Key Takeaways:
- Discomfort is necessary for growth and success, but it’s different from suffering and sacrifice. Discomfort can lead to feeling good.
- There’s a pendulum swing between needing to feel good all the time and needing to hustle/suffer all the time. The middle ground is best.
- Feeling good doesn’t always mean feeling easy/lazy. Doing hard things can make you feel good.
- Reframe anxiety and discomfort as excitement and opportunity for growth.
- Follow your own rhythms and alignment rather than forcing things. Allow discomfort while staying true to yourself.
So today we’re going to talk a little bit about the fact that discomfort is an absolute necessity in order to succeed in your business. Now, I know I talk over and over again about it’s got to feel good, it’s got to feel great. It’s got to feel nourishing and nurturing and amazing, and all of those things are 100% true, and you’ve got to be willing to be uncomfortable.
You see, you guys have heard me talk about this a hundred times, but there’s a pendulum inside of every single one of us that swings hugely from one end to the other. On one end is it’s got to feel good 100% of the time, and it’s always got to feel juicy and amazing, and on the other end is I’ve got to be uncomfortable and I’ve got to hustle and push it. I’ve got to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and suffer and sacrifice and blah, blah, blah, blah.
And we tell ourselves that it’s either or. Now, that’s complete bullshit. It’s not either or.
And frankly, the way I just defined it reveals a lot about the way we think about discomfort. So let’s go through this step by step. First of all, let’s talk about the discomfort piece.
Discomfort is not the same as suffering, sacrifice, push, hustle. You know, I’ve got to suffer. Everything’s got to suck in order for me to be successful.
That is not the same. There are two different kinds of energies going on in the bucket there on the left. Let’s just call the discomfort bucket on the left.
Right. The discomfort bucket is. Let me come up with an example.
Let’s say working out. I always talk about working out because it’s just a really easy to understand example. There is a difference between I have to go to the gym and I have to lift weights, and it’s uncomfortable, and it’s hard to sit there and lift these weights.
It’s not an easy thing. But, gosh, I feel good when I’m done doing it. And me going to the gym, me pushing myself to the point of injury, me not taking any rests, me training too much, me pushing myself too hard, me telling myself to suck it up, that I’m a weakling, and da da da da da.
There are two different frickin energies, right? But, I mean, we might throw them in the same bucket together, and I don’t think we do it as much with things like working out, but we do it a whole heck of a lot with things like business. We tell ourselves we should suck it up and work harder and work longer hours and we’re not doing your filing and what are you doing? And, gosh, everybody’s judging me and all of this stuff instead of. And then we confuse that with going out there and doing the things which maybe aren’t all that comfortable, but ultimately end up feeling really good.
So an example of this in business might be, let’s say, posting on social media. Posting on social media might be something that is uncomfortable. And you’re not real, like, excited to do it and you’re just like.
But when you do it, you feel really good about yourself and you feel like you’re showing up and you’re not hiding and you’re actually really standing in your power and you’re feeling confident in your offers and all of that stuff, whereas sitting there for 12 hours straight at your desk and telling yourself you need to work harder or you can’t make more money, and really trying to discipline your way into wealth is suffering and sacrificing and trying to whip your, you know, like I said, whip your way into wealth, and that’s not going to work. That’s going to stress your nervous system. You guys have probably heard me talk about this before.
It’s a psychological thing concept called the zone of proximal development. This guy named Vygotsky talks about it, and the idea is that growth, expansion, like up leveling our income, our impact, all of this stuff happens just outside our comfort zone. Well, guess what’s outside our comfort zone? Discomfort.
So we have to be willing to be uncomfortable in order to grow. Just like the muscles, our muscles have to get uncomfortable to grow. I mean, think about all the personal development you’ve done over the years.
Most of it has been confronting probably layers of you, which it’s a fricking uncomfortable process to look at, but that’s the beauty of it. You can withstand discomfort and you can handle discomfort and you can move through discomfort, but you’ve got to be willing to experience discomfort in order to do that and to decouple the concept of discomfort from the concept of push harder should self judgment, all of those things which make us feel bad that we’re not going hardcore and all of that stuff. So that’s the bucket on the left, right? That’s the bucket on the left is the discomfort bucket.
Now the bucket on the right, which is where we swing our pendulum to, is the. It’s got to feel good all the time and, like, juicy and overflowing. Dudes.
Dudettes. Feeling good isn’t always about it being easy. Sometimes we have to do the hard shit for it to feel good.
And this is why we talk about the pendulum being in the middle. It might be uncomfortable to do the hard shit, but ultimately it ends up feeling good. We confuse hedonism, which is immediately this immediate, pleasurable feedback, with feeling good.
And don’t get me started on how this is a disease. In our society, we’re training our dopamine reward system to basically give us immediate shots of dopamine that make us feel really good in the moment, but we’re losing our capacity to build things that are longer term, that feel really good because our unwillingness to feel discomfort in the moment. Okay, I did go on my little soapbox to tell you about that, but sometimes what feels good isn’t going to be easy in the present moment.
Lifting those weights in the gym isn’t easy and isn’t comfortable in the moment, but it feels good. And I feel better tomorrow. Cause I’m stronger and I feel more vital, and I feel more alive, and I have more energy.
You know, we can often mistake feeling good this hedonistic way that our society looks at feeling good for couch potato energy. Well, I feel great when I sit on the couch and I watch Netflix and I eat potato chips. Yeah, but do you feel good tomorrow? You might feel good right now, but are you trading this exact moment for what you’re trying to build now? I want to acknowledge, because it’s popping in my head, that that can be confusing as hell.
When we talk a lot about trying to live in the present moment, when we talk a lot about, you know, we really want to anchor here and now, because that is all that exists is we can make choices in the here and now. We can’t make choices tomorrow. We can’t make choices from yesterday, right? So if all we’re doing is making choices in the here and now, why not follow the hedonistic energy? Why not follow the dopamine rush? All of those things, right? The way I like to put it is I like to do tomorrow me a favor.
Tomorrow me is going to have her present moment, and her present moment is going to be better if today, me not only builds on this moment, but builds on that moment as well. And so I often look at myself as my own little fairy godmother that pays it forward to me tomorrow. And that can be a really helpful way to reframe some of the discomfort that you might need to get comfortable with in the here and now in order to build a better tomorrow.
So this is the thing. This is where we bring it into the center of that pendulum swing. We don’t understand feeling good, feeling in flow, feeling that it’s simple and easy as being this hedonistic.
It has to be the height of stimulus and it has to be an orgasm all the time kind of a thing. On the right hand bucket, because that’s not helpful for us. Or swing to the other side of the pendulum, to the left hand bucket, where it’s hard and it’s discipline and it’s uncomfortable and it’s hustle and push and stress, because that’s not helpful.
We don’t want to live in that bucket either. When we bring it to the middle, that pendulum to the middle, walk the middle road. The middle road is simple, easy, feeling good while planting the seeds for tomorrow.
Right? That’s another way to think about it. You can’t have a garden tomorrow unless you plant the seeds today. But, gosh, those seeds disappear into the soil and they seem like they’re worthless little stones.
We have to keep watering them for, like, weeks until they finally sprout. But if we were only ever focused on the present moment of those seeds, we’d never plant a garden or grow a garden or have the bounty that comes out of that garden. And so, feeling good, easy, simple.
They can all exist in the now with uncomfortable. Sometimes we’re doing things that don’t seem like they’re paying dividends. Like putting little stones in the soil and putting liquid on it.
Why am I doing this again? Oh, that’s right. Because I have knowledge that this is what grows, what I am here to grow, that impact, income, legacy, you know, the thing that you’re here to do in this world. So, a couple of other points before we wrap this one up.
Reframe, hard to uncomfortable. Reframe. Anxiety provoking.
Too uncomfortable. The funny thing about anxiety is anxiety and excitement is kind of the same feeling in the body. It’s how we frame that concept, it’s how we look at that concept that really identifies.
It really creates our perception of it. So understanding when you’re working out of alignment, as in I’m hustling, I’m forcing things to happen, versus I’m allowing myself the opportunity to be uncomfortable so that I can grow and develop and grow and develop. So the way I like to think about it is if I were to push a boulder down a dry creek bed, it would be very, very difficult and it would be me forcing things, right? But if I allow things to happen in their own correct rhythm and allow them to be easy.
I wait until the snow melts on the mountaintop and the water comes down that creek bed. And then that boulder floats itself down the river itself. And this is why again, I talk so much about following our rhythms and following our own patterns and following our own inner genius and our own knowing is because this is when we have that water coming down the mountain and it helps the boulder go down the path and we’re not feeling as though we’re pushing it down a dry creek bed.
And it can feel easy. Even though we’re still doing the work, even though we’re still push, you know, up to our knees in fucking freezing cold water. And it might be uncomfortable, but heck, it’s.
There’s ease to it and it feels in flow and it feels in alignment. And so understanding the difference between those things. And we’ll continue to have this conversation about alignment, about following our alignment, about following our rhythms and following our paths, because your individual pathway is the most important thing.
So really allowing yourself to feel good in the process and understanding that you’re nourishing and nurturing, not just today, but future use life as well. Future use, you know, impact legacy income, but also your client’s future, you know, understanding the difference between all of those things is essential and so, so important.
