Mastering Discomfort: A Self-Growth Guide

Personal growth - of any kind - can be very uncomfortable. Getting a glimpse of your ABC’s (Assumptions, Beliefs and Conditioning), especially when you’re not expecting it, can be a shock. As a coach, it’s my job to help you look at all the uncomfortable things, but when you’re bombarded with situations and circumstances, it’s important to have a plan and some tools to process all that discomfort.

I promise you this - by the end of this episode, you'll feel a lot more comfortable with discomfort. Diving into the murky waters of emotions, reactions, and the factors that shape them - it's as enlightening as it is challenging.

I share the DO’S and DON’TS of how to navigate tricky topics and why it's so crucial to understand, acknowledge, and constructively use our responses for personal growth.  Of course, understanding how your Core Values are your compass when confronting uncomfortable situations, plays a vital role in self-care and personal growth in your own timeline. Turn up the volume, keep an open mind, and let's embark on this insightful journey together.

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Transcript

Andrea Johnson: 0:02

You're listening to Stand Tall and Own it, the podcast for high performing female leaders who are ready to make an impact by discovering the safety that comes from understanding their own value and exercising their own authority. I'm your host, andrea Johnson, and I'm here to tell you it is time to just truly be you, my strong friend. It's time to Stand Tall and Own it. Hey there, welcome to another episode of Stand Tall and Own it. I'm Andrea Johnson, your host, and I just got off a Zoom call that was about an hour with basically what we're going to call a team to create a really good quality of life plan for a family member, and I don't normally share things like this, but I felt like it was such a great way to explain the topic that I'm going to share with you today. It shouldn't be a long one, but it is basically the idea of confronting and dealing with things that make us uncomfortable, things that are hard, and how we do that and how we react to them. There's conversations every day that I have with people about topics in the news or in their lives, or in local politics or across the world things that make people uncomfortable, and so I'm just going to ask you flat out this morning and sorry, I'm just going to ask you flat out here you can tell I'm recording this live Are you uncomfortable about something? Is there something that just keeps kind of pushing at you and kind of hits that last nerve for you? That's what we're looking for and that's what I want to address today, because I find that people are in a little bit of a perpetual state of uncomfortableness. I find that I am. There's always something that's challenging me and there are some really big things that we have to process. There are some really big things that we're being confronted with right now, some really big assumptions that I've had, some really big beliefs that I didn't realize I was holding onto and, quite frankly, conditioning that's the thing right now for me is I'm really confronting it and I want to talk about how to process some of these things. And this is not another episode on overwhelm in the face of media. I understand that because there's plenty of it, but this is a little bit different. This is kind of behind the scenes on that kind of thing.

Andrea Johnson: 2:25

When I originally planned this topic, it was in a conversation with my best friend and my podcast producer, and she and I process information and how we are changing and the things we need to do. We process them very differently. We process the growth that comes from being confronted with those things very differently and, side note, you'll notice a lot of my podcast topics come from conversations, which is a little tiny window into how I process things. To put it very plainly and maybe I'll do an actual episode on this, I process things internally, but then I refine them externally, so I might do a lot of thinking about something and then I have a conversation back and forth with other people that helps me figure them out. But as a coach, this is my work. I actually ask people questions. They want to learn and grow and I find the areas where they're a little uncomfortable and then I do what I call either hold the mirror up for them or I slide that mirror across the table so that they can look in the mirror and just not a physical mirror, but just metaphorically be able to say, oh, this is who I am, this is what it looks like for me, and that's kind of where I was going to go with this episode.

Andrea Johnson: 3:38

But right now, at the recording of this, we're at the end of October, there's just in 2023, and there's so much going on in life, locally, nationally there was another mass shooting last night Things are happening politically, things are happening across the globe the war in the Middle East. There are so many things and many situations and circumstances that are providing a mirror of sorts, showing you what you're really made of, and I don't want to assume that you're okay. It shows you a lot of these. The reactions that we have to these situations shows us what we believe, what we assume and the way we are conditioned, and so what I really want to bring to you today is this concept of understanding how you're processing this stuff and that you're doing something with it, because being upset and uncomfortable about something, there's a way in which it's good. We need to be upset about atrocities, we need to be upset about war, we need to be upset about inconsistencies in the way people live their lives publicly. We need to be. Those are things that are, I think, okay to be upset about.

Andrea Johnson: 4:53

The question comes in to what do we do with it then? Right? So I want to ask a few questions to start off with, and then I'm going to give you a couple of things to do and not to do, and then we'll wrap it up. So, for starters, how are a lot of these things hitting you? Is it too much? I had a friend, marco Polo me yesterday and said you know we really haven't talked about all the things going on, but she said I am just like my heart is in agony. Are you one of those people? How do things hit you? Are they, are they making you sorrowful or sad? You need to understand and maybe even document those things. How are the big issues that are playing out on our national and international and even locally like had sad at church conversation last night over dinner. It was local politics or the local, you know school board running. It's just what in the world.

Andrea Johnson: 5:44

Everybody at that table had things hit them a little differently, and so you need to understand.

Andrea Johnson: 5:50

How do they hit you? Do they make you sad? Do they make you angry? Do they motivate you to do something? Do they just flabbergast you? So kind of take a little moment to just kind of give yourself a little assessment. How is this hitting me?

Andrea Johnson: 6:03

And the next question would be what are they showing you? For instance, not responding to the war in the Middle East? What's happening in Israel and Palestine right now for a lot of people. They say that for anybody not responding to that publicly, that says what they believe about it, or that there's something about them that that they're not comfortable sharing. Or, you know, not responding to another mass shooting, there's something that there's something that I'm not comfortable sharing. Or I'm going to put all that out of my mind, or maybe I believe those things are okay, but I think it's important for you to understand when you find there's something that's uncomfortable, how is it hitting you and why is it hitting you in that way? So what is it showing you about yourself? Let it be a mirror that you hold up and see what's there, because, if you can see, oh, I was assuming that people would act like adults or respectful adults in this situation and clearly they didn't. Or I believe that one should be better in the other than the other in this particular situation, but they're not acting any better. So what am I going to do with that? And or maybe it's conditioning. I was conditioned to believe X about this situation or this you know circumstance, and all of a sudden I realize maybe my conditioned response to that was wrong, or it isn't accurate or isn't based in reality. So what is it showing you?

Andrea Johnson: 7:33

The next thing to ask yourself is how are you going to process it or how are you processing it? Because just pushing something off or just getting angry at it and walking away, that's not processing. I'm just going to say that to you right now. It's just not processing. Processing is actually to asking the questions of yourself and saying what does this mean, why is it important, what am I going to do with it and how am I going to be different later? So if it's showing up for you in sadness, then how are you going to process that sadness. If it's showing up for you in anger, how are you going to process that anger? By process I mean working through, either emotionally or mentally or even spiritually, that situation to a place of resolve, to a place of where you are no longer uncomfortable in a way that you don't understand right. There's some things we're going to be uncomfortable about forever and we're going to understand why, and that's not what I'm talking about.

Andrea Johnson: 8:32

But then the last piece is to understand how you process. Like I said just a minute ago, I am an internal processor. I think things and then I refine them by sometimes coming on a podcast episode or having a conversation with a friend, or I refine them by writing them out and a journal a lot. So, when you know what's hitting you and you ask yourself what is this holding a mirror up to me? For what is it showing me and how am I going to process this? And how do I process right, for instance, if something's making you really, really sad?

Andrea Johnson: 9:07

But you're mostly a mental processor, you might need some help, because mentally processing emotions is can be a real challenge, so you might need a little help. So the biggest question then, and the biggest thing to understand, is what are you going to do with all of the uncomfortableness that's out there? So, as a coach, my job is to find the uncomfortableness. It's to slide that mirror across the table to you and say you want to grow. Therefore, we're going to show you where you know, we're going to let you look in the mirror, but right now things are coming at you fast and furious, so it's a matter of saying I'm going to give a gift to myself and do this work. So that's what I'm asking you to do today, is give yourself a gift you need potentially, depending on how you process and what you're processing, you might need space and time to do your work. You might need quiet. You might need to get away. My sister-in-law I'm so jealous goes on these lovely retreats all by herself. She leaves her kids with their dad and she just goes and does her own thing. And I need to do that because I think that would be really helpful, so she knows how she processes and she has a plan for what she processes while she's gone.

Andrea Johnson: 10:18

It may be that you need a responsive back and forth. I understand that too. This is where a counselor, a psychiatrist or even a coach, depending on the type of information you're processing could be a very helpful ally. A really good friend who's a really good listener is also very good at this. It may be that you need to take time to allow your heart and mind to open.

Andrea Johnson: 10:42

Some of this stuff is not going to be processed overnight. It's just not. Even if we weren't talking about all the big things on a global scale right now, if we're talking about the way that you have lived your life up until this point and you're confronting your assumptions, your beliefs and your conditioning, some of that is not going to get processed right overnight either. So you need to give yourself the time to allow the feelings to come up regarding some of those things. When I was confronting some really hard stuff about two years ago, there was a lot of tears in this house and there was a lot of crying on the floor for me, and there was a lot of what I would call grief and anguish over the things I had believed, over the things I had allowed myself to participate in, the harm that they caused other people, and that's all good to recognize. But you need to allow the feelings to flow regarding the situation and your response to it Before we move forward.

Andrea Johnson: 11:37

I have some things for you not to do, okay, number one do not ask anybody else to do the work for you. The I'm not the only person who says that, and there are people who are more qualified to say that and there are entire people groups who say please don't ask us to do work for you. What I am saying is your work. Is your work right? If you have a boss and your boss comes to you and says I need you to learn how to use Microsoft Excel because I need you to start doing spreadsheets and reports on a daily basis, you don't turn to your boss and say can you teach me how to do Excel, or can you learn how to do Excel for me so that I don't have to really learn it? You would never do that. Well, I actually had one or two employees that might have, but if you do that, you are likely to not have that job tomorrow. So if your boss asks you to do the work and you learn to do Excel so in order to manage the reports, it's the same concept.

Andrea Johnson: 12:35

When you look in the mirror and realize you have some work to do, you don't ask somebody to do it for you. You ask people to walk with you. You ask people to hold your hand. You ask people to support you. You may, in doing your own work, you may discover that you have really good allies that can help you and people that are around you that can give you that kind of information. But don't ask anybody else to do the work for you. This is your work, right? The second piece is do not beat yourself up or wallow in the shame or grieve of your own discoveries of what you see in the mirror. If circumstances and situations in the world are holding a mirror up to you and you're recognizing that there's something that you don't want you. Lying in a puddle on the floor is not going to help you or anybody else. Ok, so don't beat yourself up or wallow in that shame and grief. That's just two things that I'm going to say. Don't do, and here's the things to do or to know. All right, you need to know these things or you need to do these things.

Andrea Johnson: 13:32

I love this phrase your journey, your speed, your speed, my journey, my speed. There's always somebody in front of somebody in front of me. That's why I follow people. Next episode is somebody that I am so excited to share. It's a fabulous episode. It's.

Andrea Johnson: 13:49

It's about an uncomfortable topic and she is someone that I have followed for four years. She is someone that I watched walk certain ways and I am now walking that way because she has led the way. My journey looks different than hers. She had to do a lot of work before she was at a place in a journey where I could actually follow her, but it's. If it's your journey, it needs to be at your pace and just remember there's always it's OK to be behind somebody catching up. This also came out of my conversation with my friend. There are ways in which she has grown and experienced life, that it are light years ahead of me and there are ways that I have grown and light years ahead of her, and the beauty is we get to see each other on that journey. We get to learn from each other on those respective journeys.

Andrea Johnson: 14:37

It's not just one path you're on. You're on a path for your growth in your spiritual walk. You're on a path on your growth in your emotional and your your mental capacity. You're on a path and growing in your career. You might have different people you follow in all of those areas. You just need to know your speed and be comfortable with it and be kind to yourself in it. In those journeys, like my friend and I, we don't have to be side by side all the time in order to, as she put it, ride our bikes Right. She can see me up there riding at mile mark or 10 and or see that I've passed it or maybe I've lapped her, but on another one she's going to let me, and it means that we see that somebody else that we know and we trust can do these things, and so we're actually allowing them to go at their pace and us to go at our own pace and to know that when she can do it, that means I can do it Right. So it's it's the ability to see not competition but collaboration and to move forward together.

Andrea Johnson: 15:38

The other piece is number one First. The first thing is your journey, your speed, and the other piece is, oh my gosh, y'all help or belonging is available to you. You don't have to do this by yourself. I'm a coach and I want to coach you and I want to help you. But you have to be on your journey and you have to want that help. You have to know that you're ready for it.

Andrea Johnson: 16:02

Like I said, this next week's podcast episode, the interview that I'm sharing with you, I wasn't ready for that. I recently shared how I went back to my last job and actually did a workshop for people that I used to work with and they said I'm sorry we didn't bring you in last year. I said last year I wasn't ready to do this Right. You have to be ready to confront what is in the mirror. You have to be ready to see what's in the mirror. You have to be ready to process it and be willing to do it. But I need you to know what I can do and what my skills are and I need you to know what I offer you so that when you're ready, you can take advantage of it. My friend my friend now knows. She says she'll like start a Marco Polo and she'll say I need to rant a minute and do not want coaching and I'm not interested in coaching, I just need to talk. And that's the beauty of understanding who you are and your speed and understanding that belonging is still available, even if you don't want or need help right this minute. If you need to just process, that's what you can do.

Andrea Johnson: 17:07

Because I had friends, coaches, even strangers. I had a friend when I was in a particularly working through a particularly difficult grieving something in my past that I was looking at and and just being ashamed of it who was texting me saying no matter what, no matter if you never get to talk to your family again, no matter whatever happens. I know that sounds really dramatic. I lean to the dramatic. Sometimes she said I will always be your friend. I've had coaches who've stood by me. I've had friends. Turns out my family stands by me.

Andrea Johnson: 17:44

You have somebody who will listen and sit there and hold your hand while you process, while you cry, while you may be scream. I'm like I said. I have a flair for the dramatic. There were moments 20 years ago when I threw trash cans and screamed in the backyard. I needed to get that emotional energy out. But I've always had someone who will listen and my desire is to be a voice for you and to, even if I can't physically hold your hand, be able to say I am here and I will listen to you, respond back to me and I will be somebody who will support you in your process. And whether or not you follow me is irrelevant, right? Having people sit with you and me wanting to do that for you or having people sit with me made all the difference, and me wanting to do that for you is part of my mission. So if I am just a voice on a podcast, one that you only hear in your ears once a week, if you never reach out to me personally, if you never join my community or coach with me, meet me, if you're local or take any of my courses, I will still be your friend, who comes to you with honest feedback, who comes to you with hard truths, with information on how to confront the uncomfortableness that we deal with as we grow, I will be that voice in your ear that says you can make it. You can make it through this. The world's not going to end, it's going to be okay and it I know.

Andrea Johnson: 19:14

It feels like challenging some of these things, especially the conditioning If you're dealing with that part or a belief that you didn't realize you have. It feels like you're jumping off the ledge, but or even like off a cliff, but you're not. You're jumping into a shallow puddle. Your feet are going to get wet, you're probably going to get muddy, but it's a shallow puddle. And standing tall that's what this podcast is about. This is why I renamed it. Standing Tall And Owning all of that means a couple of things: First, doing the work, the work that makes me uncomfortable and I need to know why but I need to do it right.

Andrea Johnson: 19:52

I have to do the work that makes me uncomfortable, but I have to be willing to look in the mirror and see it for what it is and then confront the things that are uncomfortable and decide and make a decision and move forward and decide what you're going to do with it and then realize I can stand on my own two feet and I'm not going to be moved. I am actually going to be strong in who I am and and as a person, and in my own ideas when I figure them out and when I decide I'm going to respond this way to this uncomfortable truth. But this is why I say over why, why I say over and over again that understanding you and your core values is so important. Understanding that gives you the ability to stand there, look in the mirror, remind yourself that whatever you see, no matter how grieving it is, can be addressed and dealt with and you can make a difference in your life and in the lives of others, because you're not alone. You don't have to do this alone.

Andrea Johnson: 20:53

I want to hear from you. So, on social media, dm me on Instagram or LinkedIn. You can email me at Andrea at theintentionaloptimistcom. Those come straight to me. If you're reading my newsletter, which is a printed version of the message in this podcast episode, just hit reply. I will reply back to you.

Andrea Johnson: 21:10

Several of you did that on my last one and it was so exciting to hear people say Andrea, this one really made a difference.

Andrea Johnson: 21:18

I needed this perspective. Thank you so much, or gosh, I'm really struggling with this area Now, if you're not on my newsletter. Just when you're done with this listening on the podcast, scroll right on down and or, if you're on YouTube, just scroll on down in the description and hit the link, because you can get on the newsletter and because sometimes we need to hear things and read things. Right, we need, as a good teacher knows, that you have to present it several different ways. So if you were to listen and then read, or watch and then read, then you're going to actually process the information a little better. Because here's the deal, my friend you deserve to look in the mirror, you deserve to change and grow and you most certainly deserve the grace to process things and, in the process of things, the grace to give yourself the time that you need to be on your own journey and do it your own speed, but to do it well for you, because you also deserve to stand tall and own it.