Embrace Discomfort

Where are you on the scale from challenge to injury?

When I do trainings, I often suggest that people embrace discomfort. When I teach negotiation skills, I talk about the discomfort of learning how to talk about money, asking for a raise, or finding out what people in your community earn. When I teach about presenting and speaking in public, I talk about working through the anxiety of getting up on a stage – an anxiety I share, by the way.

Most of us are willing to get uncomfortable in pursuit of things that are important to us, whether it’s looking for a romantic partner, asking for a promotion, telling a story at a Moth StorySLAM or learning how to paddleboard.

Most of us also know the difference between physical pain that signifies injury or risk of injury and the discomfort of using muscles in a more vigorous way. We can categorize in our minds that the pain in our shoulder is the dull ache of soreness from a particularly vigorous game of basketball and not the sharp stab of a torn rotator cuff.

But how effectively do we differentiate between types of discomfort at work or in our career? Last week, I talked about how the pain of chronic dysfunction or abusive treatment at work can impact our perception.

What if it it’s not pain, but discomfort? Can we accurately assess what is the work equivalent of the discomfort of sore muscles you’re using to build a new skill or greater strength and what is actually damaging?

I often use the framework “on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the most, how would you characterize….” It’s the same shorthand used by medical professionals to assess pain. I find it a useful way to get my clients to quantify something that is subjective; in this case, discomfort.

Let’s do a little audit. Imagine that we have a scale of discomfort from 1-10. 1-5 is manageable, not unpleasant stress that comes from trying new things or being in unfamiliar circumstances. There’s minimal risk, and any discomfort is tolerable. It might even be invigorating.

6-7 is discomfort that’s more challenging, more acute. It might be getting difficult feedback from a supervisor, or having to give a presentation to a thousand medical professionals. You are capable of doing it, but it scares you. It’s a big ask, but one that you have the capacity to handle. You might find yourself tired and drained afterwards, but your recovery time is reasonable.

8-10 is discomfort that can become damaging very quickly. It might be leading a pitch or managing a huge event, with difficult stakeholders and little support. It might be owning a budgeting process at an organization with little attention to effective processes or metrics and unreliable data. It could be a job with leaders who are demeaning and demanding or one with expectations that you will be checking email 24/7.

First, understand your sweet spot on that scale of 1-10. Each of us is different; one person’s stable job may bore another person stiff; what you consider to be a challenge that invigorates may be someone else’s stress nightmare.

People who dislike discomfort, conflict, change or risk, may prefer to live in a 1-4 zone. I like to challenge myself, and try new things. Without that I get bored, so I like to live in the 5-6 range. My professional goals also require that I do things that sometimes make me nervous, like lots of public speaking and writing. Committing to turn out a newsletter every week means I have to work through my perfectionist discomfort because I often don’t have enough time to do much revising or editing. But part of why I’m doing these every week is to work through that perfectionist discomfort. I am embracing discomfort.

Once you’ve determined your sweet spot, then look through the areas of your job and assess your level of discomfort with various aspects of your work, below. For the purposes of this exercise, I’m inviting you to assess discomfort to check in on how much cumulative discomfort you are carrying.  If one of these areas of your work is positive and great, you can mark zero.

Consider the following:

·      Interactions with leadership. Do you have any discomfort in your interactions with your leadership or managers? Use that scale of 1-10. One is no discomfort, 10 is a white-hot fire of damage. Write the numbers down. Again, if this is positive, just write down a 0.

·      Interactions with peers. Think about meetings, work sessions, how you interact with your peers. Are they kind? Do you like them? Or is there a constant jockeying for political power? 1-10.

·      Interactions with people you manage, where applicable. Think 1:1 meetings, coaching and advising, giving feedback, assessing the work of others.

·      The work you do. Your actual work product. Whether it’s writing code or supervising a youth gymnastics team, how much discomfort do you have with your main job?

·      How you work. Are you constantly in meetings, having to squeeze in time to do your actual deliverables in the evenings and weekends? Are you back in the office and hating it? Do you have to travel extensively to client meetings, finding yourself on the road two to three weeks a month? Or do you generally enjoy how you spend your time each workday?

Now look at the numbers that you wrote down or associated with the different areas.  Does anything surprise you? Are you finding that your numbers are generally quite low and there are only a few areas where you feel discomfort? Are those areas of discomfort what executive coaches sometimes call “growing edges” that is, areas where you are increasing your skills or capacity? Maybe you’re a new manager with discomfort around giving negative feedback, but otherwise things are good.

Or are you surprised at how high your level of discomfort is across the board? This is the circumstance that I’ve found myself in. I take a certain amount of discomfort at a job for granted and am not always alive to when it moves from the positive discomfort of being challenged to damaging discomfort of being overworked or treated unfairly.

I used to believe that there wasn’t any good or positive job for me as a woman in advertising, it was all going to be some flavor of bad, and as long as I was well paid, I could deal with that. Which may be the circumstances some of you find yourself in – it’s a tough job, but you need the money or the healthcare coverage or both.

I have found that it is good for me to be fully aware of the toll a job is taking on me, even if I stay at the job. It’s too easy for me to get used to a certain amount of bad and not notice when it gets worse. You’ve heard that thing about if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water he will jump out. But if you put him in a pot of cold water and slowly increase the heat he’ll boil to death because the change is incremental.

I have no idea if that’s true, and I’m not about to start tossing frogs in pots of water.  But I do think it’s useful to measure ongoing discomfort at work. Check in, on that handy scale of 1-10, and make sure you are accurately assessing where you are in relationship to your sweet spot of discomfort. Stay challenged but don’t let discomfort move into distress.