At the recent Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, one of the most useful reminders had nothing to do with medals or margins. It was about fear.
In alpine skiing, the luge, and freestyle aerials, athletes routinely push past 140 km/h with little more than a helmet between them and the ice. Yet their biggest battle is rarely physical. It’s psychological.
Take Mikaela Shiffrin, for example. She’s the most decorated alpine skier in history, and in her own words, she didn’t arrive at her fourth Olympic Games feeling calm.
She arrived having spent months working with a psychologist, deliberately desensitising herself to the Olympic environment and everything it triggered. As she explained during an interview, she spent the summer in deep conversation with her psychologist, “talking about all the different feelings surrounding the Olympics, and like desensitising to the word, and imagining the vibe, imagining the colours.”
She wasn’t focused on eliminating the pressure or waiting to feel perfectly composed. She was training herself to perform well in its presence.
That distinction matters.
Many of us still hold an outdated view of confidence and growth. We assume that if we were truly ready, the hard thing would feel easier. We tell ourselves that if a new challenge makes us anxious, stretched, or awkward, it must be a sign we’re not cut out for it.
Often, the opposite is true.
Discomfort is frequently part of development. The problem is that we misread it. We feel discomfort and assume danger, incompetence, or misalignment. However, in many cases, it’s simply the feeling of learning, adapting, and operating at the edge of our current capability.
Of course, not all discomfort is productive. Some of it is draining and corrosive, or reflects poor leadership, unrealistic demands, or a psychologically unsafe environment.
Consequently, the more useful question is not whether discomfort is present, but whether it’s serving you.
When Difficulty Helps and When It Hurts
Researchers Elizabeth and Robert Bjork have long argued that certain forms of difficulty, what they term ‘desirable difficulties’, can strengthen learning1.
Their point is not that harder is always better, but that challenges requiring effort, retrieval, adjustment, and active engagement can deepen long-term learning and transfer.
The Bjorks are equally clear: difficulty only helps when it’s workable. When a task exceeds someone’s capacity altogether, that difficulty ceases to be desirable and becomes counterproductive.
Workplaces are often poor at making this distinction.
A stretch assignment can be deeply developmental. So can stepping into a bigger role, having uncomfortable but necessary conversations, giving difficult feedback, leading through uncertainty, or taking responsibility before you feel fully ready. These moments feel uncomfortable because they are exposing. They require you to perform before mastery is complete. They ask you to tolerate imperfection, scrutiny, and the possibility of failure.
Overload is different. It happens when the challenge is not matched by support, resources, skill-building, or recovery. It happens when leaders romanticise resilience and underinvest in conditions for performance. In those settings, discomfort doesn’t deepen capability; instead, it depletes it.
The Story You Tell Yourself Matters
What determines whether discomfort becomes developmental or damaging?
Part of the answer lies in how you interpret the situation. Not what’s happening, but what you believe it means.
Researchers distinguish between challenge and threat states. When you interpret a demanding situation as a challenge, meaning you believe you have or can mobilise the resources to meet it, you tend to perform better than when you interpret the same situation as a threat.
A 2025 meta-analysis covering 62 studies found that challenge states were consistently associated with stronger performance outcomes than threat states across education and sport2. The effects were modest but reliable.
This shifts the question from “Is this hard?” to “How am I interpreting what’s hard?”
When you treat the physical signs of stress as proof that you’re failing, you are more likely to emotionally spiral. The racing heart, the tight chest, the sharper breathing become evidence that you cannot cope.
But when those same signals are interpreted as the body preparing to meet a challenge, the outcome shifts.
Professor Jeremy Jamieson and colleagues found that when people were taught to interpret stress as useful rather than harmful, they coped better in the moment and were less likely to fixate on negative signals3. A 2024 meta-analysis confirmed the pattern, showing that this kind of stress reframing can improve performance4.
Growth Rarely Feels Polished
Leadership growth rarely feels elegant. More often, it feels clumsy.
You say the thing, but not quite how you wanted. You hold the boundary, but your voice shakes. You put forward the view, but worry afterwards that you sounded underdone. You make the decision without all the information you wanted, and the tension remains.
In those moments, the inner critic arrives fast: I’m not ready, and I should have been more prepared. The temptation is to retreat, to wait until you feel more polished before you step forward again.
Resist that temptation. Readiness is not a prerequisite for action. It is built through action. Those clumsy, imperfect moments are not evidence that you are falling short. They are the practice ground where your capability takes shape.
Research published in the Academy of Management Learning & Education reinforces this perspective5. The study found that negative emotions don’t automatically undermine learning. Under conditions of mindfulness, they can actually support it, because individuals become better able to appraise those emotions as a challenge rather than a threat.
Discomfort does not need to disappear for growth to happen. What matters is whether you can stay present enough to work with it well.
What Leaders Need to Understand
For leaders, this carries two implications.
The first is personal. Stop assuming that discomfort is always a warning sign. Sometimes it tells you the environment is unhealthy, the expectations are unrealistic, or the cost is too high.
But sometimes discomfort is simply the sensation of doing something that matters before you feel polished in it. Learning to tell the difference is part of mature leadership judgement.
The second is organisational. If you want your team members to grow, you need to create conditions where challenge is possible without tipping into avoidable threat.
Professor Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety remains foundational here. Teams learn better when people believe the environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking: asking questions, admitting mistakes, speaking up, and testing ideas without punishment for getting it wrong the first time.
That doesn’t mean lowering standards. It means pairing high standards with sufficient safety for learning.
The best leaders understand this. They don’t treat development as a sink-or-swim exercise or confuse pressure with performance.
Instead, they calibrate stretch by providing context, coaching, feedback, and room to recover. They know that real development involves discomfort, but it should be the discomfort of effort and adaptation, not the discomfort of chaos, neglect, or fear.
Ask Better Questions
So, as you look ahead to a new working week and your next challenge, ask yourself not whether getting uncomfortable is good for you, but what kind of discomfort you are facing:
- Is it the discomfort of growth, where capability is stretching beyond old limits? Is it the discomfort of honesty, where you are finally facing something you have avoided? Is it the discomfort of visibility, where you are learning to stand behind your judgement? or
- Is it the discomfort of overload, where demand has outpaced the required support?
Getting clear on that distinction will change what you do next.
Your aim as a leader is not to eliminate discomfort. It’s to be the leader who recognises when discomfort serves your and your team’s development.
Getting you ready for tomorrow, today®
Award-winning author and global workplace expert, Dr Michelle Gibbings, helps leaders, teams and organisations unlock strategic influence to accelerate progress.
References
- Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. In M. A. Gernsbacher, R. W. Pew, L. M. Hough, & J. R. Pomerantz (Eds.), Psychology and the real world: Essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society (pp. 56–64). Worth Publishers. https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2016/04/EBjork_RBjork_2011.pdf
- Hase, A., Nietschke, M., Kloskowski, M., Szymanski, K., Moore, L., Jamieson, J. P., & Behnke, M. (2025). The effects of challenge and threat states on performance outcomes: An updated review and meta-analysis of recent findings. EXCLI Journal, 24, 151–176. https://doi.org/10.17179/excli2024-7995
- Jamieson, J. P., Nock, M. K., & Mendes, W. B. (2012). Mind over matter: Reappraising arousal improves cardiovascular and cognitive responses to stress. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(3), 417–422. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025719
- Bosshard, M., & Gomez, P. (2024). Effectiveness of stress arousal reappraisal and stress-is-enhancing mindset interventions on task performance outcomes: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Scientific Reports, 14, 7923. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-58408-w
- Vongswasdi, P., Leroy, H., Park, J., & Menges, J. (2025). Uncomfortable but developmental: How mindfulness moderates the impact of negative emotions on learning. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 24(2), 197–223. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2023.0434