Senior Coach, Conscious Leadership Group
How we meet discomfort is one of the great questions of life, and many of the teachers who have shaped the CLG-verse have taken it up: How should we be with ourselves in difficult times?
A client recently came to me looking for a way out as he was leading his company through a reorg. In response to his team being upset about the process, he found himself avoiding the office because he was physically uncomfortable there and afraid he’d say something he couldn’t take back. He wanted to know how he could escape this discomfort, fast.
The Two Arrows Parable
I find it useful to recognize that there are two kinds of difficulty, as demonstrated most clearly by a Buddhist parable in which suffering arrives as two arrows. The first is the pain of the situation, and the second is our reaction to it. The second arrow is where we build stories, and as Byron Katie says, “When we believe in our thoughts, when we tell ourselves a story, we suffer.”
In other words, the second arrow is optional.
My client was convinced his team’s response shouldn’t be the way it was, so he focused on correcting it. In meeting after meeting, he made the case for the reorg, walking the team through the rationale and urging them to focus on the opportunity instead of what they had lost. He believed that if he could just get his team to see the situation as he did, the pain would dissolve, but it didn’t. It stayed because it had nowhere else to go.
Looking Through Our Window of Tolerance
When we cannot sit with discomfort, our “window of tolerance” narrows, causing us to try to control and manage our circumstances to keep that discomfort at a distance. That window is the range of emotional intensity in which we can stay present. Outside its edges, we either become overwhelmed or go numb and shut down. Some people build their entire lives around this avoidance, resting on an unspoken assumption that life should grow easier as we age and that we’re entitled to a comfortable existence as a reward for hard work.
But life offers no such guarantee. Relationships end, deals collapse, plans fail, and loss arrives whether we have prepared for it or not. The first arrow always comes. The real question is not how to escape discomfort, but how willing we are to meet the pain of the moment when it does. The Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön describes this as letting things fall apart while staying present to the moment. This is how we begin to discover what life actually is.
Facing discomfort is not resignation, nor is it the same as feeling better. It begins with the decision to stop looking for the exit and turn toward what we have been avoiding. Pain is not a problem to be solved. It is an experience to be moved through. If avoided, it behaves like a monster in a dream. It chases us, appears at the worst possible moments, and keeps chasing until we stop running, turn around, and finally look at it.
What Happens When We Face Our Discomfort
Consider my client again. Once he decided to face the pain and discomfort with his team rather than manage around it, he could see how far below the line he had been living and how much energy he was spending to resist what was already happening. He slowed down. He let himself breathe with the tightness in his chest. And beneath the frustration he kept showing everyone, he found the thing he had actually been avoiding: his own grief about everything that was changing. He realized he had worked so hard to stay positive that he had never let himself feel it.
Feeling it was the turning point. Moving through the pain rather than around it was what finally gave my client something to offer. He saw that letting his team witness their leader’s sadness, as hard as that was, could build a level of trust they had never had. The team had ruptured, and something new was trying to form. The “strategy” he had been demanding was waiting on the other side of the feeling he had been unwilling to have, and had he kept avoiding his own pain, he would have missed it entirely.
Weekly Practice: Go on a Discomfort Diet
This is a capacity you can build intentionally in small doses. If you avoid pain like most of us do, try a week on a “discomfort diet.”
- Order the salad with no dressing.
- Sit next to the overflowing garbage can in the park.
- Listen to music you cannot stand.
- Have the conversation you have been avoiding.
Each time, stay a little longer with the experience instead of fleeing it. Notice the stories your mind manufactures, and the desire for comfort that rises alongside them. Remember that pain is not a problem to be solved, and discomfort is not a monster to run from. As you expand your capacity to stay present with the experience, you may find that what looks like a wall is actually a doorway, and that the way forward runs directly through it.
Learning to face your discomfort doesn’t happen overnight. Explore our upcoming conscious leadership training sessions, where comfort zones are constantly challenged through teachings you can apply to achieve real growth.
Further Resources
- Curiosity vs. Being Right video – Conscious leaders understand why they, and others, want to be right. They accept this threatened state and use curiosity to shift.
- Instructions for Doing “The Work” (Byron Katie) – What if the opposite of your story is at least as true? Use these simple steps to navigate your belief and free your mind.
- Commitment #2 Meditation – Curiosity – This meditation supports you in letting go of being right, and embracing the idea of curiosity.
