Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable

If you want a computer to understand you, you need to speak the computer’s language. If you want another human to understand you, likewise you need to speak their language. What is the equivalent to computer code that our human brains run on?

Stories.

Stories are powerful things that change the way we see the world. Look at the news: Trump, Brexit, anti-vaxxers. How you feel about each of these topics is not dictated by the facts; your feelings are shaped by the story you have on each. What is interesting is not that you are thinking ‘well, I have the right opinion because the facts are on my side.’ What is interesting is that the other side thinks exactly the same thing. This is not to say that it’s a 50/50 probability that Trump is no crook, Brexit is a good idea, or that you should avoid vaccinations; what I am saying is that the right story can make us very selective about the facts we weigh and the realities we dismiss. Indeed, in the face of the right story, the facts themselves may be judged as irrelevant.

So what is a story? In his book, Into the Woods, author John Yorke says that stories have a universal structure, a crisis moment at the start, resolved at the end. In the middle of the story, a decision is made in the face of challenge, and the challenge is in some way overcome.

1 Inciting incident

2 Challenge

3 Decision

4 Challenge overcome

5 Resolution

This is the shape of the story, and it is also the shape of the narratives we tell ourselves.

Here is an example. Traditionally comedies always end in a marriage, and I've always been uncomfortable with this as a trope because I think a marriage is a beginning, not an end. If you have a couple in which one partner thinks they have reached the resolution of their story, and one partner who feels they are at the beginning of theirs, you have a recipe for unhappiness.

This hardwired code for storytelling can get in the way of us living our best lives. Six months ago, I ran a marathon. Am I as fit now as I was then? No, I’ve slouched about and eaten my (growing) body weight in carrot cake since. I know that I should get back to the gym, and will... just as soon as I stop telling myself that I am ‘fit’ (5 - resolution) and remind myself that I am at a point of having to maintain my fitness in the long term (2 - challenge). Fitness, dedication to a job or putting your energy into a marriage should be an unending journey. Unfortunately, our brains tell us that the narrative arc is complete, and we lose the momentum to continue with the enthusiasm that success requires. My narrative arc closed when I crossed that finishing line, and it is very difficult to persuade myself that I am no longer a half-marathoner.

Successful brands are great examples of how this storytelling works. A good brand (story) will get us to buy things at inflated prices or don’t do quite what we want them to do. Coca-cola is not fulfilling the basic function of quenching thirst; it allows anyone from Alabama to Zimbabwe to buy a slice of the American Dream. Changing the brand (see: ‘New Coke’) is changing the story, and stories are resistant to change.

On a more personal level, how do we keep going to the gym, or plugging away at the job, or doing any of those long-haul things that we want to do? I suspect that we cannot break our programming completely; but we do need to hack it to achieve change.

Despair is an extreme emotion and in this model it represents a mismatch for whoever is feeling it; circumstances have pulled them from their comfortable Stage 5 Resolution and given them a Stage 1 Inciting Incident: unexpected disability, sudden loss of a friend or partner, redundancy: when an individual is taken sharply from one end of the process to the other, it is not easy for them, and the stages of grief (anger, bargaining, acceptance) are testimony to the difficult journey that people have to make.

Putting this together what I’d like to avoid is the idea that you are somehow deficient if you’re not prepared to go through with the discomfort of change. Guilt is not a helpful spur to positive action. If you don’t do the training, you won’t do the marathon, and if you don’t want to do the marathon, that’s fine. But don’t say you do want to do it, if you’re not prepared to put in some training runs. We all make compromises; look at yourself and things you consider ‘resolved’. Should they be? Are you prepared to put in the work and have the difficult conversations required to change how you regard those things? Are you sleepwalking in your job when you should be deciding to chase a promotion or look for another role? Alternatively, are you in a state of crisis about an issue that should really be considered ‘resolved’?

Moving forwards from crisis to resolution is hopefully fulfilling; but going backwards, finding yourself ‘starting again’ is painful - but maybe it doesn’t have to be.

Starting again is also starting fresh. And despair at turn into something else if we see ourselves at the beginning of a field of possibilities rather that at the end of a process. If we write our own story, we become our own hero in the drama of our lives, rather than the foot note in someone else's.

Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable may be too much to ask. But change - chosen or imposed - means choice: embrace or avoid. We write our own stories. The narratives we live make us who we are. Our stories are our character. And characters, like stories, are about the choices we make. As Gandalf says in The Lord of the Rings, ‘All we have to do is decide what we do with the time given to us.’ When we are resolved, we do nothing. When we face a challenge, we act - or allow our inaction to become part of our identity.

Being uncomfortable is part of the process of change. And while being comfortable is - well, comfortable - it isn’t where change happens. So to understand that the discomfort will end and be worth it, is the motivation we all sometimes need to change our story.

Thanks to my colleague Aya Gharbawi for suggesting this title.