Dealing with Discomfort

Hey, I’m Paul Krismer, a happiness expert. Do you ever get tired of listening to your friends complain? We complain about all kinds of things, and I’m probably as guilty as the next person. People whine about how hard life is. Trust me, I’m sympathetic. If you watch my regular videos, you know I’m sympathetic. There’s a lot of things going on in the world that are not easy. But sometimes, I feel like we start making excuses for being where we are, kind of stuck, because we don’t want to do the things that are hard. We don’t want to learn to meditate. We don’t want to get to the gym. We don’t want to tackle that resume and job hunt to get us to the better job that we actually really need and want. But it’s hard, and so we stick with the routines and the ease that we have, and sometimes, mediocre lives.

This isn’t criticism. We grew up in this very coddled society where so much is just easy. We get warm water out of a tap for crying out loud. There’s just tons and tons of stuff that food, shelter, clothing, medicine, all those things for most of us, most of the time, have been easy to come by. And then, when we get challenged with doing something hard that would actually stretch us and grow us, we might be hesitant. We don’t want to have to be made to feel pain. Well, this video is going to tell you why you damn well better sign up for some pain. Stay tuned.

International public speakers and best-selling authors, stay tuned to hear Paul Krismer and Jackson teach the practical science behind happiness and success. So, we’ve all heard it right? All the gurus that challenge us to push harder, the personal trainer who yells at you, “one more rep,” and all that kind of stuff. The idea that discipline and hard work is what gets us to where we want to go in our lives, and for sure, we sign up for bits and pieces of that formula. But it’s a grind, and after a while, especially sometimes as we get older, or especially in our young adult years where we haven’t learned where our motivation muscle is yet, we can get stuck in patterns that don’t actually help us be better.

Sometimes, I think some of the coaching on this front is over the top. It’s all about pushing ourselves to new and bigger challenges over and over and over again. We may feel like it’s relentless. There’s so much already pressuring us in our society to be awesome that just another darn thing feels overwhelming. One of the best examples I think, that even I shy away from quite often, is over and over again, I’ve heard this advice, “Take a cold shower every single day.” And I know that can be daunting for a lot of us. Yet, the evidence may be, why would you bother? There are some good things about it. You get a certain kind of new body fat that’s good for your body, it boosts the immune system, it shocks our hearts a little bit, and it also shows us that the absence of pleasure and comfort is just not that bad. Sixty seconds of cold water, anybody can handle it. But why? Why would we do this?

Well, not just for those little benefits associated with that one example of taking a cold shower, but it also teaches us that we can actually grow in our lives when we know that there’s going to be discomfort in that growth process. There’s an interesting study that kind of, like so much of the positive psychology research, intuitively reflects back what we instinctively know. That when we’re aware that personal discomfort will take place as we go through some growing edge and learn something new, that awareness in and of itself helps us be motivated to go and do that undertaking. So whatever your thing is that you want to learn to do, to meditate, to take a course, to apply for a new job, to be daring and go out on dates, or to be daring and go out and do some new activity, climb a new mountain, take some sports lesson, call your mother that you haven’t called for so long, all these things that give us a little bit of discomfort, we actually grow by acknowledging that it’s comfort and saying, in spite of it, I’m going to go through it. The growth is greater when we do that, our motivation is greater when we’re aware of the discomfort and kind of thinking through what we’re going to experience, and then in fact, we do go.

I mean, that’s what we all want. We’re either in this life growing or dying. So, in small degrees, I’m encouraging all of you to say, “What is it that I’m shying away from doing? What is it that I want that I’m not prepared to experience some discomfort to get?” And maybe make a plan to, in small ways, in incremental tiny steps, accept the discomfort, go forward, start that new thing and see what happens. The evidence would suggest that you will not only grow in that area that you were specifically interested in, but that you’ll learn to grow better and be more comfortable with discomfort. And goodness knows, the world is filled with challenges and hard things. So, why don’t we build the muscle to do them, accept them, and be content as we move through challenging times? That’s it for this week. If you like this kind of content, click the like button, share it with friends and family, maybe your HR director, and we’ll see you next week. Bye for now.