Episode 26: The Discomfort of Growth

Hello, podcast universe! Welcome to Episode 26 of the 100% Awesome Podcast. I'm April Price. Welcome to the podcast and to the very last day of October.

[00:48]
Are you ready for this? This is the part of the year that goes at double speed, so I hope you are dialed in to create exactly what you want in your life these last two months. I actually spent some time this week writing down some very specific goals that I'd like to achieve before the end of the year. (And P.S. the end of the decade!) and I think sometimes we're tempted to give up at the end of the year and think, "Well it's almost over anyway. I'll hit it again in January." Right?

But the end of the year and the first of the year are really just constructs that we've made up. They're just thoughts about how we organize our time but it's all just time. It's all just life. And these last eight weeks are just as important in your life as the first eight weeks of the year. When it's all just time, every day counts, and I like reminding myself that every choice in those day counts. It's all creating something for you. And progress really is kind of undetectable a day at a time. But when you amass enough of it together it builds into the life that you want.

So just remember that whether it's the beginning of the year or the end of the year your brain is never interested in reaching your goals, right? Your brain doesn't know what time the year it is. And no matter how important it feels to you, your brain wants to talk you out of every one of the choices that are ahead of you, out of every one of those goals. That's its job; your job is not to listen and then just to go create what you want anyway.

And if you ever want help understanding your brain and its motivations and how to overcome your own thinking, sign up for a free coaching session and I'll help you out. It is truly one of the very best things you could do for yourself any time of the year and in so many ways can be the first step in getting you the life that you want. So I'm inviting you to a session.

[02:43]
Okay, today on the podcast I want to talk to you about discomfort. Aren't you glad you tuned in today? You're welcome! I'm just here to bless your lives.

So after last week's podcast I got lots of nice notes and e-mails from listeners and clients who have lots of advice on how to get my iron levels back up and improve my labs and my life experience, which I'm happy to say I am working on. And my good clients can see my suffering and they could see that I could find relief if I changed my "C," right, by changing the circumstances of my life.

And obviously I have the very best clients in the world, and I love you all, but I love also that this is what we do as humans, right? We don't like feeling discomfort of any kind. We don't like suffering and so we try to figure out how do we alleviate or eliminate suffering by changing our circumstances. And in coaching we actually call this trying to change the "c." We're always trying to change the "c" so that we can feel better because, oh, how we love to feel better!

But today I want to talk to you about the idea of actually staying in discomfort, staying in pain on purpose, staying in negative emotion and why you might want to do that. So, this is going to be a hard sell, right? Okay, here we go. Let's see how persuasive I can be.

[04:13]
So last Saturday my brother ran the Javelina Jundred which is a 100-mile race through the deserts of Arizona. He started the race at 6 a.m. on Saturday morning and he finished the race just after midnight at 12:22 a.m. When he finished, he had run for 18 hours and twenty-two minutes. Now I think it goes without saying that this experience required an inordinate amount of discomfort in order to accomplish it. Almost a superhuman amount of discomfort actually when you really think about it.

In fact, he had written an email to our family a couple of months earlier inviting us to come and watch him if we wanted to. And he said: "If you come by the race and I happened to look like death please do not ask me if I want to quit and certainly don't tell me that I should quit even if I blistered leaving vomiting or dehydrated."

So, you're like, “Okay he's volunteering for an experience that might involve blisters, bleeding, vomiting, and dehydration, right? He even referred to the race as "exploring the pain cave." Like not many of us like to go exploring in the pain cave, right? But I tell you all this and I remind you that all of this was optional. He wanted to race in the Javelina Jundred. He signed up. He paid money. He trained for months. Much of it in the middle of a night out in the desert. No one makes you run hundred-mile races. It's all optional.

So that's the kind of discomfort I want to talk to you about today. Optional discomfort and I want to focus on why you would want to do hard things and uncomfortable things in order to get different results in your life. And what just the willingness to experience discomfort can create in your life.

[06:10]
Now you might be saying, “But April I don't ever ever ever want to run a hundred miles. How does this even apply to my life?" I hear you and I'm with you. There are certain experiences that I'm okay living without.

But for each of us, if we're honest, we have our own personal Javelina Jundred out there. There is something out there that we want to experience and that we want to require of ourselves, that is only available through massive amounts of discomfort. And for each of us that's different of course. But the principles that I'm going to be talking about here are the same.

And I want to share three ideas about discomfort to help you as you go after the goals and the dreams and the experiences that you want to have in your life.

[06:54]
1. So the first idea I want to talk to you about is the idea that you aren't special. What a way to start! I mean, how rude! Well what I mean by that is that sometimes we think it's just hard for us. It's just uncomfortable for us.

We think that the Jesse Itzlers and the Serena Williams and The Rachel Hollis's and the David Deatons (that's my brother) that they're just different somehow, they’re just built different and we feel like they're missing like a pain chromosome or something, right? Or they don't have the part of their brain that doubts themselves or likes the easy way or the part that like loves to procrastinate. We think that they have some sort of evolutionary advantage or built in confidence that allows them to do things outside of their comfort zone, whereas you and I are just crippled and hamstring by doubt and very low pain tolerances. Right?

But the truth is that these people are not special, and neither are you. There isn't a shortcut around the pain or discomfort for them or for any of us. This is the human condition. Self-doubt and insecurity and pain and discomfort are part and parcel of the human experience and the higher goals the more you're going to experience some of those things. When you run a hundred miles there is pain. It doesn't matter who you are. Right?

Brains protest when they have to run a hundred miles. Some brains, like mine, protest when we have to run one mile. And that's what brains do. They seek pleasure, they avoid pain, and they conserve energy.

[08:33]
That's their job. Inside every single human being. You are no different and neither is your brain. Whenever you decide to go out of your comfort zone you're going to run into the objections of your human brain. Welcome to being a human, right? Welcome to the planet. It's painful here. At least 50 percent of the time it's going to be a negative emotional experience.

And the more you can get used to the idea that the price of your goal is discomfort and the price of any goal for any human is discomfort, then it will allow you to start dropping your resistance to the discomfort itself and move instead into accomplishment.

So, as you know I'm working on building my coaching practice and while it does not involve the physical pain of running one hundred miles it still involves pain that my brain would like to avoid. I have to record podcasts that can be rejected. I have to coach clients and face all the self-doubt and fear that goes along with that. I have to create Facebook ads and risk my revenue. It's an exercise in bravery for me. A

and just this morning in the shower my brain offered me the thought, "We should just give up. We should go back to the days when we woke up bored and irritated and disappointed in ourselves but still safe and give up our current state of feeling scared and insecure and ashamed." To my brain bored seems preferable to shame and it tries to talk me into giving up my current course of action all the time.

[10:12]
So, whenever we start a goal or decide on a new course of action in our lives, we think it's going to feel good. When I started coach training, I was so excited about what I was going to learn and how it's going to be able to help people, how it is going to be able to contribute and the difference that it would make in my own life and in my own relationships. And I was anticipating lots of positive affirming emotions and incredible experiences.

And we do the same thing when we set goals to eat right or get up early or exercise more or save our money. We think it will feel so good to do those things and to accomplish those things and that's why we started in the first place. We think we're going to feel a positive emotion when we do it. The reality is that whatever we choose to do that goes against pleasure, involves pain or discomfort, and requires energy. Whatever we choose to do then is also going to include a fair amount of negative emotion as well, as our brain protests.

We never anticipate this though. We never think I'm going to get up early so that I can feel more tired and jealous of my husband and sorry for myself. We think I'm going to get up early so I can feel prepared and focused and have some time for myself right. And then we get up early in the negative emotion comes up of tired and jealous and plenty of self-pity we think "Well dang, forget this," right? Just like I did in the shower this morning.

This is what it means to get up early? Forget it. This is what it means to have a coaching practice? Oh, I'm out. This is what it means to run a hundred miles? You gotta be kidding me. This is what it means to save more than I spend? No thanks. This is what it means to lose weight? Okay forget it.

[12:03]
So the key to accomplishing the things we think we want in our lives is to be really willing to feel negative emotion in order to get what we want. Feeling negative emotion doesn't mean there's something wrong with you or your goal or your brain and that you need to change before you can accomplish it. It just means your brain is working.

The key is not wanting to do a thing and then thinking, "Well if I was really strong or I was the right kind of person or if I was really disciplined or really confident then I wouldn't feel negative emotion. Something must be wrong with me." Instead it's wanting to do a thing and then knowing that inevitably there will be negative emotion. And that has nothing to do with who you are as a person or the kind of person you are. It has everything to do with the fact that you are a person. Period.

2. Okay so the second thing I want you to know about discomfort and achieving what you want is that you are going to have discomfort in your life either way. Again, I know really good news, right?

And you know so this goes back to the idea that no matter how you choose to live your life you're going to experience negative emotion. Life is always going to be 50/50. We can't be happy all the time and we're not supposed to be happy all the time. And there isn't a magic road that you can take where you can feel good all the time. Again, this is the human condition and we resist it so much we think it should be different.

[13:37]
And I think this is exacerbated by our modern way of living. I actually think our ancestors were much better at feeling negative emotion because we live now in a time in history when much of our suffering and discomfort has been mitigated to some degree. Right?

We have air conditioning and drive thrus and electricity and running water and instant communication and prenatal care and heated car seats, which is like the best invention ever, by the way. And in our lives today, if we're uncomfortable in many cases we can do something about that. This is the marvelous result of human ingenuity and I'm so grateful for that, but it does make it so that when we feel discomfort and negative emotion, we often think that we need to solve for it.

There's an idea out there somewhere inside of us that we shouldn't be uncomfortable. But no matter how much we solve for our physical comfort in the world, there is still for each of us the standard amount of emotional discomfort. And we can't escape that. It is a part of life. So, what I want you to see is that when we decide not to participate in optional discomfort by pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zone (which is by the way always our choice) there is still going to be discomfort in our lives. You haven't escaped discomfort by opting for a smaller life or an easier experience. There is still discomfort.

For example, as I said before, before I started my coaching business. I had plenty of negative emotion, right, around my worth and my value in the amount of challenge I had in my days. I felt bored and unstressed and unfulfilled before I started my business. My brain created board by thinking certain thoughts. And it creates anxiety today by thinking other thoughts. But do you see either way I haven't avoided having negative emotion?

[15:32]
So, a few weeks back I was standing in the shower completely overwhelmed with the negative emotion of putting my work out into the world and having it judged, right? When I had this kind of epiphany in the shower and I realized that having a coaching business is optional but having negative emotion is not. There's always going to be negative emotion. That part is non-negotiable. That is how the whole earth life experience was designed. You are going to feel negative emotion no matter what. So, you might as well go after your goals and dreams while you're at it.

There is either going to be the negative emotion of running for 100 miles or there's going to be the negative emotion of regret and wondering what if. There is the discomfort of self-doubt and shame when you create a podcast and share your thoughts with the world, or there's the discomfort of hiding and staying small. There's the discomfort of restricting your calorie intake or there's the discomfort of living in a body that's carrying extra weight. There is the discomfort of not answering the urge to spend or there is the pain of living with too much stuff and not enough money.

And I just want to make sure you know there's no nobility in one or the other. You're just creating a different life experience by the discomfort you choose. What do you want is the only question you need to ask. If I'm going to be uncomfortable either way, what do I want? What are the results I really want in my life?

There is nothing keeping you from those results except your own unwillingness to be uncomfortable. Nobody hands you the results. Nobody hands you the race buckle. Right? Or the new dress size, or the published book. You pay for all of those things with discomfort.

[17:21]
And we really want to negotiate with the universe on this. We want to barter on the price. We want the thing but we don't want it to be hard or we want a shortcut. And the thing is, whatever it is we want loses its value if you drop the price.

So let me give you a little example of this. In the Javelina Jundred, the race is broken up into five 20-mile segments and during the last two segments the runners are allowed to have a pacer to run with them. So, my brother asked my sister Rachel, who's actually run her own 50K race, to run the last 20 miles with him as his pacer and keep him on track and save him. If he got lost somewhere in that pan cave that he talked about.

And so, a few months before the race she told me, “Hey I need some coaching." So, I'm like, "Awesome." And she said, "I'm supposed to be training. I'm supposed to be getting up early and putting in my miles in the desert so that I can run with David and pace him and I just can't make myself do it. Day after day is going by and I just don't go. I just don't go run. And I'm at this point my life, I don't feel really good right now, physically. I'm so busy with work and I have all these plates and all these obligations and all these people in my life and I just can't get myself out on the trail."

So, I asked her what it was she wanted, and she said well I want to help David. She wanted to help my brother but also, she didn't. Right? She knew the price of discomfort that that would require. And in that moment, she really didn't want to pay it. So, she wanted to help but also, she didn't.

[18:59]
So, do you see what her brain was doing? Her higher brain was saying, "I want to help my brother" and her lower brain was saying, “Let's not." Like your lower brain doesn't like pain or spending energy and it prefers pleasure. And so here she was wanting to do this thing and her brain was arguing with her. And so, then she started an unhelpful negotiation with the universe, with the rules of the game, saying "I want the thing I want to help but I don't want to pay the price. Can you just lower the price and make it easier?" Right? She came to me saying like can you just like make this easier, right?

And this is what we do. We want the prize. And the feeling and the accomplishment. But isn't there an easier way? So, I told her, “Hey guess what? You get to do whatever you want." I asked her to imagine what her future self would say—the future Rachel is going to wake up on October 27, and what would she say? Because like I said, there's going to be discomfort either way.

There's gonna be the discomfort of training and the miles ahead of her or there's gonna be the discomfort of waking up in two months without being the one that paced your brother through the starlit desert on that last leg of a 100-mile race. So there is there the discomfort of regret, the discomfort of missing out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. There is discomfort either way. What do you want?

[20:36]
So as I watched my brother and sister take off for the last 20 miles on Saturday night, I knew that she would have traded any discomfort to be there in that moment with him and she had. No one else could do it like she did. No one else could step into that role like she did for him. He later said, "She pushed me just enough to keep me moving but also make it doable." And actually, with her pacing he passed seven other runners to finish ninth in this race over all 750 runners.

And all the way home, I bawled my eyes out to think what he had done. The discomfort that he had overcome and to think what she had done and the discomfort that she had to go through. Discomfort every bit until the end. But then at the end it was just pure joy. If you reduce the price, you reduce the value and the joy and the magic on the other side of it. So, ask yourself what would future you say. Is it worth the price? There's going to be discomfort either way.

3. Okay, the third thing I want to offer you is that the better we get at discomfort the more our capacity for accomplishment grows. Did you know that experiencing discomfort is a skill that you can get better at?

So before my brother had his race he posted a picture on Instagram and he used this hashtag #exploringthepaincave, right? And of course, this caught my attention because who wants to explore pain caves? I've walked past the pain cave and that was enough to know like. I don't want to spend a lot of time in there, right? But it made me think about what if I saw a discomfort in my life as an exploration or as a place that I could go and just investigate and look around in.

[22:31]
So, I asked my brother after his race what he learned about himself by exploring "the pain cave" as he called it. And this is what he told me. He said: "I thought running a hundred miles would bring me to a new level of discomfort, into areas of the pain cave that I've never been into. But that wasn't the case," he said, "It's like I've made a home out of the cave. Over time through training. It's like I kind of set up camp. I brought in a cot and a lantern and various supplies, so that I can just stay there as long as I need to. My hamstrings and feet were giving me the most problems at the end of the race, but I'd already run countless miles with tired hamstrings and sore feet."

So, did you catch that? He said, "I've made a home out of the cave so that I can just stay there as long as I need to." He's spent enough time in discomfort that he can stay there without needing to change it or escape it or make it different.

And when you think about your own goals, the ones that require discomfort, I want you to recognize that the more you do the hard thing, the more you train in discomfort, the better you get at staying there. In many ways, as I build my business, I use the same meta skills of feeling discomfort that I gained when I lost weight.

So, with my weight I had to be uncomfortable and hungry and deprived and restless, and I learned that I could just be those things. It didn't feel good, but it also didn't kill me. Like, "Yeah I'm uncomfortable. So what?" is what I learned to ask myself. Do I want what I want more than I want to escape this discomfort I'm feeling right now? And the better I got at not answering my urges and just feeling terrible, the better I got at feeling terrible, which has served me so well is I begin to build my business.

[24:27]
With my business, I have to be uncomfortable and vulnerable and exposed and insecure. I told my husband like "I don't feel naked. I feel skinless. Like somebody just like peeled my skin off and all my insides are on display for rejection and mocking and derision. Like I feel like I'm so far out of the cave, that I'm like skinless." And he said, "Do you think you're being a little dramatic?"

But when I'm so uncomfortable in these moments with my business I often remember the things that I learned during weight loss. I can just feel terrible in order to reach my goals. I only feel terrible actually because my lower brain is wanting to do the easy thing and go back to the cave and so it's thinking thoughts that are creating feelings to drive me back there. But they're just feelings. Feelings are just information they are not mandates.

So, Jody Moore, one of my coaches, wrote in her weekly email this week: "Feelings seem important. They seem like they require a response. They can feel urgent and alarming even, but they are only feelings in the end. They are suggestions. Consider the suggestions your feelings give you but make a conscious decision in the end."

When my brother finished the third segment, he had gone 60 miles. He had 40 more to go. He had these huge blisters between his first and second toes. So, I want you to imagine you're a little more than halfway, right, you're 60% through a 100-mile race. You have these huge blisters on your feet and it does not feel good. So I asked him about this and this is what he said:

[26:12]
"The hardest part was getting started again after my extended break between loop 3 and 4 when my blisters got taped up. Once I got that taken care of, the sun was close to setting and I stopped to eat some soup, which wasn't enough to actually fill me up. And it just seemed like a good time to sit down and eat a large hot meal. So how did I get started again? I knew it was going to get dark soon and my headlamp was ten miles away. So I told myself, 'I've got to get my headlamp before it gets dark'."

So I want to go to this moment, right? My brother felt like sitting and eating. His feelings said, "Sit down and eat something." He felt like resting his blistered feet. He felt extremely physically uncomfortable in that moment: tired, hungry, hurting, with 40 miles still to go. He felt like stopping. And then he made a conscious decision to override those feelings. Those feelings were just information. And he decided to get to his headlamp before dark. He overrode the feelings created by all the thoughts the lower brain was offering him to stop and rest and he decided to move forward despite his feelings.

So here's the thing I want you to know: You are never going to feel like doing the thing you said you wanted to do, but that has nothing to do with it. That's just the production of your lower brain to get you to stop. The skill comes in deciding for yourself and overriding those feelings and making the conscious decision.

I think we often think that the skill is not having the feeling. If our brain would just work with us and not offer these thoughts, that would be awesome. The skill must be having a brain that wants to do all the uncomfortable hard miserable things. But that's not the skill we're working on. The skill we are all developing is feeling bad and uncomfortable and miserable and then deciding consciously to do something anyway.

[28:14]
And the better we get at that the more times we can repeat that meta-skill over and over and over again in our lives, the more available the life we want becomes to us.

Alright, so did I sell you? Are you ready to trade the desire for what you want for the discomfort that is required to get it?

We are humans and we want it to be easy. We're all a little shocked by discomfort. We're a little affronted, like "What the heck?" Right? A couple of weeks ago I told my coach that like, "I didn't know it's gonna be like this. I thought building a business would be easy."

And she said, "As long as you think that you're going to be disappointed and frustrated. That's not a thought you're going to want to keep."

The idea that it should be easy is just a thought. And that thought that "it shouldn't be as hard as this" is the one that's keeping you stuck, it's the one keeping you from acting and it's the one keeping you exactly where you are.

[29:16]
So what if you didn't think that? What if you never thought it was supposed to be easy? What if you believe that hard is exactly the way it's supposed to be? What if you wanted to build a home in discomfort and to know it so well that you could visit anytime you wanted something more from your life? That would change every goal and every result in your life.

When my son was a senior in high school, he was trying to get into a college violin performance program, and he had to audition with some incredibly stringent and challenging audition requirements that were different for every school that he auditioned at.

And at one of his lessons he was struggling with this particular passage of the Wieniawski Concerto and he and his teacher were going over it and over it again and again and his frustration was mounting. And he finally just kind of mentally threw in the towel and even got a little bit upset and angry at his teacher. And she asked him, "Has anything ever been hard for you?"

She's like you know, "You're smart. You get good grades. You have friends. Your parents provide for you. Has anything ever been hard for you?" Do you see the question she's asking him? How familiar are you with discomfort? The thought that it shouldn't be hard was keeping my son from accepting the hard and then doing the work required to master this particular passage. The thought that "This should be easy, I should know this by now, I should be good at this, this shouldn't be a struggle" was creating all of the frustration for him.

[30:43]
When we understand instead that is supposed to be hard and that discomfort is the price, then we can settle in and get to work. And the better we get at hard, the more at home we make ourselves in the pain cave, the more that becomes available to us in our lives—the more possibility we create for ourselves the more willing we are to experience discomfort.

What you already know about discomfort you have learned through the things you have experienced and been willing to experience. What more are you willing to learn? How far are you willing to go into the pain cave to get what you want? The farther you go today the farther you are capable of going tomorrow.

What if discomfort is the price to anything you want? Better relationships, better health, reaching your impossible goals? Losing the debt and the weight and the anger? Are you willing to trade discomfort for the thing you want?

Okay, so here are the three things I want you to know:
1. First remember that the price is the same for everybody. There are no exceptions. What if you aren't special and it's hard for everyone?
2. Remember that there is discomfort either way. If you're going to experience discomfort, then what do you want to do?
3. Remember that the better we get at discomfort the more our capacity for accomplishment grows. What if you actually wanted to get better at the skill of discomfort?

I want you to know that who you become as you experience discomfort and explore the pain cave is the real reward of any goal you have, because then you will have created a you that is available for even more possibilities and accomplishments in your life…and that my friends is 100% awesome. I love you for listening and I'll see you next week.