What About the Grey Zones?
Discomfort doesn’t have to only come in big doses from big things. Sometimes it’s as simple as playing in the grey zones.
The story of my life is everything up to the minute. I hate wasting time, I hate it more when people waste my time, and I roll on the currencies of efficiency and time management. It’s this grey zone I play in, where I am always pushing things to their edge — to the edge of time, to the edge of my comfort zone, to the edge of my capabilities. It offers maximal results, but it comes with a risk: it could end badly or fall off the edge, or go too far. It’s like playing with fire knowing that a stray spark could set everything alight.
There is a lot in life that needs to be black and white. There is less space and a lower tolerance for grey zones. You can’t be in the grey zone when you are driving or in the grey zone when you are paying your bills or paying your employees. It’s this place of uncertainty and risk, with big potential for a steep fall, or an equally as steep exhilarated climb — and some things can’t fall within those inherent boundaries.
In fact, arguably, most things in our life can’t. it’s why we’ve ended up in our comfort zone much of the time, an area that isn’t grey at all. It’s a clear demarcated zone that shifts with different situations, but that has its own lines within each situation. And the more time we spend in this, the better we like being in this. We get used to the lines and the box around us forming the comfort zone and then there is no reason to stray.
It takes some intentional work to stray outside and play in the grey zones. I get that. Being on the boundaries, pushing out of the contented lines of our comfort zone, moving into areas of uncertainty is indeed uncomfortable. It is not the place your brain and body naturally choose and gravitate towards. Instead, you have to resist the pull of the wheel around the natural curve and opposing the push-back as you turn it in the complete opposite direction down the unknown road. It’s a leap, an intentional choice, a push off the edge. But it comes with great potential. The grey zones have more than black and white.
It’ also a practice. You can’t just do it once and call it done. It’s consistently doing something uncomfortable a few times a week — like being cold when you don’t want to be, initiating uncomfortable conversations when you don’t have to, and asking hard questions when you don’t need to. It’s the small things, done every day. This consistency breeds normality, which fosters comfort, and in turn makes big pieces of discomfort easier later.
It’s winter where I’m living in Australia right now. As a Canadian, I use the term lightly, because winter here means temperatures don’t fall much below five degrees, and everyone still wears their down-filled jackets as if we are in minus 20. These temperatures though, are just cold enough, that being outside in shorts and a t-shirt is uncomfortable, and being outside in shorts and a sports bra is definitely uncomfortable.
In the morning, at its coldest time, the frost still sitting on the grass and the steam rising off the ground, I finish the last section of my run in just my shorts and sports bra. I slow down a little coming into the last kilometre so I can strip off my mittens and half zip, and then I pick up the pace for the last kilometre, flying along with my shirt in my hand.
Before I commit, I know it will be uncomfortable and cold. But that’s just it: I’ve committed. To the outside viewers — cars driving past, rugged up owners walking their dogs — it looks ludicrous. For me though, it is that edge of discomfort, that dig-deep grey zone I can choose to play in. Initially be very unpleasant. As I cross into the driveway of home though, this rush of thrill and energy fills me up. It is this indescribable buzz, like I’m being pumped with adrenaline on a drip through my arm.
I finish my run, putting warmer clothes back on and going about my day. As it moves forward, I try not to move far from the discomfort of that last kilometre. During the day when I am cold and trying to find a place to get warm, I remind myself it is good to be uncomfortable. When I am in an anatomy lecture, overwhelmed by the amount of new content and information I don’t know, I remind myself that it is good to be uncomfortable and dropped into unknown territory. When a run is hard, or an interval is a struggle, I push forward: “sit in the discomfort; you’re building toughness.”
Everybody wants us to think we need a gargantuan life-changing event to take us out of our comfort zone; that growth comes best from ‘post-traumatic’ growth, where it is a big enough event that it shakes your world and then makes you put the pieces back together and grow stronger from it. You don’t have to wait to be forced into discomfort in order to figure out how to be in it.
The point of discomfort isn’t to make you uncomfortable — that happens anyway. The point of it is to make uncomfortable feel less uncomfortable, becoming more tolerable and over time increasing your tolerance level and pushing the boundaries of the grey zone. And then on that day, where the gargantuan uncomfortable thing comes along . . . it too is less uncomfortable. After all, you’ve been practicing every day.
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Change, start, cultivate or quit, I use movement and mindset to help people show up better for themselves. Learn more in my Weekly Drop In, a weekly email featuring some honest talk around our daily real life struggles and successes on the journey that is being human
