Getting Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable
More experience doesn’t give you more answers, but it helps you manage the questions.
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Early in my career, I was sure that the more experienced CEOs had all the answers. They seemed so calm under pressure, so confident in their decisions while I was freaking out all the time. My hope was that, eventually, I would get enough experience so I had all the answers as well.
Well, after 20 years that never happened.
I’m sorry to report that experience does not give you all the answers, there are always new problems that you’ve never seen before. Even worse, business changes over time and the solutions you learned 10 years ago aren’t relevant anymore. The playing field is constantly shifting and the game is not waiting for you to master it before changing.
Experience does give you a playbook, but instead of being a useful tool it has half the pages torn out and the remaining half are blurry and hard to read.
At the same time, experience does help you feel calm under pressure. It does help you feel more confident in your decisions. I am a much better CEO than I was 20 years ago, even if most of my experience is no longer relevant. So, what happens?
Experience makes you more comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Those experienced CEOs I looked up to early in my career didn’t have all the answers, but they knew no one had all the answers. They had gotten comfortable with handling new problems, with dealing with big problems and with making mistakes. They had been uncomfortable for so long that it no longer distracted them.
That’s what happened to me. I’m calm under pressure because I know we can figure things out, not because I have an answer. I am confident in my decisions because I’ve made mistakes before and I know the worst case scenarios aren’t that bad. I know I’ve found a way through the darkness before, and I know I can do it again.
That doesn’t mean that leadership is less stressful. In some ways, the longer you are a leader the more stressful it becomes! Success brings with it expectations of more success, and eventually you become afraid of failure. That brings even more stress.
But experience also helps you manage your stress. That stress is part of the discomfort, and getting comfortable with it does not mean it goes away. It just means you get better at managing it and not letting it distract you.
If you are at the beginning of your career as a leader, don’t worry if you are scared, stressed and uncomfortable. We all feel those same things, no matter how many years of experience we have. You are not alone, it’s just that some of us have gotten comfortable with them.
And you will too! Just give it time.
For more on Mental Health, see:
My mentors call this feeling "the fear." When youger folks I know strike out on their own, they ask me when the fear goes away. I tell them it never goes away, you just learn to love it.