Leading Through Discomfort

the moments that feel most uncomfortable are often the ones trying to teach us something.

A lot of leadership advice focuses on clarity. Articles all over the internet say leaders should “be decisive,” “set direction,” and “reduce uncertainty.”

It’s not wrong. But it’s incomplete.

The missing piece is that the best learning doesn’t happen when things feel clear. It happens when something feels uncomfortable, and we don’t yet know why.

That moment is where many leaders rush to act. We explain. We smooth. We reassert. We move things along. Comfort is restored, and everyone can breathe again.

It feels like progress, but mostly it isn’t.

Discomfort is usually a signal. If you remove it too quickly, you don’t just eliminate friction. You eliminate the opportunity to learn.

Discomfort Is Information

We’re trained, implicitly and explicitly, to treat discomfort as a problem.

Whether it’s an awkward silence in a meeting, a hard piece of feedback, or a reaction that doesn’t line up with our intent, the instinct is to fix it. Clarify the message. Correct the behavior. Adjust the plan. Make the feeling go away.

But discomfort isn’t always resistance. And it’s rarely incompetence. More often, it’s a sign that our current mental models are being stretched past their limits. Learning begins when the old explanations stop working cleanly.

As I write this, I’m thinking about an experience I had last week where I felt “off,” even though nothing was obviously wrong. The feeling was easy to dismiss. Instead, I paid attention to it.

Discomfort Is Not Danger

One of the traps leaders fall into is confusing discomfort with danger.

Some discomfort is a warning. You touch a hot stove, and the signal is clear. But a lot of leadership discomfort isn’t about immediate harm. It’s about uncertainty. About being unsure how to respond. About not having language yet.

That kind of discomfort isn’t telling you to stop. It’s telling you to slow down.

Peter Senge makes this point quietly in The Fifth Discipline: learning organizations don’t rush to closure. They stay with questions longer than feels efficient. They treat tension as information, not failure.

That’s harder than it sounds. Many leaders rush to solutions before they understand the problem.

Sitting with discomfort feels unproductive. It doesn’t look like leadership. It doesn’t come with a neat update or a confident answer.

But it’s often the most important work in the room.

Leading Around Discomfort

Many leaders try to lead around discomfort instead of through it. They add structure, or tighten controls. Sometimes, they just repeat expectations louder.

Sometimes those approaches work in the short term. Sometimes they even improve surface-level performance.

But underneath, the learning stalls. People stop exploring, they stop challenging assumptions, and they stop naming what feels off.

The organization becomes calmer and less curious at the same time.

That tradeoff is rarely explicit, but it’s real.

Why We Dodge It

There’s a reason this is hard.

Discomfort creates vulnerability, and vulnerability creates exposure. You might say the wrong thing. You might realize you don’t know as much as you thought. You might discover that something you’ve been relying on no longer fits.

That’s not a technical problem. It’s a human one.

In Leadership and Self-Deception, the authors describe how quickly we move to protect our sense of being “right,” even when that protection costs us learning. Discomfort threatens our identity as competent leaders. So we defend instead of explore.

The cost shows up later, when the same issues resurface in slightly different forms.

Unexamined discomfort doesn’t disappear. It just goes quiet when we choose to ignore it.

When The Reaction Is Bigger Than The Moment

One of the most useful things I’ve learned is to pay attention when my reaction is bigger than the moment seems to warrant.

That’s usually a clue.

When an emotion is disproportionate, it’s rarely about what just happened. It’s about a pattern being activated. Something familiar. Something subconscious. Something unresolved.

We don’t need to psychoanalyze it in real time. We don’t need to understand it right away.

We just need to notice it.

Curiosity is often the difference between growth and repetition.

As I mentioned earlier, I felt “off” last week. Instead of dismissing it, I treated it as something worth paying attention to. I spent time thinking. I wrote about it. I talked it through with someone I trust.

Nothing dramatic happened. But I understood the signal better than I did before.

Whether it’s a leadership challenge where a message doesn’t land as you expect, or something more personal where things just feel off, the move is the same. Don’t rush past the discomfort. Take a little time to understand what it’s pointing at.

Once you can name it, learning becomes possible. Sometimes the discomfort fades. Sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, you’re no longer reacting blindly. You’re choosing how to respond.

In Practice

Leading through discomfort doesn’t mean wallowing in it. It means staying present long enough to understand what it’s pointing at.

That might look like asking one more question instead of making a statement. Or naming uncertainty instead of covering it with confidence. Or letting a pause sit in the room a beat longer than feels polite.

These are small moves. They don’t feel heroic. They rarely get praised.

But they compound.

Over time, teams learn that discomfort isn’t punished. It’s explored. Learning accelerates not because people are braver, but because the environment makes curiosity safer than certainty.

In An Everyone Culture, Kegan and Lahey describe organizations that treat personal growth as part of the work, not a side project. What stands out isn’t the frameworks. It’s the willingness to stay with discomfort long enough for something new to emerge.

That willingness is a leadership choice.

The Uncomfortable Truth

There’s an uncomfortable truth embedded in all of this.

Leaders who grow aren’t the ones who feel the least discomfort. They’re the ones who don’t rush to eliminate it.

They recognize that learning often feels like friction before it feels like progress. They accept that growth rarely arrives fully formed. It shows up as tension, confusion, and moments where the old answers stop working.

If you want to learn faster, don’t ask how to be more comfortable.

Ask what you’re avoiding feeling,

Then stay with it just long enough to learn what it has to teach you.