Why Discomfort Actually Means You're Learning

If this is the comfort zone, in the comfort zone, we're not feeling like comfort. We We're just feeling nothing. The terror zone that we typically feel, or the fear zone, sits outside of your current level of ability. What we're feeling here is discomfort.

But what what happens is that the mindset of someone that is very averse to making mistakes recognizes discomfort and immediately interprets that as fear, something to be afraid of. I feel discomfort, therefore this is bad. And so it's actually not the feeling in and of itself that's the issue. It's a conclusion we make about that feeling.

So although when you do effective learning and you're developing skills effectively, you will always feel that discomfort. The discomfort never fades. The discomfort is always there. But I don't interpret that as something negative.

Exercising and you feel like, "Ooh, I'm really starting to work now." You don't say, "Holy crap, like something is going wrong. I have to stop right now." You think, "Okay, I'm finally getting a good exercise." For me and for a lot of the students that kind of message us with that, it's gone even past that to the point where they can't even recognize a tendency to feel fearful about it. In fact, they actually say the opposite. They feel fearful when they don't feel this because they recognize that that is a sign of being too passive.

And actually just means that their comfort zone has expanded out.