You Should Suffer More
This is absolutely ridiculous, right?
Life is hard - performing at a high level consistently is harder. Why would you want to up the difficulty level on yourself on purpose?
The short answer:
important things are difficult to accomplish.
Your deepest desires, your big dreams, the stuff that really matters, will require you to rock and roll with discomfort daily.
The long answer…
We make choices. Our choices influence our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Done over the course of days, weeks, and months, these become habits. And character is habit long done. If your aim is to push yourself to be better, to perform at a high level and to continue moving the bar higher,
you’d better make friends with discomfort.
We all know Goldilocks.
We’re looking for the same thing she was looking for. Time in our comfort zone is lovely, and doesn’t get us much growth.
Time in the Danger Zone is overwhelming, exhausting, and doesn’t get us much growth.
Hanging out in your Zone of Tolerable Discomfort, working towards a purposeful goal?
That’s where the magic happens!
Finding the Goldilocks Zone takes awareness and a willingness to get risky. Finding our ZTD means we have to try and come up short sometimes.
Our inability to hang in our Zone of Tolerable Discomfort shows up in both big and little ways.
Easing off the last rep in a drill during practice because you’re tired
Skipping recovery/stretching/etc. because it’s “not fun”
Ignoring your weaknesses and only working on what you’re already good at in training
Passing up opportunities to have open, honest conversations with teammates, coaches, or significant others because the conversation may cause some friction in your relationship.
Look - discomfort and suffering without a clear purpose isn’t useful at all.
I’m not here to tell you to beat yourself up for no good reason.
And, each time we choose the comfortable route, we’re building that habit.
Each time we choose to pursue a meaningful, challenging, uncomfortable goal with commitment, we’re building that habit instead.
If we can practice systematic discomfort, and start grooving the path to our Zone of Tolerable Discomfort -
You’re building a habit that accelerates your growth in practice, and unlocks your ability to perform under pressure.
