The Motivating Power Of Strategic Discomfort (And How To Use It To Grow Your Business)
Give yourself a lasting kick in the pants
Give yourself a lasting kick in the pants.
Often we start out a new project or goal with enthusiasm only to see that days or weeks later we’ve lost steam. How do we keep ourselves motivated to show up day after day consistently until we reach our goal?
In 1958 two ships in Lituya Bay, Alaska came into contact with a wave that was taller than the Empire State Building. One boat was completely destroyed, the other was unharmed.
When Howard Ulrich, the captain of the surviving vessel, saw the giant swell, he realized that he was too close to get out of the way. Instead, he pointed his ship into the wave. Amazingly, his ship rose above the treetops before it slid down the other side. He, and the only passenger, his 7-year old son, were not hurt and the boat was still seaworthy.
What motivated Ulrich to take such a risk?
The alternative was to have his ship smashed to pieces. Often when we have a goal, we can do something about it today, tomorrow, or never. But most of us, when pressed into a corner, take decisive action just like Ulrich. How can we create a similar need to act immediately when it comes to achieving our long-term goals? One way is to use strategic discomfort.
What is strategic discomfort?
It is discomfort that gets you moving in the desired direction. A feeling that makes you want to take action now. We all have things we’d rather not do but we get them done if we must to avoid pain.
Thousands show up to post offices in the US minutes before midnight on April 15th, the day their taxes are due, to avoid the discomfort of paying a fine. Many return library books at the last minute, to avoid punishment to their wallets. When I was in college, I paid my credit card bills at the last possible moment to avoid late fees.
No one likes to feel bad. If we can avoid bad feelings, we will.
Often strategic discomfort is something others use to get us to do what they want. Fortunately, we can harness this same tactic to get things done that we’ve been putting off for days, months, or even years.
So how do we create the discomfort that gets us out of a rut?
We use the two-step follow-through system:
First, we decide on the behavior we want to do.
Second, we create a situation that will make us uncomfortable if we don’t take action.
For example, my client Eddie wanted to build his coaching business. He wasn’t doing everything he needed to take to make this happen. Potential earnings were literally walking out the door for months.
He met with a friend whose mother was disabled. This friend said his other could get around much better if she had a motorized chair. Unfortunately, she couldn’t afford one. Eddie promised his friend that he’d get her a chair as a way to help her but also to motivate himself to build his business. Within a month, he sold his first $5,000 program.
Only when he made a goal to help his friend’s mom get a motor chair did he commit to doing everything it took to make that happen. He couldn’t imagine letting his friend down.
Before my first daughter was born, I was running about 40 miles a week. By the time we had our second daughter a few years later, I was barely running at all. I wanted to get back into shape and knew that I needed to start small. However, I had a hard time sticking to a running plan amidst all my other responsibilities.
So what did I do? I signed up with a website that would charge me $5 each day that I didn’t go for a run. Since then I’ve run almost every day for the past three months. The discomfort of losing a small amount of cash each day was enough to get me motivated to act consistently.
In each of these cases, the two-step system was followed: 1) Decide on a behavior, and 2) create discomfort when the desired action is not taken.
But why do we need motivational discomfort?
We’re often much more comfortable with the status quo than we realize. Getting in shape might feel like a wonderful idea in theory but in reality, when we get off work, we might like our routine of eating dinner then vegging out in front of the TV.
We might want to build a business and leave our job, but don’t do much about it. Maybe we have moments where we hate the job, but in reality, it provides quite a bit of security that we may be afraid to give up.
Comfort is … well … comforting. And doing something new could shake us up, create fear, frustration, and induce high doses of uncertainty. Why go from a certain comfort to uncertain discomfort? Often, the status quote is far too alluring as an alternative.
But if you make doing nothing painful, then you will get moving. So use the two-step system. Decide what you need to do. Then create a plan where you’ll experience discomfort if you don’t do it. You’ll find that you not only take action but sustain it for the long run.
We won’t all get a tsunami to force us to act now. But we can all create plans that make taking action nearly inevitable.
Final thoughts
Motivational discomfort is discomfort that gets you to do what you want to do. We create motivational discomfort in two steps: 1) Decide what to do, 2) create a plan that will make you feel discomfort if you don’t follow through.
When the status quo becomes so comfortable that we feel little need to act—that’s when it’s time to use motivational discomfort.
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