The Twenty Minute Problem

 

Somebody said something in a session recently that I have not stopped thinking about.

He was explaining why he doesn't show up for certain things his partner needs. He had been at it a while. This reason, that reason, all of them fair, all of them true.

Then he stopped mid-sentence and said something close to this:

Actually, if I take you out of it entirely, do I do things that make me uncomfortable? For anyone? No. I don't. I don't do them, period.

And the room went quiet.

Because that was the whole thing. Twenty minutes of reasons, and then one sentence underneath all of them.

What we think the problem is

We think we have a communication problem. Or a priorities problem. Or a partner problem, or a time problem, or a boundaries problem.

Most of the time what we have is a discomfort problem.

Look at what's actually sitting in front of you right now. The conversation you keep not having. The apology you owe somebody. The thing you want to ask for and haven't. Saying no to something you already said yes to. Telling someone how you're really doing instead of saying fine. Going to the thing you don't want to go to because it matters to a person you love.

None of that is hard.

All of it is uncomfortable.

And there's an enormous difference between those two words that we almost never make out loud.

Hard means you might not be able to do it. Uncomfortable means you can do it, and it will feel bad while you're doing it, and then it will be over.

Almost everything that would change your life sits on the other side of about twenty minutes of feeling bad.

Why you can't see it

Discomfort avoidance is invisible from the inside, because it never once shows up as avoidance.

It shows up as reasons.

I'm not good at that kind of thing.

Now isn't the right time.

That's just not who I am.

They wouldn't want me there anyway.

I'll do it when things settle down.

I don't want to make it worse.

Every one of those can be completely true and still be the same move. That's what makes this so slippery. You're not lying to yourself. You're telling yourself something accurate that happens to also let you off the hook.

I do this. Everybody does this. The reasons I give myself are excellent. I have twenty years of training in exactly the kind of language that makes avoidance sound like discernment.

What actually separates people

Here's what I've watched over a long time now, across a lot of rooms.

The people whose lives change are not braver than everyone else. They aren't more disciplined, and they don't have better tools. Some of them are a mess.

What they have is a slightly higher tolerance for feeling bad for a short period of time.

That's it. That's the entire skill.

They can stay in an uncomfortable conversation without ending it early. They can ask for something and then let the silence happen instead of filling it. They can hear something hard without immediately defending. They can sit still while a feeling moves through them.

Not because it doesn't hurt them. Because they have stopped requiring that it not hurt.

That's a small difference in capacity and an enormous difference in outcome.

The good news, and it is genuinely good

Discomfort tolerance is not a personality trait. It's a capacity, and capacities grow.

You don't build it by doing something enormous. You build it the way you build anything, in small increments, on purpose, in low stakes.

Say the mildly awkward thing at dinner. Ask the question you'd normally let go. Let a silence run three seconds longer than is comfortable. Tell someone the true answer to how are you doing, just once, this week.

None of that will change your life. All of it stretches the thing that will.

And here's the part worth knowing. The discomfort doesn't actually last as long as your body promises it will. It peaks and then it drops, usually much faster than you expect. The dread beforehand is nearly always longer and worse than the event.

Which means most of us are avoiding something that would have been over by now.

The question

So here it is, and it's a bit of a rough one.

What would you do this week if you were willing to be uncomfortable for twenty minutes?

Not forever. Not permanently. Twenty minutes.

You already know what it is. You thought of it before you finished reading the sentence.

That's the one.