Ep #2: Discomfort + Doing New Things with Don Neufeld

Emily
Welcome to Emotional Leadership, the podcast for high achieving leaders. Because healthier emotional lives means stronger leadership, thriving teams, and much bigger results.

Welcome leaders! I am so glad to be here with you today. Are you ready to learn how to take the second step of creating big results and moving towards your dreams, whatever they are? Today we’re going to talk about how to stop distracting yourself. Remember, the only three things you need to do to reach your goals: set clear vision, stop distracting yourself, and plan and take massive action.

In this episode, I’m going to be teaching you why your brain tries to distract you from your goals and how to start breaking that cycle. And to do that, we have to talk about a very underrated emotion. Today, we’re going to be talking about discomfort with my guest, Don Neufeld from ClassPass. Before we dive into the conversation with Don, I want to tell you where discomfort comes from and why it’s critical that you be willing to feel discomfort if you want to reach your goals.

This is a tale of two brains, or rather, two parts of your brain. The pre-frontal cortex is the modern human part of our brain. It’s what lets us plan for the future and trade off immediate pleasure for delayed gratification. It competes for our attention with the limbic system, the primitive lizard part of our brain. [The limbic system] loves us very much. It’s built to help us survive and it is very good at it. This means our limbic system is always looking for danger. The problem is, that’s outdated. Most of us live modern lives that are pretty safe and for most of us, stagnation is actually riskier than doing new things. But the best I can guess, is that this part of our brain is set to see the top X percent of danger as possibly fatal. This is what makes us act like saying the wrong thing while public speaking might actually kill us. Intellectually, we know that’s wrong. But in our body it feels so possible, right?

In fact, this part of our brain lives by a set of rules that mean doing anything new is deeply discouraged. It has a manifesto left over from when food was scarce and we were likely to die if we strayed too far from the familiar. It’s called the motivational triad: avoid pain, seek pleasure, and be efficient. The big reason our brain pushes back on us doing new things isn’t even because it thinks they’re dangerous. It’s just because our limbic systems notion of being efficient is a little limited. It thinks that doing the things we already have strong patterns and experience doing is FOR SURE the most efficient thing and THE BEST possible option. But you’ve worked with a team to improve their effectiveness–we know that real efficiency comes from reflection and change and optimizing for the long-term.

The thing is, our limbic system doesn’t have a real notion of the long-term. That’s why we developed the prefrontal cortex. Taking on new goals means doing new things outside of our brains familiar pathways. Our primitive brain perceives this as inefficient and opening us up to pain, so it responds by telling us lots of stories about how uncomfortable it will be to take on that goal or action.

What I want you to know is you can choose to forge new paths anyway. It’s not even that hard. Your limbic system is sneaky, but I’m going to show you the tools to recognize that siren song to replace growth and big wins with Netflix and micromanagement, so you can stop distracting yourself from the big results you’re creating. You just need to be willing to feel the discomfort your limbic system will create while you do it.

So now that you know why your brain creates discomfort, let’s talk with Don about how that shows up at work. Then I’ll meet you back at the end of the episode and show you how to recognize the sneaky BS your limbic system is feeding you, so that you can do part two of our big results formula and stop distracting yourself.

Begin Guest Segment

Emily
Good morning, Don. How are you?

Don
I’m very well, Emily, how are you?

Emily
Good. I’m so excited to have you here. Tell our audience, who are you?

Don
Hi, I’m Don. I’m the VP of Engineering at ClassPass. I’ve been an engineering leader for over 20 years. I’ve founded a company, I was the CTO at Medium, I ran an ad network. And I care a lot about people. I think for me, one of the things that was transformative about my life has been my experience as a special needs dad. I have a 14 year old with very severe cerebral palsy, and that experience really helped me grow and become the leader I am today.

Emily
How did that experience feed into your leadership?

Don
I think that one of the things about a personal situation like that is that there are elements of it which are utterly beyond your control. And I think as someone who came from an engineering background, we believe that we can change the world. We believe that we can build anything, we can do anything. But ultimately that’s just not true. There are limits. And that experience for me was I think my first real encounter with limits of things that were beyond my ability to control.

Emily
Yeah. I think the nuance for me is always, we can create any result we want, which means we can create any feeling for ourselves. We can create a set of outcomes in the world if we’re willing to work hard enough, but we can never change the circumstances.

Don
I think that’s right.

Emily
So what do you love about leading and managing?

Don
One of the things that I love is watching people become better versions of themselves. I think that we all have the capability of being incredible people and being fully realized. And for me the ability to watch that and be part of that and help someone get someplace that they otherwise might have never been able to is profoundly rewarding.

Emily
How do you define better?

Don
Well I would throw that right back onto the person thinking about their own life because better is always about what we want for ourselves. And one of the things about that includes figuring out what we want for ourselves. One of the things about life and especially work is that, many of the things that come at us are societally defined. Life tells us what we should want. And one of the real struggles of growing up, I think, is separating ourselves from what society tells us we should want versus what we truly want for ourselves. It can be different, it can be less, it could be more, but it’s always unique.

Emily
I think that is such a great lead in to our topic for today, which is talking about discomfort and how we have to be willing to feel it in order to get the things that we want. We do hear so many messages from around us on what’s expected for where we go with our lives and what getting better in the means and it can be really uncomfortable to choose goals, choose dreams that don’t fit with exactly what we’ve been hearing from outside of ourselves, whether that’s media, our parents, our culture. How have you helped folks kind of step outside that discomfort and choose the dreams that are really actually exciting to them personally?

Don
I think it’s helpful to talk with someone about what you’re thinking about and then to either analyze your own or ask them to analyze your language. This is something that I didn’t realize was happening for me until my therapist pointed it out–and plug for therapy here, everyone should have one. In my case, it was a presence of the word “should” in ways that I wasn’t even thinking about that really highlighted the degree to which I was taking in other expectations of myself. And so I might suggest you start there, just try to talk about what you’re thinking of doing and why you’re thinking of doing it and see what it comes out. And every time you encounter the word “should” ask yourself, okay, what’s that doing there? Where’s that coming from?

Emily
Yes. To kind of dive in to the idea of discomfort at work, where are some places that you notice yourself feeling discomfort as a leader, as a manager?

Don
I think there’s a couple of different kinds of discomfort. Obviously, there’s the discomfort that we feel personally. Then there’s also the discomfort that we cause in others. And there’s the discomfort about the discomfort. Obviously discomfort we feel ourselves is the strongest, the biggest force. It can be everything from, I’m worried I don’t meet expectations, to, I have generalized anxiety about what’s going on. It’s a pretty visceral thing to feel in your body. Whereas something like discomfort in others might be experienced as avoidance in yourself–I don’t want to make someone else uncomfortable, so I’m not going to ask that question. I’m not going to make that request of them. I’m not going to challenge that statement. Because that might creating discomfort in them or other people in the room.

Emily
Yeah. And why is creating discomfort for other people in the room a problem?

Don
Well, for some people it’s not.

Emily
That is fair! For so many of us it is though.

Don
But I don’t know if we’re talking to those people in this conversation. It’s a reflection of that feeling about discomfort in ourselves. Our mirror neurons know that the thing that we dread feeling ourselves will be created in others and so we don’t want to do that to them. We’re nice people. We’re trying to be productive and constructive and and all those positive things and I think that’s in some ways that’s the discomfort about the discomfort, which is we’re uncomfortable with the idea that discomfort can be a tool. It can be intentional. Have you ever been in a conversation where there’s a really long pause?

Emily
Oh yes, I cause them call the time.

Don
That can be intentional. Things can happen in that space that you create when you created discomfort.

Emily
This is actually one of my favorite tools with my team. We’ll ask them a question and then I will just be quiet until someone talks. And it requires me being willing to allow so much discomfort in my brain, because when I stopped talking and they’re not talking, I can hear all the voices in my head that tell me my question was wrong and that’s why they don’t have an immediate answer and I’m bad at my job and now they’re not going to trust me anymore because I haven’t helped them think quickly enough. And in reality, what’s happening is I asked a question and they want to think a little bit about the answer because if I’m asking questions, we all already know the answer to, why am I doing that?

Don
Yeah. That spiral that happens inside when there’s nothing to stop it and it just keeps going is real!

Emily
Yes. So what is the experience of discomfort like for you? What happens in your brain? What happens in your body?

Don
Certainly tension, a tension and maybe sort of a mid body stomach kind of feel, clenching, maybe dread–depending on the degree of discomfort, I think it sort of gets into that zone. If we’re really going there, you might sweat a little bit, you know, get a little bit clammy. That’s really uncomfortable.

Emily
It is! And the funny part about it, right, is that those are just ways that our body is arranging its muscles, which it does all day into various formations. We’ve just decided we do not like that version.

Don
Right. And in that moment it can be helpful to just say, I’m feeling really uncomfortable right now, to yourself. I just identify that–it’s a technique from meditation to just label what’s going on, let it go. And that helps it not control you.

Emily
Yes, absolutely. I know a moment a lot of us experience discomfort at work is when we’re giving someone hard feedback and especially when we know it’s feedback that the recipient may not want to hear or may not be open to hearing right now. What have your experiences there been?

Don
Well, I think that’s very natural to fear what will happen when we tell someone something that we anticipate they will reject or feel uncomfortable about. But let’s break that down because I think it’s really important and it helps us get to the other side of that. As leaders, the first part of that is an assumption that what we were saying is not welcome. And I think the truth of the matter is is that we are all starving for feedback about how things are going and every one of us lives in some state of anxiety that we’re not doing what we need to be doing that something’s wrong, we just don’t know about it yet. And that step back allows us to reframe critical feedback from something to be afraid of, to be something to be grateful for, to be able to give someone this opportunity to get past the uncertainty, the anxiety. A very powerful moment for me in my career was to realize that firing someone might be the best thing for them because that had always been a completely negative thing in my psychology.

Don
That was a failure. And a coach that I worked with was able to help me see that if it’s not working out for you, there’s a really good chance it’s not working out for them, but nobody’s done anything about that yet. And so what are you going to do? Giving that hard feedback, even if, and this is the second assumption, that this was going to go to a very negative place, this isn’t going to work out or you’re going to be angry with me, even in those circumstances, this can still be very much the right thing to do for both parties.

So let’s look at that second part, which is that when we say this thing, a sequence of events will be started. There’s something about control in that. There’s something about if we just say the right thing or we just do the right thing, that we’ll be able to get to the place that we want to get to. And going back to those very first things that we talked about today, there are things beyond our control and other people are that other people are beyond our control. And so we can do the best job ourselves and then it’s up to them.

Emily
Yes. So, to give our listeners a little bit of a sneak peek of next week’s conversation, I love, Don, what you’re talking about here–us trying to control the outcome. And I think we do it because we’re afraid of what we might find ourselves thinking and feeling if we don’t get our preferred outcome. And what I’m talking about with next week’s guest is vulnerability. And a lot of the tools that I teach around vulnerability and around confidence are that the worst that can ever happen is an emotion. And we can handle any emotion. We can handle any arrangement of muscles and chemicals in our body. It’s a thing we do all day. We’re capable of it. But it does have this fear associated with some of those and it causes us to try to very carefully control the outcomes of everything. So why is trying to avoid discomfort, by really carefully controlling the outcome of that feedback conversation or at least trying to, cause we can’t actually successfully do it–why is that a problem?

Don
Two reasons. The first is it inhibits us from taking action or almost certainly not going to get it right. And so by creating that expectation on ourselves that we have to, we will stop, delay, we’ll let things go. The second is that it forecloses a space for the other person to show up. By trying to manage a situation to your desired outcome, you’ve kind of removed the other person from the equation. They’ve stopped being a person and start being a machine. If you can just understand everything about them, you can push the right buttons and pull the right levers to get the thing that you want. That’s kind of dehumanizing. Wouldn’t it be better to have a real conversation?

Emily
I have to love the language that you use there, for the particular topic that we’re talking about. We’re talking about literally removing someone from our team and company and I love the highlight you made that when we’re not willing to have that conversation with them directly, we are actually already removing them from the situation. We just haven’t told them.

Don
I think that’s right.

Emily
And that’s clearly so much worse, as just who I want to be as a leader and what makes an effective team, than bringing them in and having the conversation with them. How do you allow that feeling of discomfort and work with it, work through it, work alongside it to have the conversation you need to with that person?

Don
I think that the root of why discomfort is so hard is the implicit assumption we’re making that it means there’s something wrong with us, and so what being comfortable being uncomfortable is about is the personal work, the deep personal work of knowing that you’re okay–as a person, as a human being, you have value, however this situation transpires, you will be okay.

Emily
Yes. I think those two sentences have made the biggest difference for me in my life, which is I am fine and good enough just the way that I am and I can handle anything that comes my way.

Don
And together with those things I also still have work to do. I am okay and I can still grow.

Emily
I think that’s actually been one of the single hardest lessons for me to learn in my life. I tend to see the gap between what I can imagine and where I perceive that I am right now. And I just make that mean I’m not there yet and that there are things wrong with me. But I don’t want to live in a world where my imagination is small and I’ve lived into it fully, so I had to figure out how to shift that definition.

So I knew a situation that causes discomfort for a lot of managers is when they’re watching someone on their team struggle, either because they’re not producing the results that the manager and the team want from them or just because the employee is having trouble with their own thoughts and their own emotions about whatever it is they’re working on and knowing that as managers, we could step in, but so many of us are working on developing that coaching approach as a manager where we let our employees find their own answers. How does discomfort show up for you there? How do you handle that?

Don
I think that’s a great question. And I think, historically this is an area where I am so, so guilty of stepping in. I think as engineering leaders, we almost all come from the practice itself. We’re makers, we like to do things. When we see that something that we could do, Oh, just right there, we could just do it. We could literally say move over, I’m going to type them up. But you can’t! Not if you want the other person to grow. So that coaching for me is to challenge myself–Okay Don, you know how to do this. The next level of that is, how do you ask the questions that gets the other person to figure out how to do this on their own? Because that is the most powerful form of learning. Watching someone do something, that retention level is very low. Doing it together with someone, the retention level is higher but still only sort of okay. Actually figuring it out for yourself, yhe retention level is off the charts! And so your job as a coach is not to stand at the sideline and blow whistle and yell work harder. It’s to get in there and figure out if you can see the insight that they don’t see and then see how to present that to them in the form of a question so that they can get there themselves because that’s where the real results are.

Emily
Yes! And I know the nuance in that for so many of us is the difference between having an agenda between saying, Oh, I know what you need to realize and I’m going to ask you leading questions until you get there yourself versus asking questions that let them really explore and figure it out and create their own thought processes around solving problems. What do you find are some of the questions that help you stay in that second part of it?

Don
I think the point about leading questions is really important. You can ask a question which is a directive that just has different punctuation. That’s not really the spirit of what we’re talking about here. For me, the key questions are around critical thinking and clarity of the objective, so I’m going to ask questions in one of those two arenas. Examples might be, what do you think will happen if you follow that approach? Because projecting into the future requires that they attempt to exercise their solution. And then if they’ve missed something, you can suggest examples that they have omitted, but then have them work through how that’s going to play out, because then they get the critical thinking skills of making sure that they’ve thought about all the ways that this system can operate. Sometimes people just have pieces of their experience that they’ve missed a thing, and that’s okay! You’re giving them that context and then they’re taking it from there. And that’s what cements it. Another way in which there might be a gap between what someone’s doing and what you think they could be doing is they think they’re doing absolutely the right thing because they misunderstand the objective. And so if in those questions about how you think this is going to play out, you discover that the target they’re trying to hit is not the real target, then you can help them clarify that end of the equation. But the work of going between those two points should be largely on them.

Emily
Yes. Listening to you talk just now really helped cement in my head the difference between those two styles of questions–realizing that the questions that we want to ask our teams are the questions they can continue to ask themselves. If they just took our phrasing and they just echoed it in their head over and over and over, it would serve them really well. And the questions we’re trying to avoid are the questions that you can only even formulate once you know the answer.

Don
I think that’s a perfect characterization.

Emily
Or that if they asked themselves that question over and over, they’d be taking a hammer and applying it to every situation. Could we use Redis here is not the question I’m trying to teach my team. Maybe if they were a sales engineer for Redis, I would want to be teaching them, how can we use Redis here as the question they should constantly ask, but not within my engineering team at work where we use a broad range of technologies.

So as we were talking and getting ready for this conversation, I was telling you a little bit about what I’m working with my listeners on, which is identifying a big result they want to produce at work, something outside of their normal day to day responsibilities and maybe even their official job description, that’s the sort of work they want to be doing and that really excites them but that they haven’t been making time for it, they haven’t been following through on. And you were mentioning the kinds of discomfort that can come up when we start focusing outside of kind of the day-to-day small execution within our team. Could you share a little bit more about that?

Don
Absolutely. When you’re pursuing something big, something that matters, that is going to need a lot of your attention, by necessity, you’re going to trade off in ways that are going to make you uncomfortable. Because things you were doing before, you were doing for a reason, and you’re going to stop doing those things and that means that some things are going to fall down. And that will be uncomfortable because things that used to work are no longer working. And it’s your fault. And that’s okay because you’re doing the most important thing. And if you’re not okay with that discomfort, you’ll never get to the point where you’re really making that big project go. You’re really delivering that result because you can’t let go of the things you have to let go to make the space.

Emily
How do you let go?

Don
Early in my career–and this is looking back, I did not understand that at the time–I was operating in a way where I believed, subconsciously, that there was some ideal that I could hit, that my team could hit, that my company could hit, and that that was the point. That is what we were pursuing. That perfect, productive, all-the-things place. But that’s not what reality is and it took me a while to get there to realize that it’s all about trading.

You’re not pursuing any particular ideal, you’re making trade-offs in the moment and that is what really allows you to let go. You are not losing, you’re not failing to achieve or get closer to some ideal–you’re making a very real trade off to do the correct, best thing for now and that you can change that at any point. At Medium, we had a management system called Holocracy, and one of the things that I took away from that was the idea of “safe to try.” And that is the litmus test in a Holocratic decision–is this safe to try? Not, is this best? Not is this ideal? It’s just is this safe to try, because if it’s not working out you just–again, you change and take a different path at that future moment when you know more.

Emily
I love that wording and that description. So often we are trying to optimize for the best possible outcome we can create. I think what’s funny about that is, as engineers, we know not to! Well, as engineers, most of us figure out pretty quickly not too. We have a term called over-engineering and we think it’s a bad thing, theoretically, and we spend time trying to understand the right level of correctness to optimize for. I think we forget that lesson when we step in as leaders and suddenly, if we’re not doing the best thing in every moment, it means we’re not good enough and something’s gone wrong and we’re the problem.

Don
Maybe that’s the key, is we just need to ask ourselves, are we over-engineering our decisions?

Emily
Yes! So how would you notice if you’re over-engineering your decisions?

Don
Well, when you’re over engineering a system, one of the things that’s happening is you’re not delivering it. You’re too busy building it to be operating it. I think the same is true about decisions. If you find yourself stuck, if you find yourself just going back for more data, more data, you need to think about this longer. That’s an indicator that you’re probably over-engineering that decision.

Emily
I love that way of describing it. Thank you. As we’re wrapping up, anything else you want to share with our listeners?

Don
I think being comfortable being uncomfortable is a very personal journey, and it applies in all the dimensions of our life. What we’ve been talking about here has been very much the work side of things and there’s a certain kind of discomfort that happens in the workplace. And there’s certain kinds of discomfort that happen outside the workplace and I think it’s a powerful tool in our whole life to be able to sit with discomfort.

Emily
Agreed. Thank you so much for a fantastic conversation, for sharing your thoughts and your expertise with our audience. It’s really been fantastic to talk with you today.

Don
Thank you for having me, Emily. It’s been a great conversation.

End Guest Segment

Emily
Thank you Don. And now for our tool for this episode, over the next week, you’re going to learn to notice the ways your limbic system tries to distract you from your priorities and goals. I want you to pull out your phone, open up your work calendar, and schedule 10 minutes with yourself every day this week. On my calendar, I call this event “growth.” I suggest making it a recurring meeting, because we’re going to use this time every week. So go ahead, pause this episode and do that right now.

If you have trouble finding the same time every day, it’s totally fine to choose a different time each day. Just make sure you have 10 minutes with yourself every day. I’ll wait.

Fantastic. Learning is good, but we need implementation and practice in order to really make a difference and create new results in our lives. So how do you notice all the ways your limbic system tries to distract you from your goals and dreams? Well, we’re going to start with one of the biggest tools it uses–today’s emotion: discomfort. Here’s how…

This week, each day during your growth time on your calendar, you’re going to get a piece of paper and a pen and write down all of the things in the last 24 hours that you didn’t want to do because you felt uncomfortable. Make the list as long as you can. You can include things you didn’t do and things you did do. Then next to each of those items, you’re going to write down two more things. First, you’re going to write down the sentence your brain fed you about why it would be uncomfortable to take that action. You’re teaching yourself to recognize the excuses and cajoling your brain uses most frequently with you.

This will make it much easier to notice it when it’s happening and decide whether or not you want to listen. Second, you’re going to write down what goal, dream, personal value or want would be delayed if you chose not to take the action. This helps your brain be realistic about what you’re losing when you opt out of discomfort. Our brain hates loss, so it’s a useful hack for countering your limbic system sphere. By the way, some tools I’ll tell you you really should write by hand since it tends to create a different type of thinking and focus than typing, but for this one, if you’d rather type, feel free. Throughout the week, you should notice some patterns emerging. You should also find yourself recognizing your limbic systems distractions in the moment, giving you the opportunity to embrace the discomfort and stop distracting yourself from your goals.

And that’s it for this week! As always, I’ve put together a podcast guide for you that includes the tool from this week’s episode, and a sheet you can print with the questions on it to make your growth time super easy. Just grab the link in the show notes or text “discomfort” to 44222. I’ll see you next week. Keep watching for the places you’re avoiding discomfort and learning to recognize the ways your brain tries to distract you and have an amazing week.

If you loved this episode and want to dive deeper into improving your own emotional health so you can feel better and have bigger results at work, you have to join me for a one-on-one call. We’ll talk about where you are, where you want to be, and create a solid plan to get from here to there. Just visit go.exceptional.vision/call.