Inviting Discomfort to the Table

*Originally given as a talk at LillyX, a TED event at Eli Lilly and Company in May 2019

We so often hear, “get out of your comfort zone.” There’s this notion of pushing, of forcing, of shocking our system, of removing ourselves from our selves to enter this external, uncomfortable place where we miraculously move forward. And if we’re a part of a team, we, all outside of comfort, are meant to move forward together. But what if, instead, we cultivated zones of discomfort within ourselves? What if, rather than force ourselves into places outside of our comfort, we welcomed, invited discomfort into our comfortable spaces, into ourselves?

That’s what happened when I decided to establish a commune with three other women for two years in college. For us, a commune meant an intentional community where we would strictly and whole-heartedly share all responsibilities, including all income and expenses, food and belongings, cooking and cleaning, and we would share all decisions through complete consensus. We envisioned this would create the ultimate home, a warm refuge where we could live in revolutionary togetherness and in shared belonging. Our home was meant to be our total comfort zone, a place where we were our fullest selves, a space in which we were deeply engaged as who we are.

We couldn’t leave ourselves behind, pushing into an unknown space outside our comfort, letting go of the space that made us relax into who we were, but in order to create the community that we wanted, one that brought everyone along equally as we challenged and progressed ourselves forward, we also couldn’t only be comfortable. If we wanted to create a table where we could all show up and give our fullest selves, that meant our discomfort needed to come along, too.

It started at the grocery story. In our first few days, we walked through every single aisle together to establish our exact shared shopped list, down to the brand, that we would take turns fetching every week, and we got into a passive aggressive, huffy fight about apples. Some of us wanted organic, some wanted fuji, others were prepared to run for the cheapest option of the week. Ultimately, we all, frustrated, resigned to get the cheapest option because, when in doubt, we could at least all fall back on our common fear of bankruptcy.

But we hadn’t truly reached consensus, we had just all said yes. We hadn’t all felt heard and we weren’t ‘thinking together’ as the roots of the word consensus imply. We were left with a bitter resistance to having to make further decisions as a unit if they were all going to end in frustrated sighs and settling. It was only an apple, but we were losing investment in communal progression, losing willingness to throw our whole selves into holding our community accountable to its best self.

We were each uncomfortable in the produce section that day and in those that followed, but we didn’t understand its shape or origin and we certainly hadn’t welcomed its presence.

After a few days of grumbling in resentment every time we looked at the fruit bowl, one of us asked if, embarking upon a life of shared resources and risks, we should have a talk about money. We all said yes, not truly knowing what we were getting ourselves into but liking the idea of being a community that could discuss the hard things and holding tight to a shared vision of our home being that revolution, that evolution of our best selves together, that something different in the world of division around us. And so began our first “round table”.

On a long road trip, much akin to a work environment where you can’t just walk out, we took turns stating our monthly expense limit. But rather than stop there, confused why some were placing such hard and fast restraints on spending and unknown anxiety building up in us, pushing us to shut down and go back to that place by the apples when we said ‘fine, whatever you want’, holding back ourselves and compromising our consensus, we began to ask of each other: what’s behind that tension in your voice right now? You hesitated just then…what’s giving you pause? Where is that defensiveness coming from? What’s creating that hard line for you? What is the shape and story of your agitation when we bring this up, or that?

That was the shock to the system, we were officially outside any zone of comfort. But we weren’t going to get anywhere unless we took those questions and asked them of ourselves, letting the discomfort they were illuminating exist in us openly.

And, slowly, we peeled back layer upon layer until we were discussing how family financial stress growing up had made us hyper-cautious around spending and how family history of cancer made us hyper-vigilant around food quality no matter the cost and how some of us just didn’t have enough money in the bank for more.

We still bought the cheapest apples, but eggs would always be organic and we set a hard and fast rule to never spend more than $5.50 on wine, and we didn’t all love it all the time but we all believed in the choice and we all knew why we made it.

Since those communal days, during my experiences in global health, international sustainable development, and children’s hospice care, I’ve approached every table at which I’ve found myself questioning where discomfort was in relation to it.

Was it shoved out of the room, when we hear that, “get out of your comfort zone” command? Was it in the corner, supposedly out of our eyesight but still quite present? Was it the centerpiece, controlling our every move? Was it on a pedestal, being lauded over action? And had it forced, exploded, sidled, or snuck in, or had we invited it? And what would happen if I approached each table as if it were the round one from my commune, intent on creating a community that was such a space of comfort that it challenged and encouraged us to pull up a chair with all of ourselves, including the discomfort within us?

While working on the beaches of the Greek island of Lesvos during the height of the 2015 refugee crisis, there were times when the sorrow of what suffering humans had driven each other to felt paralyzing. But rather than let ourselves grow stuck with our discomfort with the state of humanity out in front of us like a road block, and rather than shoving it away such that it nagged at the corners of our mind, distracting us, we called it to the campfire where the volunteers from all around the world gathered each evening. We asked ourselves: how do we reconcile this? And every response came in the form of a new question. And then, without any answers but with that deep discomfort openly within us, we would walk out to the beach when the next rubber boat arrived, and find it fueling our compassion. Welcoming all of our wrestling within us, space could open for us to welcome the stranger in need of refuge before us.

But then I got to South Africa to complete my masters research on the good death for dying children in resource-limited settings, expecting to exist in the hospice culture of the United States that is built around creating open space for life alongside the discomfort of death. Instead, I was told it would be culturally insensitive and highly distressing to parents if I were to invite their discomfort to the table in the way I was used to, not even allowed to bring the word ‘death’ itself to our conversations. And suddenly it was my discomfort at the table: was I going to pull up a chair for it, or not? I could change my study, assuming that if we couldn’t discuss death openly then the American understanding of good death couldn’t occur, making my research question void. Or I could invite my discomfort into the room, letting the taboo and the fear and the avoidance stay with us.

Rather than forcing the parents to be comfortable discussing death, what if I let myself be uncomfortable not discussing it? So I entered every interview asking only: “will you tell me about your child?” As a researcher, I was deeply uneasy, having no idea if anything meaningful would emerge. As I later listened to the recordings and began my analysis, I had to ask myself over and over: where is your discomfort? Are you pretending it isn’t in you? And is that hastening your judgment about what you hear? But by asking my discomfort to come along with me and inviting myself to wrestle with every word that was said, a whole new picture took shape as parents filled the open space with stories illustrating where they felt fear, where they found joy, and what helped them create meaning through their child’s illness and death. Surely, I was outside my comfort zone, but without welcoming an internal conversation with my discomfort I could have gotten it all wrong.

In sustainable development work it’s frequently said that our goal is to work ourselves out of a job. We should be working in such a way that creates a world where we are no longer needed, or where the positive impact of our work does not depend upon our presence. It can be pretty uncomfortable, and sometimes requires you to step aside and do nothing when faced with an easy, bandaid fix for the immediate problem to wait for the long-term, lasting, improvement for the whole. As an organization in pursuit of sustainable change, you must be in a constant process of keeping yourself, individually and collectively, honest, requiring, ideally, a sort of constant internal level of discomfort.

Just the other day I received a message from a staff member in the field painting a difficult picture of a peer’s choice between meeting the acute need of someone standing right in front of them and stepping aside, watching that one person struggle in favor of a more lasting betterment of the whole. They knew what they needed to do, how they needed to challenge their peer, they knew the choice they believed in, but they were hesitant, uneasy, wrestling. As a manager, I could have reacted in many ways. I could have spouted sustainable development theory at them, could have told them what to do as if they didn’t already know and as if their distress wasn’t real, could have painted the path as one in which you get on board and get outside your comfort zone, or you get off.

But what we need as a team is for all of our staff to engage with their fullest selves, not to forgo who they are to charge into discomfort. Nonprofit organizations are thinly staffed and we are often faced with suffering in our daily work…it is challenging, and requires us to all show up to work with our fullest passion and fullest belief in the actions we take as a team so that we can push ourselves forward with our fullest drive.

We need our team to be that revolutionary community, a trusting space where we have room to breathe even when it’s uncomfortable so that we can hold ourselves to collective account as we ‘think together’. What this staff member needed was encouragement of that internal zone of discomfort they were cultivating and a welcoming invitation for it to join our table. So I responded by saying: “this is hard, sometimes this feels awful, when it gets easy is when we know we’re off the right path.”

Our commune was never perfect. Inviting discomfort to the table is necessarily messy and bringing all of yourself to ever conversation can be tiring and time-consuming. After our money talk, our round tables moved to religion, principles, and doubt. Then it was death, family, fear, redemption. In doing so, we learned that what brought us to the table was not the same and that our places at it each looked very different. Our assumptions about each other no longer held true, we could no longer pretend that we were in perfect harmony or that equality of voice would come naturally through similarity. But welcoming that discomfort opened space to challenge: sometimes illuminating where our discomfort had moved in front of us, rather than alongside us or where it should be giving us necessary pause or sometimes just all ending up somewhere a little further through collective questioning. We weren’t all comfortable with every decision, some of us are still complaining about those apples, but we moved forward together through every one because we were each in every one.

So I’d encourage you to think: are you walking up to the table intent on creating a community where you can all engage as your fullest selves? If so, where is your discomfort? Have you shoved it out of the team meeting? Have you suppressed it from the conversation, until it exploded? Or is it just heard in whispers around the office? And what’s that pause in your sentence telling you? What are the questions nagging at your mind, distracting you? Are you letting the answers you don’t have paralyze you? Are you forcing the discomfort of others without welcoming your own? Are you hiding it away, when it needs to be in the light, challenging a new way? Are you only showing up with part of yourself, because your discomfort isn’t welcomed?

This is your table. Don’t run off to some other zone, leaving yourself behind – we could all miss out. But sit down with your discomfort, too. Peel back the layers and embrace the rawness, we’ve got apples to buy.