When we feel discomfort — especially around being seen or sharing our truth — the instinct is to try to overcome it, manage it, or push past it. But this very effort to get comfortable is what disconnects us. The alternative is to speak from the discomfort rather than from the desire to overcome it.
In a coaching session, Joe asked a woman struggling with sharing her story to walk right into the middle of her discomfort and speak from there. The moment she stopped trying to manage the discomfort and instead let her authentic frustration out — “I think there’s a lot of really stupid, unhelpful things that people recommend” — everyone could feel a palpable shift. She was suddenly fully present.
“Speak from the discomfort rather than from the desire to overcome it.”
The trying to be comfortable creates a dissociative, out-of-body experience. Sitting in the discomfort and letting it be the ground from which you speak paradoxically creates the most authentic, connected communication. The discomfort doesn’t need to be solved — it needs to be inhabited.
Related Concepts
- Discomfort is the resistance, not the emotion
- Being with emotions beats fixing them
- Avoidance is the stuckness, not the feeling
- Owning the trigger as yours dissolves the fight
- Intensifying a feeling moves you through it rather than trapping you
- Truth is a felt experience, not a performance
- Trying to feel your feelings is as much resistance as trying not to feel them
- Fully feeling a pattern ends it without figuring anything out