My confrontation practice is uncomfortable
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I have a confrontation practice. I just didn’t know it until my yoga instructor named it for me last week.
She said yoga is a confrontation practice. Because when you’re truly present with yourself on the mat, moving through the poses, you get confronted with all kinds of things. And if you let them, those things deepen your awareness and strengthen your practice. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since, because I have never been good at confrontation. And I hadn’t noticed, until she said it, how much yoga has been helping me with exactly that.
Confrontation is one of the trickier things to navigate as a leader. We generally want to be liked. We don’t want to rock the boat. It’s why giving direct, clear feedback is so often hard. Not because the other person can’t receive it, but because of how it will make US feel. And that is the practice. If we can recognize that what’s really coming up is OUR guilt, OUR fear, OUR sense of lack, or whatever word suits you, then we can actually work with it. It’s not until we’re honest with ourselves about what’s surfacing, and open enough to confront it and shift it, that we can affect any real change.
I love mirroring what happens on the mat to what happens off of it. I notice where I’m breathing and where I’m not. I notice when I’m forcing myself into a pose because I think I should, or because I want to nail it, instead of listening to the fact that my lower back hurts and I need to engage differently before I make it worse. On the mat I am confronted by my body, my breath, and my thoughts nonstop. And in the same breath I get to make an adjustment, pause, grab a block for support, or simply choose not to do that crazy one-armed crow pose.
We are constantly working with leaders on self-awareness and self-mastery, on feedback and accountability. I’d add confrontation to that list. Sometimes the shift happens right in the room with us. But we know it’s really taking hold when someone reports catching a feeling, catching a spiral and moving out of it, making a hard decision and following it with a direct and compassionate conversation.
I’ve also been noticing how many people around me are being confronted with symptoms and choosing to write them off. Confrontation is not TO you. It’s FOR you. So how can you be more conscious of it when it’s happening? When you get sign after sign after sign that you are tired and burnt out, that your body does not want to run twenty miles a day without a day to recover, what are you doing with that?
We’ve long been trained that pushing through is the way of the world. No pain, no gain. But what if that isn’t true anymore? What if ease and flow is the new name of the game? What if you could have more ease, more joy, more fun, and still have purpose and meaning and the life you actually want? What if the thing to address now is discomfort, not pain, and ignoring the discomfort is the root of the suffering? What if ignoring it over and over gives your body, your brain, the universe, your job no choice but to get louder until it stops you in your tracks with a back surgery, a trip to the hospital, a case of shingles, you name it? I’ve seen too much of this lately, and it’s almost always because we decided we were bigger than, stronger than, or better than what was right in front of us, for us.
So here’s the invitation, and it’s twofold. What if we made confronting discomfort a practice? What if we treated the signs in front of us as information, and asked what the most aligned action is for me, for the team, for the business, RIGHT NOW? And what if you practiced it on the small stuff first? I already know what happens. It builds strength. It builds resilience. It builds confidence. And most of all, it moves you toward ease, toward flow, toward alignment with your purpose and your company’s.
Let’s choose this week to confront our discomfort and get curious. What is it trying to tell us? And what are we going to do about it?
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