What If You Have to Go Through It?

I've hit plenty of struggles in my career. And at each one, I’d prefer to skip ahead to the part where everything makes sense again. 

And each time, as much as I try, I don’t get to skip past that part. And it definitely doesn't move as fast as I'd like. 

I see it with a leader making difficult changes to a leadership team. Or a founder who knows they need to let go but has spent years being successful because they were so good at doing the work themselves. They usually know what they need to do. The hard part is going through it.

And maybe that’s because sometimes the thing making leadership painful is the exact thing leadership is asking you to learn.

The conflict-averse leader has to experience conflict to learn how to lead through it. The founder has to experience the discomfort of letting go to learn how to succeed through others.

I’m realizing the same thing applies outside of leadership.

There are some things we probably can’t learn by reading about them, talking about them, or knowing what we "should" do. We have to experience them.

And that takes time.

Change at an organizational level takes time. Change at an individual level does too. The fact that something is still uncomfortable doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t working. It may mean that we need to be patient. Keep going. Pay attention to what the struggle is asking you to learn.

Because when I see leaders get to the other side, there’s usually growth, relief, and excitement. And quite often the phrase: “I wish I would have done this sooner.”