Busting the 5 Myths of Hunting Discomfort to get Breakthrough Results

Your results (in business and in life) are defined by one thing and one thing only.

It’s not how hard you work.

How bad you want it.

Who you know.

Or how much money you have.

It’s not sheer determination or grit. It’s: the discomfort you avoid. Your results are defined by discomfort. In having written the book on discomfort, here are the 5 myths I hear most, that I can clear up for you right now, all packed into a 5 minute read…

Hunting discomfort leaves you with an uncomfortable life. FALSE. 

I can’t tell you how many people I hear from that tell me something along the lines of… “Sterling, look at my bank account, my job, my business, my relationships, etc. etc. etc." – I don’t need to hunt discomfort, I’m surrounded by it!” My answer is always the same: you’re not hunting discomfort, you’re living with it. And I’m willing to bet you have a lot of reasons for it too. When you hunt discomfort, you’re forever free from it. Hunting discomfort is a paradox. The more you seek it out and reconcile it – the less you feel it in the long run. 

Some people are naturally better at handling discomfort than others. FALSE.

To my knowledge, there has never been a baby born that the doctors announced was “discomfort optimized”. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Because our ability to handle discomfort isn’t inherited. It’s built. You go to the gym to build your biceps. If you want to get better at handling discomfort (resilience, sure, but also an ability to create breakthrough results regardless of the circumstances.), you hunt discomfort. There’s just no other way. 

I don’t need discomfort to reach my potential. FALSE.

That’s like saying you don’t need two of your wheels to drive your car. 4 wheels are a fundamentally necessary part of any traditional automobile. Trying to drive on only two would be dangerous and would certainly slow you down. Discomfort is a fundamental part of you in your life and your business and ignoring it is similarly dangerous and at best it’s going to slow you down. If you want to reach your full potential, you need all of you. Including the discomfort. 

I already know what discomfort is limiting my results. MAYBE. 

More likely not. Unconsciously, we construct our lives and businesses to avoid discomfort. Why? It doesn’t feel very good. And so from a very young age, you just stopped exposing yourself to those things that were uncomfortable. Here we are years later… and unless you’ve done a lot of work, my money is on that you’ve forgotten what those things are. The discomfort you avoid is a blindspot, hidden from your view by none other than you. Finding the discomfort that’s in your way is the first step to breaking through it to the results on the other side. Good thing we made this short quiz to give you a little insight into what that hidden discomfort that has been holding you back, is. 

Discomfort isn’t what’s in the way of my results. Very likely FALSE. 

A clinical study out of the Healthy Life Centre in Norway found that people working towards a new health plan already knew how to lose weight (at the most basic level isn’t it: move more and eat less?). Those that weren’t able to hit their health goals felt that it wasn’t a matter of learning something new, it was the discomfort that was in their way. Ok, they said they were “burdened by emotional baggage”  which left them “unable to act in accordance with the knowledge they possessed”. In most cases you at least have some idea how to achieve your goal be it a health goal, money goal, relationship goal, or any other kind of goal. What’s holding you back isn’t knowing how. It’s hunting the discomfort that’s in the way. 

There you have it! The 5 myths of hunting discomfort for results. Your results are defined by the discomfort you’re avoiding. Don’t let believing the myths about discomfort stand in your way any longer. Here’s to myth-busting. Here’s to your results. And here’s to hunting discomfort, together. #NoMatterWhat. 

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