I just finished reading an excellent book, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self.  As written by Michael Easter, the comfort crisis results from each of us not doing anything uncomfortable: not exercising, never going hungry, eating comfort food, never challenging ourselves…  In the end, this comfort crisis leads to us being less healthy and less happy.

As leaders, we need to embrace discomfort on a personal level – eating right, exercising vigorously, getting out into nature – to be as healthy as possible while leading our companies.

On a leadership level, we can also get into a comfort crisis as we get complacent in our positions and our organizations.  In the book, The Prophet, Kahil Gibran says it well.

“Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master.”

To lead our businesses well, we cannot become comfort junkies.  We must embrace discomfort.

Do the Hard Work Upfront: All too often, we put off doing the hard and uncomfortable work.  Instead, we procrastinate and occupy ourselves with unimportant but easy tasks.  As author Tim Ferriss writes, we do…

“Senseless pseudo work procrasterbating.”

Similarly, Sadler Training describes constructive avoidance as:

“The busywork that keeps you from reaching out to people or doing the other important and uncomfortable work that you need to get done.”

We need to approach our day, week and year doing the hard work first.  That means doing the hard thing first thing in the morning and doing the difficult legwork upfront that will make the rest of the job or project much easier.  We need to do the hard easy – hard stuff first, then the easy stuff.

Have Uncomfortable Conversations: The dirty little secret of leadership is that most of us are wimps when it comes to having uncomfortable conversations with under-performing employees.  All too often, the conversation does not take place with the result that the employee continues to under-perform and morale suffers as team members resent the person’s attitude and/or underperformance.  Instead, we need to have these conversations timely to address and resolve these problems now.

Learn: Too many of us are complacent in what we know and what we do; we resist learning and trying new things.  The advice from countless Commencement Speeches is accurate.  We need to be learning and getting better every day for the rest of our lives.  Learning challenges us with new (and often uncomfortable) thoughts and ideas.  And learning, to be successful, needs to be uncomfortable.  As Adam Grant writes,

“Learning styles are a myth.  The way you like to learn is what makes you comfortable; but it isn’t necessarily how you learn best.  Sometimes you even learn better in the mode that makes you the most uncomfortable, because you have to work harder at it.”

Do What Needs to Be Done:  As leaders we naturally gravitate towards doing what we like to do and what we are good at.  This happens often when someone gets promoted to a leadership position and continues to do the job that they used to do.  The classic example is a salesperson getting promoted to a sales manager position and continuing to do sales rather than manage.  As leaders we are not paid to do what we want to do, we are paid to do what needs to be done to move our business forward whether we enjoy doing that task or not.

Conclusion

To paraphrase Michael Easter in The Comfort Crisis, the best long-term comfort comes from becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable.  Only then, will we eat better and in moderation and get the exercise, fresh air, and experiences we need to be healthy and happy.  Only then will we do the hard work now that needs to be done, have the uncomfortable conversations, and continue the learning that will make our teams and businesses stronger. As hedge fund manager and author Ray Dalio writes:

“Putting comfort ahead of success produces worse results for everyone.”

Let’s get uncomfortable.