The Necessity of Hunting Discomfort

If you’re not seeking out and dealing with discomfort in your life or business, you need to be. 

And I’ll tell you why. 

Not only could it be the source of your next breakthrough, it’s necessary to just maintain the status quo these days. 

Now, we could talk about hunting discomfort with apex predators, for example — lions, tigers and bears — but let’s go with an example from the humble mouse. Zoologists have studied mice and found that whenever a mouse runs across a predator (let’s say a cat) they run back to their burrow and freeze for about 24 hours. 

No surprise there. And I’d say we naturally have similar behavior. Whenever we run into major discomfort — a business breakdown, a significant disagreement, a deal that has fallen through — we typically need some time to nurse those wounds. It happens to the best of us and I think it may be necessary. 

What the mouse does next is where the difference is made. It returns to the place where it saw the predator and will run across the area over and over again (assuming it doesn’t see the predator again) until it has remapped the entire space. The mouse is smart enough to know that hunting out the discomfort of going back to the scene of discomfort is necessary. If every time it saw a predator it didn’t visit that area anymore, the space it was living in would get prohibitively small. Or, staying in the comfort of the burrow would leave for a very hungry mouse. 

We somehow intuitively know this ourselves, especially when it comes to kids. I remember a time when I was probably 7 or 8 years old trying to show off on my bike for my babysitter. I was showing off a bit too much and took a spill cutting my arm and leg on the sidewalk. What do you think I heard once I was all bandaged up? The same thing most kids hear when something goes wrong: “Time to get back on the bike”. Just like the mouse, we know that going back to the scene of discomfort is necessary. 

So how come when it comes to adult life, professional life — avoiding discomfort has become so acceptable? 

Avoiding the discomfort of a disagreement by no longer talking to those that might believe differently. 

Avoiding the discomfort of starting a business, even if it didn’t work out the first time. 

Avoiding the discomfort of trying a new technology, just trying to get by with the way you’ve always done things. 

Now, the mouse doesn’t have any other choice other than to hunt discomfort like that. It’s necessary for its survival. 

We have a choice. It doesn’t take much to avoid discomfort to leave us living in a smaller and smaller space. Fighting just to get by in the status quo by avoiding certain people, playing small, or keeping to what we already know. 

To go back to the scene of discomfort takes courage. Courage to confront the discomfort, and just like the mouse, move through it. 

This past week in #NoMatterWhat Insider, we mapped discomfort in a matrix to illuminate areas to lean into a little more. If you want to catch the recording, you can learn about Insider and sign up here. Once we can consciously see what we might be avoiding, it leaves us in a better position to do something about it. 

Avoiding discomfort will only cause problems to evolve, change and grow. Just to maintain, not to mention breakthrough, we need to hunt discomfort. And the more we do it, the better we’ll get.

Here’s the question to dwell on this week: What discomfort are you hunting?