Paradox Personified: Finding Comfort in Discomfort
It has been a little while since I wrote one of these, far too long if you ask me. I jumped into this series with excitement and then got sidetracked by a pretty large project (launching an online course!), but now I’m back!
About the Paradox Personified Series
This series will go through many of the different ways in which successful people exhibit a beautiful balance of seemingly opposing traits or ideas. On their face, each of the different subjects of this series will seem like they don’t fit together or couldn’t exist at the same place at the same time.
But watching people who are high performers, who are unique, who are amazing, you’ll see that they are able to inexorably weave two contradictory traits or ideas together creating a gracefully choreographed dance between opposites, resulting in something incredible and beautiful.
The goal of this series is to start to recognize these paradoxical traits or ideas, and then learn how to weave them into our own lives, learn how to harness the power of opposites, and grow.
Check out the first article in the series.
Finding Comfort in Discomfort
This particular paradox shows up both physically and mentally. And often if you work on one side, it helps the other, but more on that later.
Finding comfort in discomfort is the act of doing something decidedly uncomfortable and being able to find comfort from within that place of pain (be it physical or mental).
Finding it in the Physical
Let’s start with physical representations since that is a bit easier to get our brain around. I really learned the power of finding comfort in discomfort during what could arguably be labeled as the single-most painful event a woman has to endure: child birth.
The difference between finding comfort in discomfort and fighting discomfort became acutely obvious to me as I contrasted my experiences between giving birth to my first and second children. With my oldest, I was nervous (what first-time mother isn’t nervous about undergoing the experience of child birth for the first time?!) and I didn’t know what to expect.
And, like pretty much everyone tells you, once the contractions set in, it was incredibly painful. I found myself trying to fight the pain, stiffening up and trying to brace against it. Needless to say, that didn’t do much in the way of helping.
Fast-forward to my second child, where I knew what to expect, and had been seriously deepening my yoga practice between my two pregnancies. I learned in yoga that the postures were much more pleasant, and much easier to hold for long periods of time, when I stopped fighting the discomfort.
Instead, I started welcoming the feeling in, letting it wash over me and trying to find peace and stillness while sitting with that feeling. Little did I know how much this would translate to the far more painful experience of child birth.
The second time around, I took that learning and with each contraction I welcomed the discomfort and tried simply to breathe, relax and allow myself to experience it INSTEAD of fighting the pain. The difference was not minor, it was HUGE. It made every contraction so much easier to deal with, and was a complete 180 from my first experience.
Finding it in the Mental
This same concept applies to situations which are mentally difficult or uncomfortable, like having tough conversations or persevering against the odds.
If you can go into something that is hard or difficult, and find comfort within the difficulty instead of fighting it, you will be far more likely to emerge successful on the other side rather than giving up. Fighting against difficult situations never provides positive results.
You can’t argue with a difficult situation and make it go away. You can’t ignore a difficult situation and make it go away. You’ll only make the difficult thing more difficult.
In contrast, those who have learned to accept hard situations and jump into them headlong, finding comfort in a plan they’ve built with a series of steps to get through the “hard thing” are much more successful.
People who you might say have “grit” and “determination” likely have this skill down perfectly.
They understand that welcoming the discomfort, rather than fighting it, means they can approach the situation with a level head. This is what allows them to build the plan, and then calmly follow it step by step, to get out of the difficult situation and emerge successful.
Repeated Exposure
One of the most interesting things about this concept was something I read in “The Practice of Groundedness” and immediately clicked in my head. It was one of those moments where I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it all along.
People who exercise regularly are constantly “practicing” this skill. By nature, exercise should make you uncomfortable in some way while you are doing it. It should be hard.
So, it was no surprise that people who exercised often were good at this skill in all facets of their life. Like any skill, you can get better at it with practice. And repeatedly forcing yourself to be uncomfortable makes you practice this very skill without realizing it.
How to Harness it
Exercise
This one is obvious from the previous section. Exercise regularly and you’ll be practicing this skill by default. I like to take it one step further and force myself to think about the skill during exercise.
I notice it most during yoga personally. When I find myself feeling uncomfortable and itching to get out of a posture I’ve been holding for a bit, I personify the feeling of discomfort. I think of it as a person that I’m welcoming into my house. I try to let it in, and force myself to really feel the feeling as it washes over me.
I notice that the minute I do this, it instantly becomes easier to hold the posture. It instantly makes the discomfort easier to deal with and I can always hold the position much longer than when I don’t employ the technique.
Get Excited About Uncomfortable Situations
I know, it sounds weird. I learned this one back in my agency days. Typically when you are client-facing and you know a client is unhappy about something, you want to avoid that conversation like the plague.
I learned very quickly in my career that the conversations I had with clients during these times were the most productive and relationship-building conversations I ever had. If I approached them as a detective, trying to dig as deep as possible and understand exactly what the problem was (because it was rarely the problem stated on the surface), I found that I learned things I could never have learned any other way.
Ultimately at the end of the conversation, I came out better able to serve the client and the client came out better able to trust that I knew what they wanted. My relationships with clients ALWAYS got better from having these candid and honest conversations, so I quickly learned to walk into these conversations with excitement rather than dread. I embraced them rather than avoided them.
I recommend looking at uncomfortable situations the same way. If you approach them with the right mindset, you can usually come out with a better understanding of how to move forward. If the situation involves another person, you’ll often come out the other side with a deeper, better relationship with that person. If the situation is a daunting task, you’ll be more likely to succeed (and feel deep accomplishment for having done so).
Cold Showers
I know this one sounds pretty weird, and I only discovered it by happenstance. My husband recently got me hooked on Wim Hoff and when I started his practice of taking cold showers (which I love for a variety of reasons aside from this particular one), I noticed that it forced the same practice that yoga does.
It is much easier to bypass the initial moment of “holy crap, that’s cold” if you don’t fight it. Don’t tense up against the cold, but instead breathe and welcome the feeling of the cold. It’s just another way to force yourself to practice the technique that is pretty easy to do every day and takes like zero extra minutes.
