I used to think the point of discomfort was the discomfort. Get in the hot seat, take the heat, earn the growth. That’s the story we tell athletes, and somewhere along the way we started telling it to ourselves in business too.
I don’t believe that anymore.
A client of mine, a founder of a mid-scale company, came into a session convinced her leadership team was misaligned on strategy. Instead of telling her she was right, I put her thesis in front of the two people in the room most likely to disagree with her. Not to make her sweat. To see if her read on the room actually held up.
It did. She wasn’t wrong. She just hadn’t tested it yet.
That’s most of my work, if I’m honest. Not stirring up discomfort for its own sake. Helping a leader find out, under real pressure, whether the decision she already made was the right one. Sometimes it isn’t, and that’s useful too. But more often than people expect, the test simply confirms what they already knew in their gut. My thinking: ‘If we test a theory and come to the same conclusion, great; if we come to a different one, great.’ Therein lies the value of discomfort.
I spent a year working directly with Benjamin Hardy, the author of Personality Isn’t Permanent, and it unsettled something I’d carried my whole career: the assumption that who you are is a fixed, discoverable core, something to find rather than build. His research, and the argument at the center of his book, says otherwise. Personality is built, continuously, by the situations you put yourself in and the beliefs you’re willing to expose. Avoid the test, and you’re not protecting your true self. You’re protecting a habit.
So here’s where I’d start, if you’re serious about it. Ask the person on your team most likely to disagree with you to poke a hole in your next big decision, before you announce it. Sit in on a negotiation that isn’t yours and watch how your own instincts react to someone else’s pressure. Say your belief out loud, plainly, to someone who has no reason to be kind about it.
You’ll survive it. And you might find out you were right all along.
What decision are you most confident about right now, and when’s the last time you actually tested it?
