you revel in the ease and relaxation that comes with feeling comfortable at work. Having confidence in your ability to perform a job well provides feelings of satisfaction and security. What’s more, stress remains at a minimum when you are safely ensconced inside your comfort zone.

Despite these undeniable benefits, there’s also a downside to operating within the constraints of comfort — regardless of the real or perceived environmental controls that mindset affords. Lingering in a psychological state of contentment not only can — but most likely will — inhibit your ability to grow and realize your full potential, both as a business professional and organizationally.

The true nature of business is always evolving and demands flexibility and adaptability to achieve and sustain success in a global marketplace. No type of organization or industry is immune to change, which can present with extreme and unwelcome regularity. Although fluidity ushers in the unforeseen that, in turn, can prompt fear and anxiety, there are a myriad of reasons to embrace the associated discomfort.

Even if the unease you are feeling as a business leader is spurred by something other than an unsolicited or unexpected shift, the upside is its potential to advance your leadership prowess. Sure, stepping outside your comfort zone and facing a challenge can be inherently onerous — even terrifying — but with it comes the promise of leveraging untapped potential.

Stress spurs success

Whether you take the step on your own or find yourself pushed outside your comfort zone, professional growth inevitably follows. One study by the University of California, Berkeley found that performance is actually enhanced as stress increases. The research revealed that some amounts of acute, short-lived, not chronic, stress “primes the brain for improved performance” and can “push you just to the level of optimal alertness, behavioral and cognitive performance.”

Successful leaders know this to be true, as they regularly thrust themselves outside their comfort zones to increase their situational performance, enhance their leadership ability, and boost self-confidence. Fresh challenges are an extreme source of motivation. They get the proverbial juices flowing and tap into foundational characteristics such as self-reliance and optimism.

Relative to said juices, corporate anthropologist Andi Simon, founder of Simon Associates Management Consultants, says, “If you are doing something new, you are exploring something that others are hiding from.” She says that to maximize performance, one must “create anxiety—a space where stress levels are higher than normal.”

Comfort zones conceal

Stepping outside your comfort zone is indubitably awkward, but you must forge ahead. It is there, within the angst, that you will find new means of leadership proficiency.

Of course, it cannot be expected that you will perform to perfection as you traverse outside of your safety zone. When you are in unfamiliar territory rife with unpracticed and unproven terrain, those distressing missteps or stumbles will serve you by furthering your knowledge and aptitude. For every uneasy moment, your hidden leadership potential is rising closer to the surface.

Toward this end, Ben Aston, founder of TheDigitalProjectManager.com, cites research supporting the notion that stability impedes growth potential. “A study from Yale’s neuroscience team found that uncertainty is the trigger switch for your brain to learn quickly,” he says. “This means that unstable environments, while stressful, are essential for your brain to reach its full potential in the shortest span of time possible. Stagnation in the comfort zone inhibits you from achieving your best self.”

Is achieving one’s “best self” inexorably tied to overcoming distress or hardship? Drawing on William Arthur Ward’s famed quote that “Adversity causes some men to break; others to break records,” FASTSIGNS International’s CEO, Catherine Monson, asserts that the strongest leaders did not become great by staying in their comfort zone.

“People deal with challenges differently, but the key is to rise above,” she says. “Resiliency and stress are like muscles — the more we work them, the stronger they will be. When you leave your comfort zone, you test your resiliency and stress boundaries. The more often you do it, the better you’re able to handle the challenges that come with running a business.”

“Pressure makes diamonds,” says Kent Yoshimura, cofounder and CEO of Neuro.

Complacency kills

If you’ve ever enjoyed a beach vacation, you likely know that swimming amid the tide can be demanding, but worthwhile for optimum fitness. Swimming against a tide is far more difficult and sometimes scary, though wholly required in order to safely reach the shore and survive. Treading water, on the other hand, is safe and easy, keeping you afloat and alive but accomplishing little in the way of health benefits — or sufficiently navigating you out of a dangerous situation. Staying in your comfort zone for lengthy periods of time is similar. It’s safe and easy, but with less benefit than could otherwise be realized. Or, perhaps your downfall altogether. At best, it is opportunity loss. As you contentedly tread in your safe place, you are not getting better, learning, developing, or otherwise evolving in your career.

“Complacency leads to stagnation,” warns James Brown, CEO of Smart Communications. “The best way to combat this is to constantly be willing to push ourselves, our businesses, and our colleagues to explore the unfamiliar. Truly groundbreaking ideas rarely come from status-quo thinking. Embracing, rather than fearing, the unknown forces us to actively think creatively, instead of simply letting creativity come to us, and this leads to new perspectives.”

Once you embrace the unnervingly unfamiliar, you open yourself up to the possibility of accomplishing more than you ever dreamed possible. Indeed, the greatest upside of unease is its potential to be a profound and positive leadership growth moment that propels both your business and personal success.