Photo by Jasmin Sessler on Unsplash
Perhaps you’ve heard something along these lines at times in your life. We’re told to embrace challenges and ignore discomfort if we want to reach our goals and achieve big things in our career, our health, or our wealth. I’ve skittered around this idea, appreciating it on one level, but never really going all-in.
Naturally, I think of myself as flexible, tough, and just fine with discomfort (don’t we all?). I’ve birthed and raised children. I’ve worked in physically and mentally demanding jobs. I’ve engaged in difficult conversations and worked through complex dilemmas. That said, there’s lots I’ve tried to avoid, and lots I’ve made much more difficult by expecting, or fearing, the worst.
There’s a difference between the ABILITY to be flexible and actually being comfortable with discomfort, and disruption, by nature. This year has certainly tested even the most flexible of us, and many are feeling the six month malaise of chronic crisis management. Avoiding this experience isn’t possible, but it can offer the chance to look at discomfort in new ways.
“The lust for comfort murders the passions of the soul”
~Kahlil Gibran
We’ve been conditioned to avoid discomfort
The quest to eliminate discomfort and suffering has long been part of the human experience. Centuries of engineering have succeeded in making things faster, easier, and better. We use technology to reduce effort, avoid messy conversations and promote our best selves, putting a premium on the power of positivity. We’ve made happiness and ease both the goal, and the ultimate signal of success.
Happiness doesn’t come from comfort. It comes from the ability to adapt your expectations and direct your energy in ways that create greater benefit for yourself and others in the long term. It’s built from a willingness to embrace the problems and enjoy the process along the way.
As a leader or manager - you will experience uncomfortable moments. It might be delivering difficult feedback, making a difficult decision, or making the wrong decision and working through the process to correct it. A pandemic multiplies this by ten, and adds personal stressors on top of it.
We can get more comfortable, and more confident, working through difficult and uncomfortable situations with practice and experience. Building our awareness and developing emotional effectiveness is a great way to strengthen our foundation.
In the EQ-i 2.0 model of emotional intelligence, specific skills like flexibility, optimism, reality testing and problem solving can boost your ability to approach discomfort in better ways. Increasing your awareness of what makes you uncomfortable, and why, can offer choices on how to respond and help you navigate uncomfortable situations more skillfully.
Embracing Discomfort
We know that we should “demonstrate” flexibility, but we may not feel good about it. We anticipate problems, letting worries and expectations overwhelm us, causing us to avoid or reject these situations. We’ve developed the following framework to help clients increase emotional literacy and effectiveness, and it can be helpful for building your understanding, and appreciation, of discomfort:
NOTICE - What makes you uncomfortable? Is it chaos? Uncertainty? Tough conversations? Physical conditions? Worries about your own capability?
NAME– Acknowledge the discomfort. What emotions does it bring up? What beliefs do you have about it? What assumptions are you holding on to? What fears, facts or fables?
NAVIGATE- Consider different ways of looking at the situation and re-frame your assumptions. Questions to consider: “What’s a different way to look at this?” or “what else is possible here?” Consider different responses you can choose i.e. curiosity, control, avoidance. Choose a response and experiment. Reflect on how things turned out and how your response impacted the outcome.
Managers who embrace discomfort can lead in tough situations more confidently. They engage more deeply with their team and create more clarity. They can support their team to see a tough assignment or a difficult situation as a chance to learn and grow instead of a failure or something to avoid.
Susan David Ph.D., author of Emotional Agility, says “Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.” We can handle way more fears, frustrations, and foiled plans than we ever imagine. They create experiences that add to our tool kit and even build memories to treasure.
We’re all facing different levels of discomfort. Some are facing very serious challenges right now. There’s no easy answers, but embracing discomfort as part of our human experience can help us be open to possibilities and more willing to adapt. We gain skills by working through situations instead of working around them, which can build our capability to solve our next challenges faster and better.