Building Our Stamina to Be With Discomfort
How do we know when we are actually unsafe?
Of course there are some obvious indicators. If there is a snarling dog about to take a chunk out of my leg, I can know I’m unsafe. In a work context, if a manager has a pattern of lighting into people who raise issues in meetings, and then those people tend to be overlooked for opportunities or, even worse, exited from the organization, that is also a pretty good sign that it’s probably not safe to raise issues in that context. Sometimes we can clearly and objectively identify the signs of threat.
And sometimes it’s muddier.
As someone with a wonderfully vigilant threat response, I am well aware that sometimes my nervous system tells me I am unsafe when I know I’m not. Especially in difficult conversations. And even more so when that difficult conversation involves a sense that someone thinks I did something wrong. For me personally, that sets off my alarm bells. I want to defend. I freeze up. I might feel like crying or going to sleep. Sometimes I armour up to defend myself, and throw all the terrible things the other person did back at them.
For others, the alarm might be triggered by something else, but the core challenge is the same. Our bodies often struggle to distinguish between a threat to our safety and a threat to our comfort. The adrenaline surge that saves us in the face of a snarling dog feels pretty much the same as the adrenaline of receiving honest feedback, encountering a minor difference of perspective that challenges our sense of “rightness”, or witnessing emotional expression that is outside of our comfort zone. The feeling is real, but the reality of the danger is different.
Generative Conflict Principle: 17: Build our stamina to be with discomfort and difficult emotions.
In the most recent Generative Conflict cohort, one of the participants asked the question, “How do you actually get to the point where discomfort doesn’t feel like harm?” This is such a profound question and a window into the work we really need to do if we want to be able to make meaningful change (or possibly just get by) in this world of uncertainty and upheaval. It is our ability to experience discomfort and move through it that allows us to make choices without clear information, give and receive feedback, make mistakes and learn from them, disagree and stay in relationship, negotiate our own boundaries and needs, and take responsibility for the ways we cause harm or misuse our power without slipping into defensiveness and denial.
Safety is not the same as comfort
Having worked with a lot of workplaces trying to build greater psychological safety, one of the early assumptions that people make is that safety feels like comfort. The truth is, sometimes psychological safety feels very uncomfortable. It actually means that we have enough trust and emotional agility as a group to feel the discomfort of disagreement when it comes up, and to still be open to speaking honestly, listening to others, and understanding the limits of our own perspectives. We might hear things that hurt our feelings. We may have to grapple with the reality that the ways of being or decisions that make the majority feel safe might be causing harm to people outside of that majority.
And in fact, if what we want is equitable psychological safety (which I hope we all do), then it is in the areas where we hold the most power and privilege that we have the most work to do to build our stamina for discomfort. In spaces that lack equity, people who experience marginalization are often tacitly expected to stay unsafe in order to protect the comfort of the dominant group. We need to disrupt this if we want to be in good relationship.
In other words, if we truly want the benefits of psychological safety on our team – and particularly when we are dealing with conflict – we need to be willing to question the feeling of entitlement to comfort that we sometimes confuse with psychological safety. Conflict rarely feels comfortable, and the desire to be comfortable drives us to avoid it or get through it as quickly as possible. Often when people misuse power in conflict, it is because they are experiencing an intolerable feeling of discomfort, and the only way they know to feel better is to have control of the situation.
We can train ourselves to discern the difference. When we notice in the moment that we’re feeling reactive and pause to ask ourselves whether we’re unsafe or merely uncomfortable, we are building our emotional agility and our ability to stay with the discomfort of healthy conflict. But it’s not always obvious. We have to build our muscles to be able to tell the difference.
Avoiding discomfort, or friction, happens in other contexts too, not just conflict. In particular lately we hear a lot about people using AI chats for companionship, and not always to solve for loneliness: entire online forums exist for people to compare notes about how much “easier” their chat tool is to converse with than their friends and romantic partners have been. The AI doesn’t argue! And yet, facing challenges is how we humans grow! When we have to understand someone else’s preferences and needs and take them into account, while also considering our own, we build empathy, generosity, sense of our own boundaries, and clarity about who we are and what we care about. We encounter our own humanness!
In a work context, many clumsy automations remove the step of discussing and debating next steps in a process, perhaps from a belief the AI judgement will be as good and faster. But even if that were true (and the only part that’s likely to be reliably and consistently true there is “faster”), there is a loss balancing out that gain, which is the loss of generative human collaboration. The irreplaceable benefits of this include: deep human-to-human understanding of the customers or partners or colleagues who will be impacted by the discussion but who are not present; the discernment that arises from personal investment in outcomes or accountability; the value of human-specific qualities such as playfulness or unpredictability. This is not to deny the benefit of automation, it is to advocate for building on top of or underneath the crucial benefits of human process in your work. (If this resonates, we might be able to support you).
Swimming out in deep water
So how do we build our stamina?
I was in my twenties when I finally learned to swim. It took me many years because I was terrified of breathing underwater. Anytime I tried to put my face in the water, I would be filled with anxiety. My heart would race. I would imagine that I wasn’t able to get my head out before I needed to breathe in. I just couldn’t make myself do it for many years.
But I wanted to swim, so I took it in steps. First I would stand in the shallow end of the pool and lean over until my face was in the water. I would hold my breath so there was no risk that I might accidentally breathe in. And I did that until I could do it without fear. Then I tried putting my face in, still standing, and breathing out, and then standing up as quickly as I could when I needed to breathe in. It took a few weeks, but eventually I was able to start learning to do the crawl. It was not easy. There were times when I thought I had gotten my head far enough out to breathe, only to find that I was still getting a lungful of water, and then I would panic again, but I had learned to stop for a bit, calm myself down, and try again the next day. I was teaching myself that something I thought was dangerous was actually just uncomfortable.
Now I’m at the point where I can swim out in a lake, far from shore, and I feel confident that I know when I am getting too tired and need to go in. It is mildly dangerous because I could make a mistake and end up too far out, but I have built up my tolerance for discomfort.
We can do this in our relationships as well. We can start by noticing when something feels unsafe, and ask ourselves if that is really true.
- Is something bad actually going to happen? How do I know? Am I really sure or is it possible that the sense of danger is a story my nervous system state is telling me?
- Is the intensity of my reaction proportional to what is happening right now, or is there something I experienced in the past that might be adding to the feeling?
- If it really is dangerous, is there a way to decrease the danger to be able to stay with the discomfort?
- Can I ask for support?
- What might happen if I don’t allow myself to stay with the discomfort to have this conversation? Not all conversations need to be had, but have I thought about the possible impact of not having it? Is it possible that not having it might, over time, be as bad or even worse?
Accessing the gift of discomfort to stretch our capacity
What if instead of running from it, we could experience discomfort as a gift? Life is scary, complex, and unpredictable, and things we don’t want will inevitably happen to us. The reality is it is not possible to stay safe and comfortable all of the time. When we try to eliminate discomfort and fear, our life stays small. We limit our possibilities. We don’t allow ourselves to take risks that might make our lives better or align us with our deeper values and beliefs. We shut ourselves off from learning and growing. When we accept that we will experience discomfort and even threat and build our capacity to stay with it (within reason), whole new possibilities open up in front of us.
- We become able to give and receive the helpful constructive feedback that helps us grow and develop in our roles and as people.
- We move through conflict in ways that generate new possibilities and strengthened relationships instead of avoiding or coming out swinging.
- We make mistakes and discover all of the things we can learn from them.
- We name our boundaries clearly, and hold ourselves and others accountable to them rather than folding under pressure.
- We stay curious and open to problem solving when faced with the unknown, rather than urgently seeking the first (and usually not the best) solution to a complex problem.
- We openly name and discuss issues of equity and justice without succumbing to defensiveness, shame and blame, and polarization.
In other words, by building our stamina to be with discomfort, we expand our capacity to be in the complexity of being humans in relationship, with all its potential joys and possibilities, without turning away.
How do I do that?
We can support ourselves and each other to expand our capacity to experience discomfort in the workplace as well. We can start by noticing when we feel a potential threat, and pause to ground ourselves. We can ask ourselves how big the threat really is, and then try to stay with the discomfort even just a few moments longer than our nervous system reactions are telling us to.
Think of a growth goal that you have set for yourself that is challenging to achieve because something about it feels uncomfortable. You might notice in those moments of trying to move toward your goal that your system is telling you to go into your habitual patterns to get away from the discomfort. That is totally fine. We don’t need to force ourselves to go beyond our capacity. But see if you can pause just for a moment, noticing the discomfort, feeling what it feels like, and saying to yourself, “I can stay with this feeling just one breath longer.” When we can observe it rather than react to it, at first for a moment or two, we build the muscle to stay with it.
And then we move in small steps like I did with swimming. Maybe I start with just imagining what is happening for someone else who is upset with me. I don’t have to ask them yet, or be prepared to listen, I just imagine. And see how it is to sit with any discomfort that comes up. And then maybe I talk with someone else and get their feedback and support. Or maybe there are ways to hear it in parts. Or to have something written down that we can talk about later. And through all of this, we pay attention to the difficult feelings, notice when we feel unsafe, and notice that actually it is uncomfortable but ok. We build our capacity to challenge ourselves. To notice that often what we think is unsafe is actually just uncomfortable. And we learn that we are strong enough to experience discomfort and not be knocked over by it.
This sounds like a lot of work. Ugh.
You’re right, this is very hard work, possibly some of the hardest we will do. But the rewards are immense:
We can reclaim our agency.
When we can tell the difference between threat and discomfort, we expand our available choices. We can still choose to disengage when we need to, but we can also find a new space to say, “Thank you body, I appreciate the warning, but I can handle this. I’m choosing to stay in it for now.”
We can connect more authentically and in alignment with what is important.
When we have more capacity for discomfort, we can be more real in our relationships. You might notice the need to people-please decreases and it’s easier to set boundaries. Or maybe you feel more confident to wade into the conversations you know need to happen, trusting yourself to still be whole on the other side.
It takes less energy.
Being in a threat response is exhausting, and takes a toll on our minds, bodies, and spirits. While experiencing discomfort is also very tiring in the moment, it doesn’t have the same long term impact and potential for burnout as a nervous system threat response. We deserve to save the threat energy for moments that really need it, and otherwise save our energy for the things we care about.
We can expand our world.
Let’s go back to the swimming example. I wanted to swim, but my threat response told me not to, that it was too dangerous. If we only go where things feel safe, our world stays small. It’s harder to try new things. Anything we do to expand our ability to be with discomfort builds the muscle that opens up new possibilities. Maybe you just want to be able to give someone feedback, but over time you’re suddenly speaking at a rally about a cause you care about. Or possibly you took the risk to take accountability for a mistake you made at work, and a few months later, you find yourself playing a new instrument that you’re pretty bad at, but you’ve always wanted to learn. When we strengthen a muscle, it becomes instinctive to use it wherever it’s needed. And we create new possibilities.
And of course, this is all your choice. This is not a prescription. You are the only one who can know if this is the time for you to build your capacity to be with discomfort. But if you are feeling curious, you might ask yourself, “What might happen if I put my face in the water?”
If you want support to build your stamina, there are a range of ways we can support you including individual coaching, a custom training, or one of our Generative Conflict offerings.