Comfortable vs. Familiar

If you’ve read this blog for very long, you know that I have occasionally gleaned nuggets of wisdom from my Peloton instructors. I was on a 20 minute Climb Ride yesterday with Peloton instructor, Emma Lovewell. Climb rides generally focus on pushing resistance and occasionally combine that with cadence pushes. Emma (I think we’re on a first-name basis) gave us a heads up early in the ride that today was to be just such a day. She wanted us to be ready to push to new levels and said something very close to “It’s not about being comfortable. It’s not supposed to comfortable. But I do want you be familiar when you’re doing hard things.”

I loved it!

The nature of my work with with my coachees and with my consulting clients puts me right in the middle of their “hard”. In my own Personal Leadership Philosophy (PLP), I include, “Achieving greatness is hard. So I cannot be surprised when things are hard when we’re trying to do something great.”

Many, the big part of the bell curve, avoid hard in favor of comfort. Listen, I’m preaching to myself here. I like me some comfort! But I have to choose to be intentional about accepting the hard that comes with leadership. But this is where I love yesterday’s point of FAMILIAR.

With experience of having done hard and uncomfortable before, it can breed a familiarity that can serve us well.

• That, oh yeah, things can get hard.

• That it’s (often) our job to confront hard and get uncomfortable.

• That we (often) need to lead others to do the same.

• That we have done hard before… and succeeded… and grew stronger… and that can give us the confidence to know we can do this version of hard, too.

2024 will no doubt bring some hard and discomfort our way. As leaders, we would do well to check our familiarity index - ours, our team’s, our organization’s - and be ready to lean into that familiar space that can get us through and on to the next level.