Tag: uncomfortability

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Using “Uncomfortability” As A Guide -Personal Lessons From October 2018

Being uncomfortable sucks.

As creatives, we face the uncomfortable as we make things. “Uncomfortability” surrounds us and lets us know our boundaries.

Typically, that is a sign to run.

Don’t. If you can manage, stay with it. In fact, take some time out of your day and dive into it. 

Sometimes, being uncomfortable is a blessing.

By dancing with our uncomfortableness, we find out a lot about ourselves and our surroundings. It is an influential teacher that can:

All of those things are precursors to great questions about yourself and others.

Once you can question, you gain freedom through critical thought.

Change is never comfortable. Our ego swears by who we are in the past and imagines how great being the same will be in the future.

The past is a fantasy, and the future is the distraction.

Connect with the present to grow.

 

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What is “Uncomfortability”

The basis of most of this month’s theme

Mentally, you know the right thing to do. In fact, you’ve done it in your head more times than you can count.

Too bad your head doesn’t have “standards” designed to make you conform.

Those standards, both implicit and explicit, are what create that feeling in your gut when you aren’t sure. That is uncomfortability, and it is the starting point for change.

Comfort is knowing you are “protected.” Uncomfortability is the opposite. You are leaping, and you don’t know what is on the other side.

Don’t run from it, when you pay attention to it; it can function as an excellent guide.

Next time you feel it, follow it.

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“Uncomfortability”

Growing Is Hard

That’s it. Take a moment and think about the last time you went through a profound change. Chances are, you went through it kicking and screaming.

The last one I went through was no different.

When I started my goal to improve my fitness this year, I did everything “right:”

  • Found a gym and signed up.
  • Put my gym clothes in places where they were visible.
  • I made a public announcement to my email list.

It didn’t do anything. A few weeks into 2017, I still had zero gym visits on my record.

Then one day, I realized that I avoided the gym for no other reason than it was uncomfortable.

It was uncomfortable to:

  • Take my Saturday morning and go when I could kick back like everyone else
  • Walk out of work and head to the gym, even when there was
  • Admit I was wrong, I didn’t want it enough. I had to rededicate “my why.”

Now, I go to the gym four times a week.

Thinking about that story, and the power of dealing with “uncomfortability,” made me believe that it would be a fantastic topic to tackle this month, so here it is.

At the end of last year, I wrote a newsletter highlighting the “three tenets of leadership.”  Each month, I take a topic related to one of the three tenets and write about my ideas and experience around the topic.

Reread candidate

No One Wants To Read Your Sh*t by Steven Pressfield – We remember the successes. However, we need to remember the failures. Those failures become the building block, if we let them, to our success. This book starts out being a guide on how to write something interesting, yet on another read, you notice it is much more than that. This book stands as a reminder of why getting earnest experience and failing is important.

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Don’t Give Yourself a Place to Hide

Creating something is violent because it changes things.

It is why Steven Pressfield named his classic book “The War of Art.” Being uncomfortable in spaces of comfort and shipping is the difference between those who lead and those who don’t.

Tricky stuff, because when you are leading yourself into an area of uncomfortability, you pull all types of things to help you hide.

For example, I let my apartment get messy.

I could stay out late, drink too much, or over work myself. Then the excuses start to fly.

All it takes is two or three days of this behavior and my apartment is a complete mess. Now, instead of expending all my energy on my work, I have to ask “Should I put this away?” and get away from my momentum. It gets harder to ship.

My “comfortable self” knows that I’ll quit if it gets too hard.

Pay attention, and you’ll notice the uncomfortability.

And get over it.

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Avoid Junk Talk, Get Your Time Back

“Junk talk” is real

Junk talk. Definition: irrelevant words that occur during meaningful conversations.

We lose the opportunity just to say the things that matter by saying the things that don’t.

Junk talk is the noise that surrounds our signal (our truth).

We bury our “signal” with “junk talk,” usually because “signal” is scary.

It is easy to feel better when someone rejects a signal mixed with noise because we can blame the “noise.”

It’s easy to add junk talk to our conversation, pitch, or resume because we have an excuse. We hide by saying too much.

We use excuses. As a result, we live in “comfort.”

Comfort is short-term safety. Comfort is a trap. It keeps us stagnant and as a result, we focus on the battle instead of the war.

Our time matters.

When we avoid the uncomfortability of losing we waste time.

Avoid junk talk and get your time back.

Your time better spent improving signal or changing it.

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Go into the Sun, and Before You Do, Find Shade.

Extremes wear us down

If the light is uncomfortable growth and the dark is comfortable stagnation, then darkness is home for many of us.

We spend a lot of our time in the dark.

So much so that unfiltered sunlight hurts.

It hurts so much that it can convince us to go into the dark and stay there. 

That’s why it’s dangerous to go out into the sunlight and stay there. Too much pain at once convinces us that the sun isn’t for us. 

It is.

Humans don’t do extremes well. We can manage them fine. When our backs aren’t against the wall, we retreat as soon as we can to comfort.”

The best change is a sustainable one. 

Using this metaphor, we have to realize that when we want to go directly into the sun from the darkness, we need to plan “shade” periods.

The shade is a tool. It allows us to take a break from the sun while not going completely back into darkness. We can recharge, and see our next steps.

Sometimes we just need to take a break.

A retreat isn’t “defeat.”

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The Three Brains: Run Away With Fear

We deal with the unknown. There are consequences. We freak out sometimes and succumb to fear. These things paralyze you to the point that even simple tasks get overwhelming.

That fear is scary. We tell ourselves one false move and  its over.

In my head, I feel like I’ve built a house of cards through white lies and half-truths. One mistake, and down goes that house. 

 I go from being stable person to homeless, effective immediately, looking for change. Highlights of my new day would include free swipes on the train and a cool night that provides an empty park bench for me to rest on. 

A side effect of not having my headphones on and no cell phone is that I see New York City’s homeless. With any distraction they disappear – a reminder of the power of the brain, and whole people fade into the background

A little research has led me to see my brain differently. We don’t have a singular brain, but 3 in our heads – reptilian, mammalian, and human. They come up with different solutions and we act on all three to decide our next move.

Lets take a look at it in the context of a meeting at work.

RUN AWAY!!!RUN FAR AWAY!!!

Up first – reptilian.

Some call it the lizard brain and it represents our fight or flight. Unfortunately, due to evolution, it is the strongest part of the brain. It makes sense – for most of our history, fight or flight meant everything.

Sitting in a meeting and you feel that uncomfortable “bleh” feeling. Twitter is just one click away. (FYI: People who feel snooty with the business iPhone or Blackberry – email is the same escape). It starts down this path and gets the other two parts in on the action.

Scariest part, it doesn’t get to make any decision of nuance, it has comfortable or this is it.

I don’t want to stand out, that tall poppy gets cut every time. 

Next up is the mammalian or the group think part. This is the other part of that equation, the layer over the panic.

“Don’t stand out, don’t raise your hand, wait to be called, and don’t you see everyone else sitting quietly? Be like them and fit in.”

If they wanted me to talk they would have just asked.

Then comes the human part, where we rationalize the things underneath.

All this comes together to create this awful feeling that we aren’t supposed to do this.  The meeting you were in just ends up being a waste of time.

Don’t blame the brain. For most of our history it protected us. But now, since we deal with a different type of work, we have to prepare to deal with that same defense mechanism.

All three parts of the brain has a part to play. Think about each one next time you get uncomfortable. Write them down.  Don’t catasrophize. List them one by one and deal with the fear in meaningful terms, realizing that the lizard brain is fueling the thought of disaster as a defense mechanism.

It is a part of reality that we deal with ambiguity, and we don’t like surprises. Master yourself, and there is no limit to what you can do.

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Uncomfortability

I like watching my uncomfortability.

Not when it is happening of course, then I wouldn’t be uncomfortable. But I like watching it after the event, almost like a video. I try to keep hold of those thoughts in my mind, although it is better to write them.

They are fascinating when looked at when I am in a healthy, comfortable place because I being to recognized how tinged they are at the moment. When I get uncomfortable, there is no filter; all my thoughts bleed into one another.

Those thoughts get mean and unreasonable. The things that I hate bleed into other things in my mind and every action becomes a strike against me. Didn’t pick me when I raised my hand – well you must have always hated me. Don’t answer my text, I am important. Every anxious thought I have flows into everything else, and I become a mess.

When this would happen when I was younger, I would use it as an excuse to escape the moment. I spent a lot of time running from anything that seemed uncomfortable. If I couldn’t run, I would come cold. If I shut myself off, then I couldn’t hurt anyone around me.I often thought, I’ll patch up the issue tomorrow, and thinking back on it, now I recognized tomorrow never quite showed up.

Lately, I have begun to understand my discomfort, and that is where the fun comes in. A lot of what you feel in life comes from how you frame it, and I recently began to think of being uncomfortability as growth.  The best thing I can do is figuring out a framework of how to recognize it.

Most change is real – especially if you don’t allow that change to destroy you. Letting my uncomfortability run rampant was a way that I did that. Now I am trying to turn it into an exercise.A little cherry on top that signifies that this too shall pass, and I will be better for it.

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