The comfort zone trap

And the winner(s) is/are: Mohan, Ceci & Sergio – congratulations, all three of you are going to get the book “The Up Side of your Dark Side” and a surprise gift! I will share with you via email, how the gifts will get to you! Thank you for your comments and stories!

---

When you are reading this, there is a high likelihood, that you are doing so in a comfortable place, maybe with something to drink or a snack and without any major threads around you. At least I hope so!

Are you ever thinking about how comfortable things are for us? I must admit I am usually only thinking about this topic, when I am for example seeing very lazy people park on the fire lane right in front of “our” neighborhood Starbucks. This happens every morning, when my lovely husband, cute pooch and I are doing our morning walk to get our coffee (the humans, not the pooch). And my thoughts about those pretty lazy people are also pretty – pretty judgemental that is. As I said before, I am human…

…But I digress. While they definitely are not leaving their comfort zone, they are not exactly what I want to talk about. My generation, which would be Generation X and the generations after mine, aka as Millenials, never really experienced threads to their life. Other than the Baby Boomers, who were often times born right after WWII, we also did not have to live through the fall-out of a huge war. Of course there are war zones in todays life and my statement does not hold true for those that either live(d) there or had to go there to serve their own country and fight. But in general I believe it is a fair statement to say, our lives are pretty comfortable.

We are living in a world where having a TV is almost a constitutional right. We can order foot to be delivered to our doorstep and everything we need to live our lives is usually at max a mouseclick away. We can have it wam if we want to and cold when it’s hot outside.

The life of our grandparents and their parents must have been so different from ours. There was WWI and then WWII. There were bombs that were thrown on the places they called home, they might have had to run for their lives, fight in the wars themselves or have been starving as food was scarce as an outcome.

My grandpa fought in WWII as a young men. He did not talk much about it, but one time he told me how he had been fighting in Russia and then his troup had to get to Italy. They walked! Yes, we are talking at least 6,000 kilometers or almost 4,000 miles. AND THEY WALKED.

Sometimes, just sometimes, when I am catching myself complaining to myself about a distance I have to walk, I am reminded of what he had to go through and I am ashamed about my own pitty party. But this is exactly the point. We have usually never experienced the levels of discomfort that people living in war zones or other excruciating circumstances experience and not only experience but more often than not endure without complaining.

At the same time, we are already feeling uncomfortable and annoyed, when our Pizza is delivered a little later than we expected. Or, and that is the topic I would actually like to talk about, we are experiencing that something is not going the way we would like for it to go and that makes us angry, sad, annoyed etc. you name it. And we do not know how to deal with these feelings at all.

We are living our lives with the plan or at least the hope for it to be a happy one. Complete happiness seems to be the most important status to strive for. And since that is not realistic, and because we never learned to endure real discomfort like wars, starvation or other threads to our life, we try to suppress the other, negative feelings. Or numb them. Or direct our mind to something positve. Sounds familiar? If you read my last post about the funk, it will.

All of these things, even my outlet of defaulting to creativity and writing a post are coping mechanisms. And all of them have something in common: they pretend feeling the negative feeling is bad and being happy is good.

What if, the opposite was the case? What if striving for absolute and complete happiness is completely irrealistic and therefore bad? And what if the bad feelings can actually be very useful and deserve a prominent place in our toolbox?

I am currently reading a book about this – “the Up Side of your Dark Side”. And I think there is a lot of truth in this. The parents amongst us, have probably used one of the “bad feeling” tools at least once in their life. Guilt. Not to be confused with shame. Shame makes us feel that we are bad and does not have the power to create. Guilt on the other hand is us feeling that we did something bad. It is a moral compass that helps us correct unwanted or useless behavior. We really should not ignore but rather embrace it.

And using it can be an even better idea – again, we want to make sure it is guilt we are using, not shame! Let me share an example of how this “negative feeling” can be a useful tool. First an example from my professional experience and life.

Throughout my career I have been working with colleagues that I personally found difficult to work with. More than one time, I have blamed the issues more on them, than on myself and have had some rather bitchy reactions to them. In one situation, my inner compass “guilt” kicked in and I felt bad about my own behavior. Did not feel great, to be honest. Not at all.

Yet, this epiphany made me rethink the ownership of the relationship with these “difficult” people and I realized, I had to own more of it myself or I was just as difficult. When the next project with one of these colleagues came up, I used the learnings from my reflection and the relationship improved a lot – with a much better outcome for both sides. Is it perfect? No, it’s not. It did improve tremendously though. My innder judge had successfully spoken..

Another, more personal example is the following…

When I grew up, I loved my Grandma very much. She was a very important person in my life. I was eager to please her and I never wanted to let her down. However I was a child and of course also developed some bad behaviors that needed correction. One of these behaviors was, that I could not stand slurping at the dining table. And when my Grandma made soup, or a hot tea etc. my Grandpa would eat/drink it by slurping A LOT.

So the annoying kid I was, I rolled my eyes at him and sighed throughout the entire dinner, whenever he made a slurping noise. After dinner I was hoping to play cards with my Grandma as we usually did. Not this time. She ignored me at first. And after a while she sat me down and told me, how my Grandpa loved me. And how he went to work every day and worked hard physically looking forward to come home to his family and most importantly to me, his favorite granddaughter. She went on to explain how my bad behavior over dinner made him feel very sad. Bam! I never felt so guilty in my life! And also never rolled my eyes at my Grandma or Grandpa again. I learned my lesson.

All of that would not have happened, had my Grandma not used my guilt as a tool to help me see my behavior and then replace it with a better one. Super powerful! It was uncomfortable for her as much as it was for me. But she knew it was the right thing to do and, having grown up the way and in the times she did, enduring discomfort was definitely easier for her than for my generation.

She also naturally did it the right way. She did not say “Nannette, you are a bad girl”. Because I was not a bad person, I did a bad thing. She loved me and knew that. I am not sure she was aware that she could have done a lot of damage, had she used shame and made me feel bad about myself. Thankfully she didn’t do that. It is done a lot by well-meaning people with good intentions.

One of those negative feelings, that we genuinely dislike and routinely try to suppress or ignore is anxiety. Now our anxiety today is probably not as much focused on real threats to our life, as it was when we lived in caves. However the benefits of anxiety are still the same. Anxiety keeps us alert and more attentive to signs of danger. And even though the danger might not be the impending attack of a giant bear, attacks can come in different shades and be very subtle. We still would want to be able to i.e. avoid the literal “backstepping” of a colleauge at work, if we could.

Being anxious about the potential to develop a certain disease, makes us pay more attention to signals our body might be sending and we are not as much at risk to oversee important clues our body is giving us. It can help detect a serious illness early on.

However, as with everything, balance is key. Being super anxious might make us not take any risks in life and that would mean we could be missing out. Being too anxious about diseases can lead to hypochondria and become very stressful for ourselves and the people that care about us.

Another great tool is anger and / or frustration. Both usually come together or one (the frustration) leads to the other (anger). However as with guilt vs. shame, we need to use care when applying this tool. Doing it at the peak of the anger, is likely not a great idea. As described in my previous post, it can lead to losing our job, overstepping a line, saying or doing something we will regret afterwards and it worst case lets us purely look aggressive and out of control.

However using our anger and frustration in a controled way, can be a powerful tool. When sharing – in a controled way – how a certain act made us feel angry or frustrated, will allow others to take our perspective without losing their face and feel empathy. It might change the outcome of a situation or at the very least we will have shared our frustration in form of a feedback.

In my current job role I am leading a team of Managers that are managing our relationships with our servicing partners. There is a lot of room for anger and frustration in such a relationship. Often times different goals lead to broken promises, hiding of mistakes that were made and so on.

One time, one of my previous team members was really frustrated and annoyed with one of our servicing partners. The partner had messed up quite a bit so I could totally relate to his feelings. He was mad! And he was about to let it out on the partner. Bad.

I jumped in and made sure we all took a break before he could say something he would regret. Now he was mad at me. Not as much as he was with the partner, but mad still. He did not understand my approach. So I told him, you are upset right now, your voice is breaking and what you are saying is confusing at best. What do you think will that get you with them? Right, not much. Other than being perceived as aggressive and weak, which will both not support the relationship at all. And you need that relationship to still work.

He challenged me and asked me if I thought hiding his anger and frustration and “playing nice” would be a better thing. How could he let slip what they did and go back to normal Business? They would lose the last bit of respect they had and just continue to mess up. And he was right and wrong. He was right, letting this slip or hiding the anger and frustration would have led exactly to what he expected it to. But that was not what I wanted him to do. I wanted him to share his anger and frustration. As soon as he calmed down enough to be in control and use the tool without injuring himself.

So once he calmed down, we had another meeting with the team at the partner. And I had coached him how to use his anger and frustration in a controled way. I told him to make them feel his frustration but without feeling it himself. Using the experience of frustration he just made, he mustered a pretty impressive “frustration performance” letting everyone feel how them messing up had caused problems not only for them but for all their people and the relationship with our company. And they felt it! But because he was in control, clear, articulate (all things you are not at the peak of anger), they were able to understand his point and take ownership.

Moving right back to happy go lucky would not have worked at all. They would not have taken him seriously anymore. Now they do. Him having been vulnerable at his own terms showed them, that he genuinely cared for them and the project and was passionate about the work that was done. He actually ended up using two of the tools successfully. Him having shared his anger without the aggressivity that usually comes with it, made them feel like they let him down. They did not want to do that again. Win Win!

Yes, being happy feels good and it not completely a bad thing. However feeling anger, guilt or anxiety can be much more powerful. Being happy would not save our life, when danger is present. We will likely miss what’s happening around us entirely. Having an inner judge that helps us correct behavior that hurts others or ourselves can make a huge positive impact.

Feeling all the feelings consciously and enduring them, even the really bad ones, will make us more resilient. We will be able to endure things that are happening to us a little bit more easily with each experience we make. Resilience is not to be confused with numbness though. Suppressing or numbing those feelings will achieve the opposite. We will struggle badly when something threatens our happiness.

So, let’s get out of our comfort zone, be great and feel bad once in a while and train our resilience muscle. It will be worth it!