Do you inspire others with your courage and willingness to take well thought-out risks?
Do you stay with what’s comfortable? Or do you push yourself out of your comfort zone and inspire others to do the same? Can you imagine an athlete who only trains in comfort and never pushes into discomfort? An athlete has to train into discomfort and even pain to become stronger, faster better — and so do you.
– Neale Donald Walsch, author
In a discussion with The Blank Slate author Steven Pinker, Marty Seligman says that the period in which everyone regards things like sadness, anxiety and anger as problems that can be therapeutically and/or pharmaceutically eradicated has passed. According to him, therapists and patients should now adopt the concept that he calls, “Dealing with It.”
In an interview on Leadership Development News (a top-rated business talk radio show hosted by Drs. Cathy Greenberg and Relly Nadler on the Voice America Network), Seligman talked about the way in which the armed services trains snipers. Because it frequently takes as long as 24 hours for a sniper to get into position and another 36 hours of staying motionless before they can get off their shot, sleepiness becomes a significant issue. A therapist would prescribe drugs to keep them awake or instruct them in techniques to overcome fatigue.
Sniper trainers take a very different approach though, one closely aligned with Seligman’s concept of “Dealing with it.” The idea is to practice and accept any pain and discomfort associated with the action or activity you are undertaking. If a sniper has to stay still for hours at a time in cold weather, then they practice staying still in cold weather so they can deal with it.
Get comfortable being uncomfortable.
It’s the discomfort that you may feel when you’re being courageous or the nervousness you might have before a job interview. It’s the pressure you could feel coming up against an important deadline or the butterflies you may feel in your stomach before a competition. It’s the gut-check you might need before committing enormous resources to a new strategy. It happens to the humanitarian who knows she might be killed for speaking her truth and to the Special Forces operator who risks his life with every mission. And it happens to you when you take on a challenge and stretch your comfort zone.
Because of genetics or social development or both, some people are risk-adverse while others enjoy risk. Fearless Leaders relish the excitement of the challenge. They thrive in the discomfort it evokes.
How successful do you think an entrepreneur would be if she didn’t risk differentiating and innovating? Entrepreneurs must continually challenge the status quo. Thus, they live in discomfort. The best entrepreneurs thrive on being uncomfortable.
Destructive and Constructive Anxiety
Excessive stress and anxiety can hurt you mentally, emotionally and physically. Excessive negative stress will actually block your use of the executive part of your brain, the most advanced portion where your willpower and higher consciousness thinking takes place. In sports and performance psychology, it’s well known that there is a very specific relationship between performance (the vertical axis) and anxiety or stress (the horizontal axis) as shown in the diagram below.
Being nervous or anxious are neither helpful nor hurtful in and of themselves. However, using your discomfort to be in what experts often call “the zone” or “in the flow” is a huge opportunity. When you’re in the excitement part of the curve or peak performance zone, you are experiencing what is known in psychology as “challenge stress,” which gears you up to be your best and compete well. This is different than what’s on the right side of the curve, “threat stress,” which will douse your enthusiasm and desire.
When you experience threat stress, you may not believe you can handle the situation, thereby triggering the classic fight or flight response from the emotional center of the brain. Your perception of a given situation will determine whether you experience stress as excitement (challenge stress) or fear (threat stress).
Flow was originally described in the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csíkszentmihalyi.
This post was written by executive and leadership coach and speaker, Dr. TC North, based in Denver/Boulder Colorado, serving clients nationally and internationally.
