The Two Faces of Tolerance: How to Leverage Discomfort for Growth

I’m Melissa Shanahan, and this is The Law Firm Owner Podcast Episode #299. 

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Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode. 299. Isn't that wild? We'll be at 300 in just another week. That is so crazy. How fun. It's so fun to hit milestones, isn't it?

Well, as I record this, it's the end of February, but when you hear this, it will be March. I can't believe how quickly this year is going already.

This week, we get to do something super fun. We do this four or five times a year. We do Mastery Group Live and for Mastery Group members, they have the opportunity at no cost other than their travel to come to Denver to our headquarters, to our new awesome retreat suite where we get to work with them and we cap it at just a small number, five per, that way I really do get one-on-one time and I can be as helpful as possible to everyone meet everyone where they are. But we are thrilled that people are coming in this week. So looking forward to that.

Speaking of Mmastery Group, Mastery Group is going to be opening towards the end of March and we are getting ready. We have improved once again, just in by improved I'm saying tweak, we revamped our onboarding last fall, led two cohorts through the new onboarding. And it's so much better than it used to be. And we thought we were doing really great back then. But now we have new ideas based on how members have been moving through onboarding. And so we are making some tweaks to make it even better.

We care deeply that you feel like you get your hands around the things that you need to get your hands around when you come into Mastery Group. And you are able to focus on what matters the most. So we will guide you. We've got you when you come in.

If you are a firm that's doing under a million dollars and you want some coaching, you want some guidance, you want some facilitation, you want to be better with planning and with honoring your plans, with execution, this is a great program to join.

If you are interested in working with us on any level, no matter how big or small your firm is, go to https://www.velocitywork.com to the work with us page.

And there's a form to fill out that gives me some information about you, then there is an opportunity to schedule a call with me. And that's a great next step for us to figure out, is this a right fit? And if we as a company are right fit, what program makes the most sense for you based on where you are. So we can help with any of that.

But I am saying this now because Mastery Group is opening soon. So if you want to schedule a call, I would get on that sooner rather than later because as we get closer to enrollment opening towards the end of March, it just may be tougher to work out schedules last minute. Really excited to see not only who joins Mastery Group, but who comes into our sphere and who we have the opportunity to work with this spring.

Okay. Let's dig in to today's topic, which is tolerance. We are going to look at tolerance from two different sides, which I think is important to look at from both sides, so that you can explore and reflect for yourself what is true for you right now. Tolerance is a nuanced concept and depending on how you're looking at it, it can have positive implications, it can also have negative implications depending on how it's being used, depending on what you are tolerating.

Okay, let's start with the definition of tolerance. The best definition I found was this: “Tolerance is the willingness to accept certain conditions or situations, even when they aren't ideal.” The willingness to accept certain conditions or situations, even when they aren't ideal.

Now typically when we think of tolerance you'll hear a question often if you ever take part in reflective workshops, which happen close to the turn of the year. And I lead these for our Master Group members, it's called Reflect and Get Clear. We look back at the year, and one of the questions that we ask as we're reflecting so that we make better plans for the future is, what are you tolerating? And the answers to that are really important. And this is typically how people think of tolerance. What are they tolerating? What is not ideal that they should change that could have been changed, that they haven't changed, that they are tolerating.

And what comes up often is a certain team member on the team that is just not, despite how much work and effort and you've put into that person, despite how much retraining you've done with that person, it's just not happening. It's not clicking. You've been tolerating a certain level of performance out of a team member or more than one team member.

Also client relationships. This comes up a lot when people answer this question, what have you been tolerating? Relationships with clients that are extremely difficult. Maybe you've been tolerating a system or process that's not quite right, it's broken, and you do get frustrated by the outcomes, but you just haven't had the space to dig in or someone hasn't been digging in, and so it's been tolerated.

Other things that I see people tolerating is a profit margin that is too low year over year and usually when they come in, we fix it, right? We help them get on track. We don't fix it. Like our clients do great work to fix it, but we help them figure out what needs to be done so that they stop tolerating a profit margin that is much smaller than what it needs to be. Right?

And then there's things about yourself, personal productivity or your habits that you've been tolerating? And if you could see some of my episodes recently have been lined up with how to get yourself on a different track if you have been tolerating certain things and you want to be done with those things, giving you ideas, like setting rules for example.

What are you tolerating personally? Are you tolerating an insane schedule that other people control entirely? And listen, to some extent, you may need to deal with that. But where are you not taking the reins? You're just tolerating it. Are you tolerating running at 60% of the energy that you could have because you aren't getting enough sleep?

So what in your life and in your business are you tolerating? That is important to ask. It is important to reflect on that question every so often just to do a check-in and see, because we don't think of this stuff day to day. It helps to have the question posed to you so that you can answer thoughtfully and make some different decisions moving forward.

Now, let's talk about the positive use of tolerance and sort of explore tolerance as a strength. I talk about this in the foundational concepts PDF of Monday Map/Friday Wrap. How important it is to allow discomfort, to be okay with discomfort as an override to an urge that you get that is going to pull you off of a path that you want to be on.

So another way to say this is you've made some decisions about what you're going to do, how you're going to show up or what time you're going to show up for something. And it comes time for that thing. And you don't feel like doing it. There is an urge to not do it. There's an urge to abandon your plan. And it is uncomfortable when you feel that to stay with the thing that you said you were gonna do. It requires that you feel discomfort.

And as I'm saying this out loud, I'm having the thought, like, that does not sound hard. But if you know, then you know, it is very difficult to do this. It gets easier the more you train yourself, but then you just find new levels of discomfort that you have to really practice this stuff all over again with. But when you are practicing this, it feels very difficult.

Sharing how this feels for me when I am experiencing discomfort, like I really, really don't want to do the thing in front of me, whether it's because I'm not in the mood to, whether it's because it feels hard, whether it's because I'm making up an excuse that I don't have time, whatever it might be, there are times that it feels intense enough, the discomfort to actually sit with it and not just abandon my plan, which would provide relief internally. It would be like, okay, we'll do it tomorrow. That's relief. And that is what your brain tried to get you to do.

It's like I talked about the different parts of the brain in this PDF, but your lower brain, that is what it's trying to get you to do is the path of least resistance. It wants to stay safe. It wants to stay comfortable. It doesn't see a reason to go outside of your comfort zone, whereas your higher brain, your prefrontal cortex, absolutely gets it. But it takes for you to override with your prefrontal cortex, override the lower brain, override the urges that kick in.

And so that feeling for me, there are times, and I would say this happens at least once a month, where I want to crawl out of my skin. I want to do anything else than the thing I'm supposed to do in front of me. And for me, it produces agitation, for real agitation, not just irritated. No, like almost anger, but it's not quite anger. I'm not yelling at people around me, but it does not feel good inside.

But the second you get going, the second you drop into whatever it is that you were supposed to do, about two minutes in, you sort of get focused and you just, that feeling dissipates. Which by the way, is why it's so important that you have tactics to be able to drop into the thing that you are supposed to be doing quickly.

So depending on what you're working on, that could be like a certain playlist if you're doing work that is okay for you to have music on, but it could be a certain kind of playlist. It could be going to get like, I love Spindrift, going to get a Spindrift and sit down and dig in. Like, there has to be, I try to attach something to it that allows me to drop in more quickly, like something that makes it better than it would be on its own, but there is a ritualistic aspect to it for me.

So I know if I need to drop into a certain kind of work, then I will make sure my Spotify is open and ready to go. And I push play before I'm allowed to think about what I'm doing, right? So I just, I already set the tone. How can you create the container? What do you need to do to create the container so it lets you drop in as fast as possible?

If you have to sit there and think about, what right now could make this better? What can I do to really drop into focus? You're wasting time. And you know what? You're probably gonna talk yourself out of doing the thing that you're supposed to do. You need to think through this stuff beforehand. You need to have a plan for feeling this way, expect that you're gonna feel this way so that it's not a problem when it shows up, you know exactly what to do, you know exactly what to turn on. And that can make a big difference.

So that's sort of a side note, but I'm just thinking through if I'm trying to impart some experience here and some, hopefully, some level of wisdom to you guys about this practice and how important it is. You have to set yourself up to win at this easy mode versus hard mode. Like I talked about a few weeks ago. Thank you, Shane Parrish. So how can you make sure that you don't have to experience the discomfort for quite as long as you would, if you didn't have something to allow you to drop in more quickly. Okay, okay.

But going back to tolerance, this is important because you need to be able to tolerate the discomfort, but it's for a purpose, right? It's because you know a result you want to line yourself up with, so you need to do these things. And when you don't feel like doing them, but you're going to stay with it anyway, you are tolerating discomfort. And that is a meta skill. That is a skill that many people never fully develop. They never challenge or exercise themselves with. They have made it just fine in life and they don't feel the need to really push further on their current boundary with discomfort.

Or there's a great book called The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks, and he talks about an upper limit problem that people experience, and he talks about it in many facets. But one of the things he says in there is that you have a thermostat for how much discomfort you are willing to feel. You can turn up, you can crank up that thermostat, but it takes intentionality. It doesn't just happen. You really have to exercise practice and your awareness, increase your awareness so that you can have a new set point with your thermostat. And in this case, we're talking about discomfort, but he talks about it with all kinds of things. Happiness, happiness in relationships, wealth. So he talks about it in all those different ways.

But if we're applying it here, it's the same concept. What are you willing to tolerate? So if you know that you're pretty comfortable in your routines and that means you have a certain tolerance with discomfort And it's pretty low. If you're comfortable with your routines, that means it's pretty low.

So if you are going to set a big goal, and if you think about your firm, if you have a big goal, whether it's to grow revenue and grow your team because you see an opportunity in the market, whether it's to increase your profit margin and get more lean inside and increase efficiency, no matter what your current goal is for the firm, it is going to require that you do something different. And that something different is not going to be a cakewalk, because if it was a cakewalk, you would have already been doing it. And so if you are really going to bridge the gap between where you are right now and where you want to be, you are going to have to experience discomfort. And the bigger your goal, the more discomfort you're going to have to experience.

If you can't tolerate discomfort, you will fall short every time. If you can tolerate discomfort, you will get closer and closer and closer because you have the ability to feel discomfort and move forward anyway. Now again, this is a skill that's developed. It is not something that just happens overnight and it's not something you're stuck with either wherever you're sitting right now. You can develop this.

So when I'm talking about bridging the gap between here and where you are, which is going to require things of you that are uncomfortable, it may require you firing people. It may require you to hire people. It may require you to get outside of your office and go do more networking and schedule more lunches and really seek out relationships with referral partners. And for some people, that's not easy. They would rather not do that.

It's going to require that you experience discomfort for the sake of the goals that you have set for the sake of the results that you want to create. Again, going back to tolerance, it is a positive use of tolerance and it's a strength to have tolerance for discomfort because it develops resilience. And it's not just the discomfort in a moment when you don't want to do something, but it's the discomfort of experiencing the challenges that you will invariably face on your way to getting from here to where you envision yourself to be. There's going to be setbacks, there's going to be challenges, and that is not gonna be comfortable, and you're gonna keep going. So if you have a high tolerance for discomfort, it's going to increase your resiliency.

Also something else I see, and I have also experienced myself, is that if you have an increased tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity to some level. And we try to reduce that as much as possible, but there are certain things that are uncertain. So if you don't have tolerance for that, you will stay in a small little circle of things you know you can control and you can have absolute certainty around. At least that's what we tell ourselves. We don't actually have control and we can't have certainty around everything. But you will keep your world small if you don't have tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity and sort of the mystery of how things are going to unfold, then you'll have a very hard time playing bigger than what you're playing right now.

Okay, let's also talk about tolerance from the perspective of staying on track. We already touched on it a little bit with setbacks and challenges, but if you have the ability to tolerate discomfort, that can prevent impulsive decisions. And impulsive decisions don't have a ton of room in a really well thought out plan. You know, you're the owner and you can make whatever decisions you want to, but that's not typically how this should go. We make a plan so that then we execute on the plan. And then when it's time to lift our head and look back and review the quarter and then think forward for the next quarter, that's when you make decisions.

In between the quarters, you try to decrease the number of decisions you have to make. That is not the time for it. There's a time to make a plan, there's a time to honor the plan. And if you aren't good at being able to follow through and honor the plan because you get this impulsive idea, which by the way, is an urge to take you off track. It is an urge to not focus on the thing that you said you were gonna focus on. So when you feel that, if you can't tolerate the tension there, the discomfort of I had this idea, I really want to do this idea, but I had this plan that I said I was going to do, and be able to stay on track towards the plan that you said you were going to do, it's going to be very difficult for you to bridge the gap from where you are now to where you say you want to be.

Because that cycle, that pattern will show up time and time again, no matter where you are with things. So I hope you can see where this is a meta skill. The more you can learn to experience discomfort, the better off you will be. That is playing the long game. If you don't have the ability to tolerate the discomfort of staying the course, and we're not talking about years, guys, we're talking about 90 days, We're talking about a quarter.

Now, a quarter is a stretch of time. So I don't want to dismiss that it's not easy to stay the course for 90 days. A lot of people have trouble with that. But the more I work with someone and the more advanced they get, the more that they grow themselves personally, and as a leader and as an owner, but also their firm, they have an easier time, they have flexed that muscle enough that 90 days is not difficult for them to stay committed and resist the shiny objects that will pop up in front of your face.

So all this to say, your ability to tolerate discomfort on the way to a result that you want to create, on the way to a goal you want to achieve on the way to a vision you want to see realized your ability to tolerate discomfort all along the way, all along that path is directly related to the level of results that you will achieve for yourself.

As I'm talking to you guys about this, there's people popping in my head who have exercised this and have created a tolerance level that is very different than what they used to have. And I've watched it over the years. There are certain members and clients that, whether it's an acquisition of another firm and all that comes with that, like that is a bold move. That is not easy, but it is a part of the vision that they have for themselves. And so that is a step that they're taking.

And thinking of this certain client, I have watched their capacity increase to be able to tolerate more and more and more bigger problems, bigger issues, bigger challenges, bigger barriers, bigger setbacks, all of it. And bigger wins, quite frankly. So handling all of that with grace. And that is Because there is an ability to tolerate all of that, to be able to have capacity for all of that. And it's not comfortable.

You know, it's funny, I didn't think of this at the top of this episode. In my outline, this isn't in it anywhere. But as I'm talking through this, what's funny is that when you reflect on the first version of tolerance we were talking about, when you reflect on what are you tolerating, that you don't need to be tolerating anymore. You can stop tolerating it. You can make decisions that will get you out of that mode of tolerating an unideal circumstance that doesn't align with where it is that you want to go and where you want to be.

When you make those decisions, those usually require courage. Those usually are decisions that aren't comfortable to make. And so then automatically, when you make those decisions to get out of the mode of tolerating unideal circumstances within your firm, what you do with that is push yourself into a different kind of mode that is going to require tolerance on the positive end of the scale like we're talking about. It's going to require tolerance of discomfort to make those moves that you need to make that you've been sitting on.

And really, I mean, that's kind of the same thing as saying, one thing I talk a lot with members and clients about is there's discomfort no matter what. That is a part of the human experience, but the discomfort is different. And I talk about this in the Monday Map/Friday Wrap, foundational concepts, that when you feel discomfort and you give in and you abandon your plan, then it feels relieving in the moment. So you technically feel better inside in the moment. But the discomfort comes on the back end when you again, once again, have not made headway. You don't have the result you wanted to have because you didn't stick with it. You didn't have the tolerance for that discomfort.

But then the discomfort on the other side is actually up front where you feel discomfort. And instead of abandoning your plan, you go ahead and experience the discomfort now and then you feel great on the back end and you have something to show for it. So using the word tolerance here, you are either gonna tolerate unideal circumstances inside of your firm, things that you don't need to tolerate, it doesn't line up with what you really want, but you keep tolerating it. You can either exercise that tolerance now and it's not going to get you anywhere.

Or you can exercise the flip side of tolerance which is tolerating an internal state that is less than ideal in the moment but man it gives you what you want. It is the thing that puts you into a different paradigm. It's the thing that gives you that your next level, it's the thing that gets you the results that you wanted to create. And so either way, you're having to tolerate something. Do you want to have something to show for what you're tolerating? Or do you just want to tolerate and have nothing to show for it in the end?

So this is very closely tied with all the conversation and all of the writing that I've done about discomfort. I don't know if you guys know this or not, I'm sure I have said this quote on this podcast a lot, but one of my favorite quotes of all time is from a woman named Brooke Castillo. She said, discomfort is the currency for your dreams. And that has always stuck with me. That has felt like truth. And the further I go along in life the more I realize it is the truth. I think about it all the time. Discomfort is what you pay. It is your payment for the dreams that you have and that you want to realize.

As we close, it's probably a good time to just push pause after I prompt you with this and think about this for yourself. What are you currently tolerating in your business right now that is not aligned with your vision? Are you currently tolerating any team members who aren't pulling their weight? Are you tolerating inefficient processes that they've just become comfortable and no one's really dealt with them yet? Are you tolerating clients, a certain client, make a list of everything you're tolerating.

And as you think through those things, think about the impacts of tolerating those circumstances. There is impacts on morale, on productivity, maybe missed revenue, maybe bloated expenses? What are the impacts of you tolerating what came up for you with that question?

Once you have some thoughts jotted down here, and you've reflected on this for a bit, then you can start to figure out how to shift from passive tolerance to more strategic tolerance on purpose. You're going to feel tolerance on purpose with intentional moves towards more of what's aligned with your vision.

Alright everybody, thanks for tuning in. I hope you take some practical action with this. And I'll see you here next Tuesday.

Hey, you may not know this, but there's a free guide for a process I teach called Monday Map/Friday Wrap. If you go to VelocityWork.com, it's all yours. It's about how to plan your time and honor your plans. So, that week over week, more work that moves the needle is getting done in less time. Go to VelocityWork.com to get your free copy.

Thank you for listening to The Law Firm Owner Podcast. If you're ready to get clearer on your vision, data, and mindset, then head over to VelocityWork.com where you can plug in to quarterly Strategic Planning, with accountability and coaching in between. This is the work that creates Velocity.