Why Pressure Feels Like a Problem (Even When It's Right) |
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When experiencing a crisis, the instinct to retreat and escape costs you the resources you need to recover.
Growth rarely happens in comfort. Friction is what pushes us beyond the familiar and into what's possible.
Recognize whether you're in a growth chapter or a maintenance chapter, and let that be enough.
The fire and the phone call came within the same week.
A coaching client of mine, let's call her Helen, had spent nearly two decades in corporate life before doing something brave. She left to build her own consultancy. She was in the middle of that reinvention when a house fire took almost everything she owned. Many of her contacts were laid off, business leads dried up, and budgets froze as companies feared a recession and the impact of a prolonged war in the Middle East. The future she had been carefully building simply disappeared. Two crises, back-to-back.
If you have ever been there, where life doesn't wait for you to finish grieving one thing before it hands you another, you know that the standard advice about resilience doesn't quite cover it. "Just keep going" doesn't account for the weight of carrying it all.
The instinct that makes it worse
Helen's first response was to freeze. Then came feelings of grief, followed by the question: Why is this happening to me?
It is normal to feel and think this way. When we experience loss, our instinct is to escape the discomfort as quickly as possible. We over-execute at work to feel in control. We minimize what's happening at home to seem strong. We treat the struggle as the problem to be solved rather than as the experience to be moved through.
That instinct may provide short-term relief. But it quietly erodes the very resources we most need to recover: clarity, energy, and self-trust.
Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, told a group of Stanford students, "I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering. Greatness comes........