How Uncomfortable Are You Willing to Get?
- 43 minutes ago
- 8 min read
Written by Caitlin Sirett, Leadership and Self-Trust Coach
Caitlin Sirett is a Leadership and Self-Trust Coach, Chartered Manager, and founder of Evoke & Lead Coaching Ltd. She helps women build strong internal foundations and question the thoughts holding them back, so they can go for the promotion, start the podcast, speak up in the room, or finally act on the idea they keep thinking about.
Have you found yourself absorbing as much information as possible to take that step, but your feet are still firmly on the ground? You’re not alone. “Get comfortable being uncomfortable” is something I’ve discussed with the teams I’ve led for years because some of the most important work we do requires us to trust ourselves enough to step into difficult conversations and situations rather than avoid them.
Over the last few years, I’ve realised the same is true in our own personal growth. I’ve read the books, listened to the podcasts, done the courses and spent more hours thinking about why we do what we do than is probably healthy. Still, one of the most important lessons I keep coming back to is this: get comfortable being uncomfortable.
Sometimes, we don’t need another answer. We already know what we want to do, but knowing and actually doing it are two very different things.
Now, I’m not suggesting we should all spend our lives at full throttle in our stretch zone because, let’s be honest, that sounds exhausting. We need comfort, safety, rest and periods when we are not trying to improve every inch of our lives. Comfort itself isn’t the problem. Avoiding change when something in your life needs to change is.
Why can’t I just start?
Sometimes, the reason we can’t just start has very little to do with not knowing enough because, let’s be honest for a moment, we’ve all consumed the “how to” articles, watched the “follow these five steps” reels, and thought, this makes perfect sense. But you’re still here, still not moving forward, which is why I’m getting bored of seeing the same quick fixes branded and repackaged everywhere.
We have become a society obsessed with quick wins, covering things with a plaster and carrying on, but so much of that advice only touches what we can see on the surface.
Now, don’t get me wrong, learning through whatever source works for you is helpful, as long as you’re not using it to avoid the deeper work. If you can read something, apply it to your own life and feel able to step forward with that new learning, that’s the aim. But if you’re saving every free guide, listening to every podcast and hoping the next piece of information will finally solve the problem for you, this is where we need to look a little deeper.
In The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown explores our attraction to quick fixes and the much less appealing reality that, to truly grow, we need to engage with the difficult, imperfect work underneath. Hearing her talk about this confirmed something I have seen time and time again: we often already have the knowledge. It’s the discomfort and fear that stop us from actually doing something with it.
Research into behaviour change backs this up too. The King’s Fund highlights that one of the ways we become more confident in our ability to do something is by actually doing it. We take a small step, realise we can handle it and give ourselves some evidence to draw on the next time we face something difficult.
You can read everything there is to know about setting boundaries, but eventually, you are still the one who has to look someone in the eye and say no, then sit with the discomfort that follows. Knowing “how to” isn’t usually the hardest part. The doing is.
Can support sometimes keep us comfortable?
A social worker once taught me something about support that has stayed with me ever since: there’s a difference between supporting someone and rescuing them.
Good support shouldn’t always remove the uncomfortable part for us. Sometimes, its job is to help us feel supported enough to do the difficult thing ourselves.
If someone constantly steps in, gives us the answer, or removes every obstacle, we can lose the opportunity to discover what we’re capable of.
The same can happen in personal growth. We can keep looking to other people for the answer, reassurance, or certainty that we’re making the right choice, but there will always be another decision to make and more challenges to navigate. At some point, we have to start building that trust within ourselves by trusting our own decisions, listening to our own intuition, and knowing that, whatever life throws at us, we have built internal foundations strong enough to respond, adapt, and find our way through it.
That, to me, is what self-trust really gives us.
Why does personal growth feel so uncomfortable?
I’ve done my own fair share of avoiding the uncomfortable stuff. For a long time, I was staying in my lane, same shit, different day, looking at people achieving incredible things and thinking, but how?
That doesn’t mean I wasn’t progressing. I took opportunities, developed my career and moved into leadership, but I was growing within a world I already understood. I knew the lane, I knew the rules, and I knew what success looked like there.
It wasn’t that the “how” wasn’t available to me. The information was everywhere, but underneath it sat a much bigger problem: the story I had created about who I was and what my life could amount to.
I had built a box around myself without really realising it. I knew who I was inside that box, what was expected of me and roughly what my life was supposed to look like. When I looked at people doing incredible things outside of that, I just thought that life was possible for them, not me.
The more I started learning about identity, our thoughts and the power of the stories we tell ourselves, the more I started questioning mine. Learning mattered enormously, but only when I was willing to use what I was learning to challenge the limits I’d unknowingly accepted for myself.
Understanding how our identity impacts behaviour change can help us recognise which beliefs are leading the way and which ones are helping or hindering us.
Did I think I’d ever be writing for Brainz Magazine? Nope. There was no manual inside the box for that, which is why I keep coming back to this question: We spend so much time asking, “How do they do it?” when perhaps the better question is, “What would I try if I stopped assuming I’m not someone who can?”
Do successful people still have self-doubt?
Recently, I’ve been reading and listening to the stories of some of the world’s leading thinkers, coaches, and experts, people like Brené Brown and Jay Shetty, and I’ve become fascinated by what happens when you reverse engineer the success of people we often look at and think, “How did they get there? I could never achieve what they have.”
We can assume that somewhere along the way, they developed a level of confidence the rest of us haven’t quite figured out yet, that eventually the self-doubt disappeared, fear packed its bags, and they started walking into every opportunity feeling completely sure of themselves.
But listen to their stories, and that isn’t what you hear. You hear vulnerability, uncertainty, rejection, self-doubt, taking risks without knowing how they will turn out, and perhaps one of the hardest things of all, being seen trying.
Years of experience don’t necessarily eradicate fear or self-doubt, but doing the deeper, uncomfortable work can give us stronger foundations underneath them. This helps us recognise when we are choosing what feels familiar simply because it feels safer and decide whether that is actually what we want.
You don’t need to remove fear before you act. Sometimes, you need enough courage and enough trust in yourself to put fear in the passenger seat.
How do you build self-trust when you don’t feel confident?
For a long time, I thought confidence was something I needed to gain before I could take the step. Now, I think I had it backward. Taking the step is part of how we build confidence in the first place.
Self-trust isn’t the belief that everything will work out exactly as you planned. It’s trusting that if it doesn’t, you will be able to manage whatever comes next.
So, how do you actually build that? Start smaller than you think you need to.
Have the conversation you’ve been rehearsing in your head.
Make one decision without asking three other people what they would do first.
Share the idea before you’ve perfected it.
Say no without writing an essay explaining why.
Apply for something you’re not completely convinced you’ll get.
Then, and this is the part we often miss, notice what happened. Did you survive the awkward conversation? Did you make a decision and deal with the outcome? Did someone disagree with you and you manage it? Did you get rejected and realise that, actually, you were okay? That is evidence.
Self-trust is built by collecting those moments and allowing them to challenge the old story that says, “I can’t handle this.” Not every decision you make will pay off. People will see you trying, learning, and adapting, and that can feel uncomfortable. But that’s the beauty of taking risks. Each time you do, you give yourself more evidence that you can handle what comes next and trust yourself to try the things that really matter to you.
That is the relationship between discomfort, action, and self-trust that sits at the heart of the work I do with women. The goal isn’t to reach some magical point where you never experience self-doubt again. It’s to build enough evidence that self-doubt no longer gets the deciding vote.
Before you search for another “how”
Think about something you have wanted to do for a while but keep putting off. It could be changing jobs, starting something of your own, or even admitting that something in your life needs to change.
Before you ask ChatGPT for another answer, save another post or buy another course, ask yourself one uncomfortable question: “What am I hoping another quick fix will save me from having to feel or do?”
Then, get curious about what you’re already assuming, what you’re believing to be true, and what you think that answer will give you that you don’t already know.
You don’t need to leap ten steps ahead or throw yourself so far outside your comfort zone that you freak out, switch to Instagram and start doom scrolling to avoid it altogether. You just need to recognise the work you’ve been avoiding and take one honest step towards it.
That’s where the work is, and while you don’t have to do that work alone, nobody can do that uncomfortable part for you.
So, perhaps the question isn’t, “How do they do it?” Maybe the question is, “How uncomfortable are you willing to get for the life you say you want?”
Ready to stop waiting and start doing?
I’m Caitlin Sirett, a Leadership and Self-Trust Coach and Chartered Manager, and I help women build the self-trust to stop waiting to feel ready and start taking action towards the life they actually want.
My coaching isn’t about handing you another five-step plan or promising to make the uncomfortable bits disappear. It’s about helping you understand what’s actually keeping your feet firmly on the ground, challenge the stories you’ve accepted about what you’re capable of, and build the foundations to trust yourself enough to take the step.
If you’re tired of collecting more answers and you’re ready to start putting what you already know into action, book a coaching call and let’s start with what’s actually getting in the way.
You don’t need to feel completely ready. Sometimes, you just need the right support to help you trust yourself enough to take the step and find out what happens when you try. Follow me on Substack.
Read more from Caitlin Sirett
Caitlin Sirett, Leadership and Self-Trust Coach
Caitlin Sirett is a Leadership and Self-Trust Coach, Chartered Manager, and entrepreneur navigating ambition alongside motherhood, with over a decade in healthcare spanning frontline practice and senior leadership. Drawing on her trauma-informed training and lived experience, she understands the reality of wanting more while managing everything already on your plate. Caitlin helps women explore the thoughts and beliefs that keep them second-guessing themselves and build strong internal foundations of self-trust. Through mindset work, feminine leadership, and somatic understanding, she helps women back themselves and act on what matters to them.
