THE GUT CHECK SERIES · Success · No. 4
One leadership question, examined. A new one every Tuesday.
Are you professionally uncomfortable?
I took off the uniform this summer after 27 years and started a company. A number of my friends and colleagues took off the uniform on a Friday and came back Monday in a suit, to the same exact desk, doing the same exact job. Zero difference but what they were wearing. Does that make them bad people? Did they choose poorly? No, absolutely not. But I, like many other friends and colleagues, am doing something completely different: new people, new places, new skills, new demands, and new uncomfortable feelings of being completely inadequate to the task.
Those who chose the familiar job aren’t stuck. They just have to work harder, in familiar surroundings, to find the roles and responsibilities that still make them grow.
It’s not about what you are wearing. It’s about what’s driving you.
There is a kind of comfort that comes from being really good at your job. All the meetings start making sense. All the problems start to rhyme with ones you’ve already solved. Your competence carries you through each day, and it feels like you have arrived.
The drift is only logical. You’re rewarded for what you already do well, so you do more of it, get better at it, and accept risk on everything else. Your range narrows to the edges of your comfort zone, and you call it expertise. Because nothing goes wrong, nobody notices.
What most don’t know is that the feeling of comfort should sting more than it soothes.
Professional discomfort is working at the edge of what you can do instead of the center of it: the project just past your proven range, the skill you’re still clumsy at, the room where you have to listen harder. It feels like exposure, but exposure is the key to growth.
Leaders pass the habit on. A leader who has stopped stretching themselves tends to stop stretching their people, and the whole team settles into a comfortable rut. At least until the demand for innovation sucks all the comfort out of the air.
A leader who stays at the edge shows the team that the edge is a normal place to work, and makes it safe for them to be beginners again.
So check yourself. If the last six months felt smooth, treat the smoothness as a flag. Take on something you’re not yet good at, on purpose, with a date attached. Put yourself in rooms where you ask more questions than you answer.
Keep one line clear: the goal is a stretch you chose, and a load you can’t carry is something else. If the discomfort is wearing you down instead of teaching you, that is a different problem with a different fix.
Gut check: when did your work last make you uncomfortable in the good way? If you can’t remember, that’s your answer.
Row Well and Live.
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Next in the series: The Task You Should Give Away. The Gut Check series runs every Tuesday. See every question so far, or start at the beginning with Nobody Meets a Standard They Can’t See.
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