Going through change can bring a lot of discomfort. I faced it myself a lot as I have worked on a lot of transformation projects in my corporate job. I faced it as an employee and I faced it as a leader.
This is truly upsetting when you don’t know how to manage your thoughts about this. This brings feelings like doubt, confusion. This brings uncertainty at different levels and your primitive brain freaks out.
Discomfort enables growth
As humans, we really don’t like discomfort. Our first reaction to this is usually fear with fight or flight mode. Whether we want to escape the situation, or we want to fight because this feels unfair to us.
But both are energy consuming, especially when we are in ambiguity. This happens a lot while running a transformation and this is part of the deal.
However, I now see uncertainty and discomfort as many opportunities to learn new soft skills and grow.
Discomfort can really make yourself more powerful if you’re willing to embrace it.
Bring resilience into your life
A great skill that you can specifically develop while working in an uncertain environment is definitely resilience. Resilience is the ability to recover your emotional balance after what you consider a tough event.
When you are in a changing environment, it is a great skill to have because it will help you get confidence in your ability to recover from adversity.
The researches from Pr Richard Davidson proves that resilience is part of the emotional profiles that we can train. He suggests two methods for this: mindfulness meditation and cognitive restructuring. https://beckinstitute.org/restructuring-negative-core-beliefs/
Take advantage of discomfort to grow
Another great opportunity you can take while in discomfort, is to develop the way you think about your context. Finding strategies for yourself, to overcome uncertainty, in managing your thoughts and emotions.
- You can decide to develop curiosity, in order to find out about new opportunities for yourself, or just understand your context better, instead of staying in confusion.
- You can define a goal for yourself, so that you grow at the same time as identifying a way to stick to something instead of staying in doubt.
- You can work on accepting your feelings, instead of fighting them and losing all your energy.
- You can learn perseverance in trying new things and fail until you reach a goal, instead of staying overwhelmed.
All of these strategies are generating growth for yourself.
Which one will you pick up?
