55. The Truth About Discomfort
There’s an idea in the coaching community and personal growth space that discomfort is an essential ingredient in hitting big goals and creating more of what you want in your life (and career).
While I do agree that the ability to handle discomfort is an incredibly useful skill to have, not all discomfort is created equal.
Sometimes discomfort is the sensation of pushing back on old patterns that aren’t getting us what we want. But sometimes discomfort is sending a different message.
That’s why it’s so important to understand your own discomfort.
Sometimes discomfort is a “yes, but I’m scared,” and sometimes it’s a “NO WAY,” and sometimes it’s something entirely different.
Once you know how to discern what your discomfort means, then you can decide what you want to do about it. Maybe you want to lean in because this discomfort is part of up-leveling in some way. Or maybe you want to choose another path because this discomfort is an indicator that the situation isn’t aligned with your values and preferences. Either way, learning how to understand your own discomfort is key, and that’s exactly what we’ll cover in more detail on this week’s podcast episode.
If you want to supercharge your capacity to create a life that blows your mind, I have some one-on-one coaching slots opening up soon. Send me an email and let's talk about it or click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If there are topics y’all want me to teach and talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why you get to decide whether discomfort is helping you or not.
How discomfort comes up for my clients in their careers.
What cognitive dissonance is and why it feels so uncomfortable.
Why it’s so important to get curious about what exactly is making you feel uncomfortable.
How to see the purpose behind the discomfort you’re feeling and decide if it’s a yes or a no for you.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
If you’re enjoying the show, please leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts!
Feel free to ask me any questions over on Instagram!
The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about discomfort.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, happy Wednesday. Before we get into this week's topic, I want to share a few things with you. Thing one is we're having a lot of work done to our ancient Victorian house. So there may be some background noise that you hear, and I do apologize for that.
I'm in the quietest place I can find in my house, but it turns out there are no truly quiet places when this much work is being done. So we're just going to do what we can with what we have. Like I'm always saying, better to put out imperfect work than putting out no work at all.
Another piece of information I want to share with y'all is something actually really sad. And that is that Alex and I said our final goodbyes last week to our beloved cat, Cowboy. As many of y'all know, he was 18 and diabetic and had some other health stuff as well. And we just love that cat so much. We just treasure him.
And I'm going to use present tense because we still treasure him. But his time came, and we knew it was coming. We could tell from the way he was acting, and his muscles were getting really weak. So we had actually scheduled an appointment for a vet to come in mid-November. But his health took a turn and we had to say goodbye to him a little early.
And y'all, it was not my favorite thing ever. We cried a lot, we're still crying a lot, I will continue to cry a lot. This cat was such an impact in my life and just such a delight to me. I'm so grateful for the four years I got with him, four and a little bit of extra. So I just wanted to share that with y'all because we talk about more than just work here and I mention my cat a lot. So I wanted y'all to know what was going on with that.
Also, it's worth mentioning that even though grief is really difficult and not a very pleasant emotion, I think it's a really important emotion. I think I'm actually going to do a whole podcast on grief at some point. Not today though, because one of my clients actually mentioned that she thought it would be really valuable to do a podcast on grief. Especially with so many things going on in the world right now.
And she was saying like so many people in her life are grieving so many different things, from Covid related deaths and illnesses to other stuff also. So that will be forthcoming. And if you have thoughts about that or want to ask that something gets covered in that, feel free to reach out via Instagram or email.
And the third thing I have before we get to our topic is another book recommendation. Because even when life is hard and we're grieving, and we're saying goodbye to our favorite people, in this case people being a cat, but he's people to me, it's great to also have something delicious and yummy and resonant. And I just finished a book that I really loved, called The Once and Future Witches, and it's really good.
I will say it's not the light reading that I'm often recommending with like my romance novels. This book takes place in a time when women and people of other marginalized identities didn't have a lot of rights. And so a lot of reading of that book actually I felt deeply infuriated. Not at the book, but just at the history of the experiences of women, and people of color, and queer people, and trans people.
It got me pretty fired up. But I also thought it was a great story and a great read. And witches, which was super fun to read because it will be November when this comes out. But it was mostly October when I was reading it, so that was fun.
Okay, so let's get into our topic for today. The topic is discomfort and I think this is such an important topic. I was actually coaching a client yesterday about discomfort and some really interesting stuff came up which is what inspired this podcast.
So there's this idea that I've heard tons of times in the coaching community and in personal growth books and kind of all over the place that discomfort is the currency of our dreams. I think that's actually a Brooke Castillo quote. And then the other quote I want to share with you is, “Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.” And that quote is from Susan David, who is a psychologist.
And this idea gets thrown around a lot. And here's the thing, I do agree that discomfort is super useful and can help you achieve your goals, create your dreams, build meaning in your life, do the kind of work you want to do, have the kind of relationships you want to have.
The ability to be able to feel discomfort and move towards your goals is incredibly powerful. But not all discomfort is created equal. And I think that's so important to mention and to talk about explicitly.
So when I was younger and I first came across this idea, I remember kind of thinking like, “Okay, so anytime I feel uncomfortable, I should stay and experience whatever is happening because that's useful.” That was kind of what I took away from that.
And whoever taught me this concept– I think I first learned it in a book, I don't even remember what book– I probably was misunderstanding how they were teaching it. But I don't actually know because I can't go back and look at the source material because I don't remember what it was.
But I remember kind of thinking that and then being in all these situations where I would feel wildly uncomfortable, but I'd be like, “Okay, but this is good because being able to be uncomfortable is important.”
And then it was a few years and a lot of insights later when I was like, “Oh, not all discomfort though.” We don't need to turn towards everything that scares us. We don't need to turn towards everything that feels uncomfortable. Sometimes discomfort is also an indication that something's not for us and we don't want to have it, do it, be around it, whatever.
So how do you know the difference? How do we know when discomfort is bringing us closer to our dream life, and helping us build purpose and meaning, and create a career that really delights us and lights us up, and when it's a different kind of discomfort? You get to decide for you the answer to that, shocker, you have the authority and agency. You get to decide for you.
One way I like to handle this is to think about what is the purpose behind feeling this discomfort? One way I like to think about it is thinking about like, what is the purpose of engaging with this discomfort and is this discomfort happening in the direction of something I am trying to accomplish, learn about, get to, et cetera?
So let's break this down a little. On the one hand, discomfort is just information. It's just like kind of a message that's reporting to you that something's happening. And it can be recording a few different things. One of the things I think about is the idea of cognitive dissonance.
And cognitive dissonance is the specific sensation of if you hold two beliefs that contradict each other. Or if you hold a belief, and then you're doing behavior that contradicts that belief, that can create cognitive dissonance. And cognitive dissonance can feel uncomfortable.
Other things that can lead to discomfort are, and this actually sort of is cognitive dissonance in a way, when we're trying to change our belief system, which is what we talk about all the time here on the podcast.
When we're trying to change our belief system, and we're taking action from the new belief system, but the old belief system hasn't gone away yet. That can feel really uncomfortable, that can bring up that dissonance.
So as an example, if for your whole career you've been a people pleaser, who says yes to everything, whether you want to or not. And you're beginning to work on the idea that it's okay and maybe even beneficial and beautiful to be able to say no, or not right now, or I don't have enough bandwidth, or I would need more resources to be able to take on that request.
When you first say no, or any of those other things I mentioned, that will probably feel wildly uncomfortable to you. Because you're saying no, but your brain also probably still harbors that belief that it's not okay to say no. And the combination of those two things can feel really uncomfortable.
All that being said, I do think sometimes discomfort is also a message of like, “This thing doesn't sit well with me.” Or like, “Whatever is happening here, I'm not into it or I don't want to be around it.” Now, I do think no matter what the discomfort is that's coming up and whether it's one that we want to lean into or one that we do not want to lean into, it can be worthwhile to be curious about it.
Because being curious about it is going to help us understand which kind it is. And being curious about it is going to help us get the value out of the discomfort no matter what we choose to do next. And if you're wondering what the fuck do I mean when I say get the value out of it? I'm going to explain that right now.
So when I say get the value out of the discomfort, it's like get the learning get the education, get the interesting information for us. So with coaching, the way we do it here on this podcast, we are working to help you be able to create a career that really is wonderful for you, that delights you. Whether you stay in your current job, or in your current business, or whether you leave and do something new.
The goal here is to basically create a much more satisfying and enjoyable experience of work that sustainably exists over the long haul. So it's not just like a burn bright, burnout. It's like we're going to have this as our new normal experience.
So when we see discomfort come up and we're examining it and getting the useful information out of it. What we're doing really is saying, “Why is this discomfort here? What is it telling us?” Discomfort is usually telling us that we're having a thought.
We're having some kind of thought about what's happening. And that might be a thought that's our old social programming. Or it might be a thought that we are like, “No, I want to keep that thought.”
So if we're in a situation and we feel uncomfortable, while we're in the situation, we're probably just going to navigate it as best we can because it's really hard to do this kind of intense coaching in the moment until you have a lot more practice. I can do it sometimes now, a lot of my clients can do it after we've worked together. That's not a beginner step so I wouldn't necessarily tell you to start there.
So actually, where I would start is with a past experience. So taking an experience where you felt uncomfortable, and then like looking at it. What was going on? Why did I feel uncomfortable? And your brain might be like, “I don't know.” Because brains love to say I don't know. And you just keep asking, “Okay, what if we had to take a guess, why might we have felt uncomfortable?”
So to go back to the people pleasing example, let's say you work in a corporate office and your bandwidth is full. But someone asks you to spearhead a new project and you feel uncomfortable. When we dig into that, what we would probably find is you feel uncomfortable because you think you have to say yes.
But you also know that your workload is full and that you can't say yes without either basically doing more work than you have capacity for, working extra hours, or letting something else drop. And your brain probably doesn't think any of those are acceptable answers and so it feels discomfort. Because it's trying to solve the situation, but finding no solutions that feel good to it.
So in that case, we could look at that information we're getting from the discomfort and then we could think like, “Do I want to lean into this discomfort? And which part of it do I want to lean into?” Because one of the things that I often teach is we're going to have discomfort either way.
We can either have the discomfort of saying yes to the extra work assignment, and then the discomfort of having like six things we're doing in the room for five. Which is going to probably have us feeling anxious, and stressed, and overworking, and working outside of office hours, and maybe not doing our best work on certain stuff.
Or we're going to have the discomfort of saying no. Or we’re going to have the discomfort of telling someone else like, “Hey, a new priority came up, I can't do this thing for you anymore.” It's discomfort either way.
But when we look into the discomfort and see why is that particular discomfort there, we can decide which discomfort we want to lean into and experience and which discomfort we don't. Which discomfort is a no for what we're trying to create long term for ourselves, and which discomfort is a yes for what we're trying to create long term for ourselves.
Okay, and that brings me to the idea of discernment. Discernment basically means, according to Google, the ability to judge well. And I think this is what we're doing with coaching overall, but especially this is what we're doing when we're looking at like, is this discomfort going to serve me and my goals or is this discomfort not going to help me? And is this discomfort actually a message that I want to go in the opposite direction of this thing?
When we get curious about the discomfort, why it's there, what thoughts are creating it, then we can discern whether we want to lean into it or not. Now, this is the part where I just want to remind all of y'all that being a perfectionist will not be helpful, but many of us will try to be a perfectionist about this anyways. I see this in my clients, I still see this in myself even though I'm a recovering perfectionist.
All of us will probably want to be able to immediately discern perfectly with 100% accuracy, and then only lean into the “good discomfort” and never lean into the “bad discomfort.” It sounds great, but it doesn't tend to actually work. I mean, if you can make it happen, go for it. And then you can teach us all a class about how to do it.
But that does not tend to work for me. Instead, what I find to be most effective and helpful for me and for my clients is setting ourselves up with the idea that discernment is learning, and learning involves trying stuff and then seeing what happens. And then evaluating what we've done and then kind of making new decisions about the directions we want to go.
So sometimes you're going to be digging into “Why do I feel discomfort here?” And you're going to think you've figured it out and you're going to be like, “Oh, this actually is going to take me closer to the career I want.”
And you're going to lean into that discomfort and go with it versus going back from it. And you're going to find some new information like, “Oh, that actually wasn't useful. That wasn't helping me go in the direction of my dreams, I just thought it was.”
And so it's at that point that a lot of people might want to be really hard on themselves, or might want to say like, “Oh, this is never going to work, I'm never going to figure this out.”
Versus saying like, “Oh look, my discernment just got sharpened. Oh look, I learned something that's going to help me be much more discerning in the future. Oh look, this information has crystallized more clearly and I'm going to be able to use what I just learned in this experience to discern more thoughtfully in the future.”
Okay, so let's review. One, there is this concept that discomfort is the key to getting everything you want. And that concept has a lot of value to it, but not all discomfort is created equal. Sometimes by tolerating discomfort and learning how to navigate it, we are bringing ourselves closer to our goals and dreams. Sometimes tolerating discomfort is keeping us in situations that we actually don't want to be in.
So thought work can be used. Thought work as the kind of stuff we do here where we talk about what our thoughts are and what they're creating for us. Thought work can be used all kinds of different directions.
Part of learning to use it and do this coaching work is learning to use it for yourself instead of against herself. Using it for creating the dream life that you have, for creating the career that you have been craving. And not using it against ourselves to like punish ourselves or make us do things that we actually do not want to do.
And in order to be able to tell the difference, we need to create discernment. And discernment is really us getting to know ourselves more deeply and us getting to understand what our signals are and where we actually want to go. And in order to do discernment, we need to have some flexibility with ourselves and some grace with ourselves to allow for the fact that it's not like a perfect line from A to B.
We're not going to just decide we have discernment and then everything goes like hunky dory all the way. I mean, if you can make that happen, good for you, congratulations. Like I said, and I mean that, that would be amazing. For most people it's a little bit of that like three steps forward, two steps back. Like we have a big breakthrough and then we have a big stumble.
And we live in a culture that says the breakthrough is good and the stumble is bad, but really, it's all learning and all learning can carry you forward to the life you're trying to design. So that's what I wanted to teach you today, that is how to navigate discomfort and how to tell if the discomfort is helping you become the person you want to become and build the life you want to build. Or if the discomfort is telling you that you're in a situation that you actually don't want to be in.
And if you want some help figuring out how to navigate discomfort and how to choose the discomfort you are learning to navigate, I have some room for new clients and I would love to work with you on that. So scoot on over to my website and sign up for a consult and let's talk about it. All right, y’all, have a great week. Bye-bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, happy Wednesday. Before we get into this week's topic, I want to share a few things with you. Thing one is we're having a lot of work done to our ancient Victorian house. So there may be some background noise that you hear, and I do apologize for that.
I'm in the quietest place I can find in my house, but it turns out there are no truly quiet places when this much work is being done. So we're just going to do what we can with what we have. Like I'm always saying, better to put out imperfect work than putting out no work at all.
Another piece of information I want to share with y'all is something actually really sad. And that is that Alex and I said our final goodbyes last week to our beloved cat, Cowboy. As many of y'all know, he was 18 and diabetic and had some other health stuff as well. And we just love that cat so much. We just treasure him.
And I'm going to use present tense because we still treasure him. But his time came, and we knew it was coming. We could tell from the way he was acting, and his muscles were getting really weak. So we had actually scheduled an appointment for a vet to come in mid-November. But his health took a turn and we had to say goodbye to him a little early.
And y'all, it was not my favorite thing ever. We cried a lot, we're still crying a lot, I will continue to cry a lot. This cat was such an impact in my life and just such a delight to me. I'm so grateful for the four years I got with him, four and a little bit of extra. So I just wanted to share that with y'all because we talk about more than just work here and I mention my cat a lot. So I wanted y'all to know what was going on with that.
Also, it's worth mentioning that even though grief is really difficult and not a very pleasant emotion, I think it's a really important emotion. I think I'm actually going to do a whole podcast on grief at some point. Not today though, because one of my clients actually mentioned that she thought it would be really valuable to do a podcast on grief. Especially with so many things going on in the world right now.
And she was saying like so many people in her life are grieving so many different things, from Covid related deaths and illnesses to other stuff also. So that will be forthcoming. And if you have thoughts about that or want to ask that something gets covered in that, feel free to reach out via Instagram or email.
And the third thing I have before we get to our topic is another book recommendation. Because even when life is hard and we're grieving, and we're saying goodbye to our favorite people, in this case people being a cat, but he's people to me, it's great to also have something delicious and yummy and resonant. And I just finished a book that I really loved, called The Once and Future Witches, and it's really good.
I will say it's not the light reading that I'm often recommending with like my romance novels. This book takes place in a time when women and people of other marginalized identities didn't have a lot of rights. And so a lot of reading of that book actually I felt deeply infuriated. Not at the book, but just at the history of the experiences of women, and people of color, and queer people, and trans people.
It got me pretty fired up. But I also thought it was a great story and a great read. And witches, which was super fun to read because it will be November when this comes out. But it was mostly October when I was reading it, so that was fun.
Okay, so let's get into our topic for today. The topic is discomfort and I think this is such an important topic. I was actually coaching a client yesterday about discomfort and some really interesting stuff came up which is what inspired this podcast.
So there's this idea that I've heard tons of times in the coaching community and in personal growth books and kind of all over the place that discomfort is the currency of our dreams. I think that's actually a Brooke Castillo quote. And then the other quote I want to share with you is, “Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.” And that quote is from Susan David, who is a psychologist.
And this idea gets thrown around a lot. And here's the thing, I do agree that discomfort is super useful and can help you achieve your goals, create your dreams, build meaning in your life, do the kind of work you want to do, have the kind of relationships you want to have.
The ability to be able to feel discomfort and move towards your goals is incredibly powerful. But not all discomfort is created equal. And I think that's so important to mention and to talk about explicitly.
So when I was younger and I first came across this idea, I remember kind of thinking like, “Okay, so anytime I feel uncomfortable, I should stay and experience whatever is happening because that's useful.” That was kind of what I took away from that.
And whoever taught me this concept– I think I first learned it in a book, I don't even remember what book– I probably was misunderstanding how they were teaching it. But I don't actually know because I can't go back and look at the source material because I don't remember what it was.
But I remember kind of thinking that and then being in all these situations where I would feel wildly uncomfortable, but I'd be like, “Okay, but this is good because being able to be uncomfortable is important.”
And then it was a few years and a lot of insights later when I was like, “Oh, not all discomfort though.” We don't need to turn towards everything that scares us. We don't need to turn towards everything that feels uncomfortable. Sometimes discomfort is also an indication that something's not for us and we don't want to have it, do it, be around it, whatever.
So how do you know the difference? How do we know when discomfort is bringing us closer to our dream life, and helping us build purpose and meaning, and create a career that really delights us and lights us up, and when it's a different kind of discomfort? You get to decide for you the answer to that, shocker, you have the authority and agency. You get to decide for you.
One way I like to handle this is to think about what is the purpose behind feeling this discomfort? One way I like to think about it is thinking about like, what is the purpose of engaging with this discomfort and is this discomfort happening in the direction of something I am trying to accomplish, learn about, get to, et cetera?
So let's break this down a little. On the one hand, discomfort is just information. It's just like kind of a message that's reporting to you that something's happening. And it can be recording a few different things. One of the things I think about is the idea of cognitive dissonance.
And cognitive dissonance is the specific sensation of if you hold two beliefs that contradict each other. Or if you hold a belief, and then you're doing behavior that contradicts that belief, that can create cognitive dissonance. And cognitive dissonance can feel uncomfortable.
Other things that can lead to discomfort are, and this actually sort of is cognitive dissonance in a way, when we're trying to change our belief system, which is what we talk about all the time here on the podcast.
When we're trying to change our belief system, and we're taking action from the new belief system, but the old belief system hasn't gone away yet. That can feel really uncomfortable, that can bring up that dissonance.
So as an example, if for your whole career you've been a people pleaser, who says yes to everything, whether you want to or not. And you're beginning to work on the idea that it's okay and maybe even beneficial and beautiful to be able to say no, or not right now, or I don't have enough bandwidth, or I would need more resources to be able to take on that request.
When you first say no, or any of those other things I mentioned, that will probably feel wildly uncomfortable to you. Because you're saying no, but your brain also probably still harbors that belief that it's not okay to say no. And the combination of those two things can feel really uncomfortable.
All that being said, I do think sometimes discomfort is also a message of like, “This thing doesn't sit well with me.” Or like, “Whatever is happening here, I'm not into it or I don't want to be around it.” Now, I do think no matter what the discomfort is that's coming up and whether it's one that we want to lean into or one that we do not want to lean into, it can be worthwhile to be curious about it.
Because being curious about it is going to help us understand which kind it is. And being curious about it is going to help us get the value out of the discomfort no matter what we choose to do next. And if you're wondering what the fuck do I mean when I say get the value out of it? I'm going to explain that right now.
So when I say get the value out of the discomfort, it's like get the learning get the education, get the interesting information for us. So with coaching, the way we do it here on this podcast, we are working to help you be able to create a career that really is wonderful for you, that delights you. Whether you stay in your current job, or in your current business, or whether you leave and do something new.
The goal here is to basically create a much more satisfying and enjoyable experience of work that sustainably exists over the long haul. So it's not just like a burn bright, burnout. It's like we're going to have this as our new normal experience.
So when we see discomfort come up and we're examining it and getting the useful information out of it. What we're doing really is saying, “Why is this discomfort here? What is it telling us?” Discomfort is usually telling us that we're having a thought.
We're having some kind of thought about what's happening. And that might be a thought that's our old social programming. Or it might be a thought that we are like, “No, I want to keep that thought.”
So if we're in a situation and we feel uncomfortable, while we're in the situation, we're probably just going to navigate it as best we can because it's really hard to do this kind of intense coaching in the moment until you have a lot more practice. I can do it sometimes now, a lot of my clients can do it after we've worked together. That's not a beginner step so I wouldn't necessarily tell you to start there.
So actually, where I would start is with a past experience. So taking an experience where you felt uncomfortable, and then like looking at it. What was going on? Why did I feel uncomfortable? And your brain might be like, “I don't know.” Because brains love to say I don't know. And you just keep asking, “Okay, what if we had to take a guess, why might we have felt uncomfortable?”
So to go back to the people pleasing example, let's say you work in a corporate office and your bandwidth is full. But someone asks you to spearhead a new project and you feel uncomfortable. When we dig into that, what we would probably find is you feel uncomfortable because you think you have to say yes.
But you also know that your workload is full and that you can't say yes without either basically doing more work than you have capacity for, working extra hours, or letting something else drop. And your brain probably doesn't think any of those are acceptable answers and so it feels discomfort. Because it's trying to solve the situation, but finding no solutions that feel good to it.
So in that case, we could look at that information we're getting from the discomfort and then we could think like, “Do I want to lean into this discomfort? And which part of it do I want to lean into?” Because one of the things that I often teach is we're going to have discomfort either way.
We can either have the discomfort of saying yes to the extra work assignment, and then the discomfort of having like six things we're doing in the room for five. Which is going to probably have us feeling anxious, and stressed, and overworking, and working outside of office hours, and maybe not doing our best work on certain stuff.
Or we're going to have the discomfort of saying no. Or we’re going to have the discomfort of telling someone else like, “Hey, a new priority came up, I can't do this thing for you anymore.” It's discomfort either way.
But when we look into the discomfort and see why is that particular discomfort there, we can decide which discomfort we want to lean into and experience and which discomfort we don't. Which discomfort is a no for what we're trying to create long term for ourselves, and which discomfort is a yes for what we're trying to create long term for ourselves.
Okay, and that brings me to the idea of discernment. Discernment basically means, according to Google, the ability to judge well. And I think this is what we're doing with coaching overall, but especially this is what we're doing when we're looking at like, is this discomfort going to serve me and my goals or is this discomfort not going to help me? And is this discomfort actually a message that I want to go in the opposite direction of this thing?
When we get curious about the discomfort, why it's there, what thoughts are creating it, then we can discern whether we want to lean into it or not. Now, this is the part where I just want to remind all of y'all that being a perfectionist will not be helpful, but many of us will try to be a perfectionist about this anyways. I see this in my clients, I still see this in myself even though I'm a recovering perfectionist.
All of us will probably want to be able to immediately discern perfectly with 100% accuracy, and then only lean into the “good discomfort” and never lean into the “bad discomfort.” It sounds great, but it doesn't tend to actually work. I mean, if you can make it happen, go for it. And then you can teach us all a class about how to do it.
But that does not tend to work for me. Instead, what I find to be most effective and helpful for me and for my clients is setting ourselves up with the idea that discernment is learning, and learning involves trying stuff and then seeing what happens. And then evaluating what we've done and then kind of making new decisions about the directions we want to go.
So sometimes you're going to be digging into “Why do I feel discomfort here?” And you're going to think you've figured it out and you're going to be like, “Oh, this actually is going to take me closer to the career I want.”
And you're going to lean into that discomfort and go with it versus going back from it. And you're going to find some new information like, “Oh, that actually wasn't useful. That wasn't helping me go in the direction of my dreams, I just thought it was.”
And so it's at that point that a lot of people might want to be really hard on themselves, or might want to say like, “Oh, this is never going to work, I'm never going to figure this out.”
Versus saying like, “Oh look, my discernment just got sharpened. Oh look, I learned something that's going to help me be much more discerning in the future. Oh look, this information has crystallized more clearly and I'm going to be able to use what I just learned in this experience to discern more thoughtfully in the future.”
Okay, so let's review. One, there is this concept that discomfort is the key to getting everything you want. And that concept has a lot of value to it, but not all discomfort is created equal. Sometimes by tolerating discomfort and learning how to navigate it, we are bringing ourselves closer to our goals and dreams. Sometimes tolerating discomfort is keeping us in situations that we actually don't want to be in.
So thought work can be used. Thought work as the kind of stuff we do here where we talk about what our thoughts are and what they're creating for us. Thought work can be used all kinds of different directions.
Part of learning to use it and do this coaching work is learning to use it for yourself instead of against herself. Using it for creating the dream life that you have, for creating the career that you have been craving. And not using it against ourselves to like punish ourselves or make us do things that we actually do not want to do.
And in order to be able to tell the difference, we need to create discernment. And discernment is really us getting to know ourselves more deeply and us getting to understand what our signals are and where we actually want to go. And in order to do discernment, we need to have some flexibility with ourselves and some grace with ourselves to allow for the fact that it's not like a perfect line from A to B.
We're not going to just decide we have discernment and then everything goes like hunky dory all the way. I mean, if you can make that happen, good for you, congratulations. Like I said, and I mean that, that would be amazing. For most people it's a little bit of that like three steps forward, two steps back. Like we have a big breakthrough and then we have a big stumble.
And we live in a culture that says the breakthrough is good and the stumble is bad, but really, it's all learning and all learning can carry you forward to the life you're trying to design. So that's what I wanted to teach you today, that is how to navigate discomfort and how to tell if the discomfort is helping you become the person you want to become and build the life you want to build. Or if the discomfort is telling you that you're in a situation that you actually don't want to be in.
And if you want some help figuring out how to navigate discomfort and how to choose the discomfort you are learning to navigate, I have some room for new clients and I would love to work with you on that. So scoot on over to my website and sign up for a consult and let's talk about it. All right, y’all, have a great week. Bye-bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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56. The F*ck It Effect
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