Being Successful Requires You To Be Okay With Discomfort, Self-Mastery Requires You To Fall In Love With It

Being Successful Requires You To Be Okay With Discomfort, Self-Mastery Requires You To Fall In Love With It

The journey to bliss often begins in the last place you’d expect: discomfort.

The truth is that to really heal, to really ascend, to really deeply and completely change your life, you have to not only be okay with discomfort, you have to fall in love with it.

Right now, you’re stuck because you’re in love with your comfort zone. You’ve conditioned yourself to crave the feeling of distraction and ease. Of course, those temporary vices never really fulfill you, and the feeling of dissatisfaction creeps back up every day, because you are not really giving yourself what you need and want.

What you want is to be uncomfortable.

It seems counterintuitive, but it’s true.

What you want is to let yourself feel sad when you are sad. What you want is to grieve. What you want is to pity, mourn, and rage. And when you are not given the ample time and space to do it in a healthy way, you find other outlets, other apertures, through which you can project everything that’s suppressed.

What you want is to rise to the occasion.

What you want is to burn through your limitations, to be challenged and overcome.

What you want is to look your demons in the eye and dissolve them of their power.

What you want is to get angry and let that anger transform your life. What you want is to feel sad and let that sadness show you what matters. What you want is to feel anxious and let that anxiety show you where healing is required.

You don’t want a complacent life, no matter how much you convince yourself you do — and you know this because even when you have it, you are still dissatisfied.

To reach for the life you want, you have to fall in love with being uncomfortable. You have to get addicted to it. You have to start to prefer the high of breaking through your limitations to the dull comfort of staying safe. You have to let the fear rush through you and open you, more deeply than ever before. You have to let everything that’s holding you back become the foundation, the ground zero, upon which you rebuild the rest of your life.

Your life is ultimately going to be the product of what you tolerate.

It is going to be the sum of what you’re comfortable with.

So you have to get uncomfortable. You have to defy your impulses, however briefly, and you have to stretch. You have to learn to keep walking to broader horizons, that there is no point at which we simply “arrive,” because that is not what we were designed to do.

We were built to grow. We are here to evolve.

You know this, because you feel it.

Every tether you have to your discomfort is what’s holding you back, and every ounce of that unhappiness is showing you what you’re destined to transform.

So fall in love with the alchemy. Learn to metabolize discomfort, and use it to your advantage, instead of letting it hold you stuck and steady, exactly where you have always been.

January Nelson is a writer, editor, and dreamer. She writes about astrology, games, love, relationships, and entertainment. January graduated with an English and Literature degree from Columbia University.