Work and Cold Showers

Ready, set, freeze

Every morning at about 8:45, cold water hits my body as conflicting feelings of discomfort, willpower and mental fortitude battle it out. For the last several years I’ve been starting my showers with cold water. As a quick aside, I realize this is baby stuff compared to a retired Navy Seal friend of mine who spends several minutes every morning in a deep freezer filled with 40 degree water. He’s living his best life so more power to him!

While some claim there are health benefits to shocking our bodies with icy water, the practice has taken on a new meaning and purpose for me.

I use those few seconds to remind myself of a couple of things. First, I can do uncomfortable things and they won’t kill me or even hurt me. Second, it’s a metaphor for life - a reminder that sometimes life is “cold.”?Maybe we’re lonely, out of work, stressed, underpaid, struggling with addiction, out of shape, in a rut, sacrificing to provide for a family or (fill in the blank with your struggle here.)

A few seconds of cold water reminds me that it will eventually get warm. When I’m struggling, it won’t last forever. It’s been a good mental and emotional exercise. Every morning I prep myself for discomfort.?

Then, at about 8:45 this morning, something happened.

As I turned the handle of the shower, expecting frigid water out of the main shower head, it came out of the hand shower hanging a foot to the right. My wife had given our young daughter a shower last night with the hand shower and hadn’t turned the diverter knob back to the main shower head.?

As the freezing water hit my body from a different angle, I felt myself react in complete surprise, and realized that I’d conditioned myself for a certain kind of discomfort but was completely unprepared for a different version of it.?

That got me thinking. We intellectually realize life, work and relationships are going to have their challenges and we get used to anticipating the challenges that often come along with the different roles we play.?

But what happens when a challenge hits us seemingly out of nowhere - when one of our kids is diagnosed with a lifelong condition, when our company is acquired and everything feels like it’s changing or when we find out a spouse or partner has been hiding an addiction or affair.?

What can we do when we’re put in a position of discomfort we’re not used to, but that has to be dealt with? Of course there are several different answers and approaches depending on the context. I’ll share a couple of things I’ve learned that have helped me.?

Step back

Our instincts can serve us well. When the cold water hit me in the shower in a way I wasn’t expecting, my natural reaction was to step away from the water. That doesn’t mean I gave up on taking a shower. While our initial reaction may be to get away from the discomfort, we often still have to deal with it. We can pause, gather our thoughts, think things through and then respond from a place of calm and presence, rather than from a place of reaction.

For example, when we get a piece of negative feedback from our boss, the initial reaction may be to end the conversation as quickly as possible and write our boss off as a jerk who doesn’t understand us. If emotions within us are high in the moment, it’s probably best to step away from the situation and allow those emotions to run their course.?

However, just like we still need to take a shower, we still need to interact with our boss regularly. We can’t avoid them forever. So, after a pause, we can find the right time to have a deeper conversation about the feedback, ask more questions and come up with ideas to make positive change.

Practice perspective

When we experience the unexpected, our brains can make us feel like it’s a much bigger deal than it actually is. My brain definitely interpreted the freezing water as danger, which is the reason my natural reaction was to get away from it. But after stepping back, I was able to process the fact that cold water isn’t actually going to kill me and I can get back in.

For example, we might bomb a presentation to a client. We leave the room thinking the worst. We aren’t going to close the deal, we’ll likely get demoted or even fired and the whole company will fail because of our incompetence. OK I may have gone a little overboard, but you know what it feels like. Most of us have been in that place in our heads.?

The reality is that our interpretation of what happened is only our interpretation. The client may have heard exactly what they needed to hear. And even if they didn’t, and we don’t close the deal - we’re not gonna die, there will be other clients and the company is probably going to be just fine.?

We’re all going to make mistakes but most of those mistakes are what retired submarine captain David Marquet calls “above the water” mistakes. They aren’t going to sink the ship. So, let’s give ourselves a little grace and practice perspective.?

Habits stick

Unexpected discomfort is inevitable and feels like it comes out of nowhere. How we respond to it can be deliberate and intentional even though we’re not prepared for it. The ability to respond in that way is a result of how we systematically approach everything else in our lives. When we make it a habit of stepping back and practicing perspective, those habits guide our actions and decisions in times of unexpected discomfort.