It’s not supposed to feel good

Feeling bad is the price you pay to learn something new.

When I feel stress, worry, or anxiety, my default reaction is that whatever caused the negative feeling should be avoided. I know a lot of other people have the same experience. It feels like the path you’re going down must be the wrong one. Real lizard brain stuff. “Bad feeling = don’t do that again.”

But while trite, there’s something to those Pinterest statements you see all the time. “Pressure makes a diamond.” “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” “Do it scared.” They’re reminders that feeling bad is part and parcel with change and that you must persevere if you ever want to have a chance at success.

Cate Hall, author of You Can Just Do Things, calls this “the moat of low status.” It’s basically the feeling you have as you plod forward into uncharted territory. Here are a few choice passages that resonated with me:

“How do you attain a moat as a human being? How do you become hard to compete with, and do things that others will not duplicate? One way is to learn to embrace being temporarily low in social status. That might mean allowing yourself to look stupid or talentless or, God forbid, corny.”

“[People] would rather be hypothetically good at songwriting–talented in their imaginary world–than be bad on the way to becoming good.”

“The Moat is effective because it’s all too easy to imagine the embarrassment of being bad at things. The scenarios we conjure up are so vivid and loom so large that we can’t see the upsides that come from plunging in and struggling our way through anyway. Envisioning embarrassment is easy because at once point we’ve all faced some stinging humiliation that made a profound impression on us. It’s like the memory of getting water in our lungs while learning to swim: a vivid and immediate reminder that we really don’t want to go through that again. Imagining how good you’ll sound as a trained singer, or how beautifully written your blog posts will become is harder because you’ve never experienced those things. Yet.”

Something that I find interesting is I have no problem feeling this way with fitness. Prior to having kids, I was a pretty avid weightlifter. I had no issue showing up to the gym and being weak. I wanted to get stronger and the only way to do that was show up and put in the reps. Lots of days I couldn’t finish the workout or I needed to walk instead of run. Workouts would end and I would feel very tired but pleased with my progress. I never thought working out should feel good. Or “No pain, no gain” as they say!

But for some reason in my professional life as of late I have equated every negative feeling with “oh something must be wrong” instead of plunging into the moat of low status. I am bad on my way to becoming good. I’ve never led marketing at a fast growing start up. I don’t know how it all works. Yet.

It’s not going to feel good on the way there. But the only way out is through.