Tag: uncomfortable

Performing Poetry in Bars and Embracing Discomfort to be Successful (1-24-24)

Last week was about choosing when to feel discomfort.  This week is about performing poetry in bars and embracing discomfort to be successful.

I remember one time earlier in my career, when I had crushed a presentation in front of a difficult audience that peppered me with tough questions. Afterwards, a person asked me what my secret was.  I replied, “As a hobby I perform poetry in bars.  Imagine presenting in a room where everyone is loud and obnoxious.  Imagine sharing deep parts of yourselves and then getting a low score on the poem.  Imagine being booed.  None of that is pleasant.  Besides the poetry, I do dry runs where I ask people to come at me hard with stuff to throw me off my game.  That gets bumpy.  You live through that ugliness a few times, and the official presentation becomes a lot easier.”

Where is this going?  A large reason why I was successful presenting in a tough situation is because I had spent so much time embracing discomfort.  As a result, my mind and body were ready for the discomfort when the stakes were real.  The pressure from the situation and the tough questions weren’t anything new.  They were things I had dealt with and more importantly overcome time and time again.  Once the pointed questions started coming, it’s like my muscle memory took over and just handled things.  However, if I would have never experienced discomfort like that before, I would have frozen.

Think about work for a moment.  How often are you embracing situations that cause discomfort?  How often do you truly encourage people to challenge you and your thinking?  How often do you do a dry run and ask people to critique you before the real presentation?  How often do you role play through difficult feedback and conversations, so you can be prepared for the real convo?  If you’re anything like me, you probably don’t create or invite these situations as often as you should.  While none of those situations are particularly pleasant, consistently embracing discomfort in lower stakes instances make it a lot easier to tolerate that discomfort when things are on the line.

The challenge: How are you embracing discomfort to grow and be better? 

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Choosing Your Discomfort (1-17-24)

This week I’d like to kick off a series exploring comfort and discomfort.  We will start by exploring working out and choosing your discomfort.

There are some people who feel great as they workout and love doing it.  I am NOT one of those people.  I’m quite the opposite.  Whenever I exercise my body screams at me about how miserable and stupid all of this stuff is and pleads with me to just go sit on the couch.  While exercising causes discomfort, I’ve found that if I consistently go through the discomfort of working out, then I feel more comfortable in my body on any given day.  On the flip side, if I embrace the comfort of just hanging out on the couch too often, I begin to feel uncomfortable in my body.  It’s achy, sore, tired, etc.  It’s weird that sometimes my body can feel worse from not doing anything vs pushing itself.  Anyone else experience that?  As a result of all of this, even though I don’t particularly like exercising, I choose the discomfort of working out, so I can have the comfort of being in my body.

Where is this going?  I can’t remember who said it, but I once heard someone say something like, “Either way you’re going to experience discomfort.  You get to decide what discomfort you experience and when.”  While this sentiment applies to me and working out, it often applies to work situations as well.  Last week I was in a kickoff call, and we were discussing milestone maps and timelines.  It became apparent to me that the rough draft just wasn’t working.  At that point I had a decision.  I could choose comfort and not say anything, or I could choose discomfort and encourage us to dive into the issues which would likely bring some tension.  I chose discomfort.  I said to the team, “These kickoff meetings are always messy.  I want you all to know that not only am I okay with that, but I expect that to happen.  We need to dive deeper into these milestone maps, because it’s not quite where it needs to be.  Before we go any further, I just want to reiterate that I’d rather have these uncomfortable conversations about how we need to fix our plan now early in the year vs avoiding the conversation and scrambling at the end of the year when we missed things because we didn’t plan for them.”  With the stage set, we all chose discomfort.  We began challenging, pushing, and demanding more from ourselves.  We had real talk about how certain parts weren’t well defined and how the sequencing was off.  There was a healthy amount of tension, and no one felt carefree, cozy, and comfy during the conversation.  Afterwards, we were all thankful we chose discomfort because we could see how choosing discomfort now will make life easier down the road.

Is the above situation familiar to you?  Maybe your situation isn’t about milestone maps.  Maybe your situation is about giving tough feedback.  Maybe your situation is about making a tough prioritization decision.  Maybe your situation is making a market research recommendation that won’t exactly be embraced with open arms (Nothing like telling a VP that the data isn’t as meaningful as they had hoped 😉).  Whatever your situation you have a choice.  You can choose to go through some relatively short-term discomfort that can set you up for more sustained comfort or you can choose short-term comfort which will likely make you consistently uncomfortable in the long-term.  The choice is yours.

The challenge: What discomfort will you choose?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry