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Very often, if some change you’re making feels uncomfortable, that’s a good sign. That’s a sign that it is challenging, fairly deeply conditioned things inside you. I’m not talking about things that just on a deep intuitive level feel wrong. Right? Our intuitions are very useful and important to trust. But the kind of low level discomfort that comes from, like, adopting a new habit, working in a different way, you should expect it to feel awkward.
There’s a sort of related phenomenon where certain kinds of advice and certain kinds of personal development make me want to kind of cringe. I don’t want to read about self-compassion because that seems kind of like yucky. That is a sign that you’re onto something. This is something I’ve learned after too long. That feeling of, “Oh, I don’t want to go there. That’s not my kind of thing,” is very often a defense mechanism against the fact that this material has touched something vulnerable in you and you think that by being sort of sardonic and funny and dismissing it as cringe, you’re going to protect yourself from it.
Something to remember when it comes to moving forwards with things that feel awkward because they are new and because they represent some kind of growth, something that’s being challenged inside you, is to be willing to work in incredibly tiny increments. One question that I think could be very useful to ask yourself is what version of something you’re willing to do. Maybe it’s not speaking in front of an audience of a thousand people that I’m working to here. Maybe it’s not, you know, going on sabbatical for six months. But gradually lowering that boundary. What is it? And maybe it is some very, very small version where you will actually find once you lower, lower, lower, “Oh, okay. Yes. I could do that fifteen minutes. I could go into that setting and talk to that number of people.” And it’s fascinating. There almost always is some level at which you’re willing.
Meditation is a good example. People think that what they’re supposed to be doing is following their breaths and stopping their thoughts. But, actually, that process of getting it wrong as it were, getting distracted, realizing you’ve been distracted, and coming back to following your breath, that’s the bit where the growth happens. Right? It’s a bit where you fail, and then you sort of gently resume is where the action happens. Otherwise, if you could just put your attention on your breath and and sail through, there would be kind of, in some sense, no point.