Becoming Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable

Today, I want to share with you a lesson it took me years to learn. Avoiding discomfort rarely leads to success.

Obvious, right? I think we can all agree this isn’t a particularly Earth-shattering revelation, yet it is still something I see people struggle with on a daily basis.

For me, this revelation came about at the gym. I practice Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and I thought I was pretty good with discomfort. It’s a tough sport. For a long time, I was the only woman on the mat, pretty much everyone I train with is either bigger or stronger than me, and the aim of the sport is to force your opponent to “tap out” by either choking them, applying joint locks, or otherwise submitting them. My lesson started when a new guy joined my gym. This in itself was nothing unusual, new people try the sport all the time. Some get the bug and stick around, many drift away when they realise just how tough a sport BJJ is.

This particular new guy had very little in the way of skill or technique, but he made up for it with a willingness to crank on submission attempt after submission attempt. At first, I tapped to these cranks because they hurt.

I was frustrated. I knew I was better than this guy, yet I was tapping to him over and over again.

Eventually, I realised I had to do something differently if I wanted to beat this guy. And, believe me, I wanted to beat him.

The next few times I trained with him, I paid attention to what I was tapping to. It took a few classes, but I worked out that whilst the things I was tapping to were uncomfortable and sometimes actually painful, they wouldn’t actually result in injury.

Once I understood this, I stopped tapping. At first, it sucked. Just because I wasn’t going to be injured, didn’t mean it didn’t hurt. But then I started winning. Over and over again, I moved past the discomfort. Over and over again, I learned that if I could ignore the pain or discomfort, I would eventually manage to get into a better position and from there could control and even submit a man 15-20 kilos heavier than me (that’s about 30-40 pounds for my American friends).

This same lesson is repeated over and over throughout our lives. We don’t become strong and fit by skipping the gym, we don’t become confident and effective public speakers by avoiding the spotlight, and we don’t become successful in our careers by avoiding taking on new roles and responsibilities.

The essential lesson I learned through this experience is that we can’t grow if we don’t push through discomfort.

Not long after I stopped tapping, new guy stopped showing up for class. It isn’t unusual in BJJ for new people to just disappear, which is why I presume he was simply another victim of the high attrition rate BJJ experiences and not driven off by my newfound ability to shrug off his submission attempts.

The challenge we face is to first identify the discomfort which is preventing our personal growth and then crush it.

