Discomfort

Comfortable with the uncomfortable. What does this mean for me? More and more discomfort must be embraced and sought out. Why? Because it’s easier than ever to remain comfortable. Distraction options are at an all time high. Standards of living, same thing.

The more you embrace discomfort and do hard things, the more your comfort zone grows. What was once outside of it now becomes the norm and feels comfortable. It takes effort and work to keep expanding that zone, and a lot of trips into the zone of challenge/discomfort.

There’s an active discipline to it – get comfortable doing hard things. Having uncomfortable conversations. Working out at an uncomfortably high intensity. Although often difficult to tackle, I think these are the easy ones to spot.

Much harder to spot, and perhaps far more insidious, are those that take more of a resistence discipline. Sitting with boredom rather than reaching for stimulation. Persistence in a plateau. How well can you maintain effort and focus when it seems like it’s not paying off? When it appears that your performance has leveled off rather than the early hockey stick curve of improvement? When it would be easier to reach for your phone rather than sit in and wrestle with a hard topic?

I’m learning that for me it’s less about the active discipline – I embrace those fully and rarely miss a shot. The hardest discipline is the small choices I make over and over and over. It’s in those quiet moments of resistance where mastery is built. Mastery in the work I do, mastery in the life I’m building.