Don't Come to Leadership to Feel Better: Welcoming Suffering to Expand Your Capacity as a Leader

I keep a list of one-sentence ideas that might be worth expanding on later. Here's one that bubbled up for me recently: Welcome suffering and learn how to end it. This is a daunting challenge, easier said than done, I assume for everyone reading this. Yet, if we can meet this challenge, even a little bit, then we have a priceless gift to share. For me, the late Charlotte Joko Beck, an American Zen teacher, offered clear insight to size up this feat.

Let's start with what may be one of the most baller statements of all time. If I ever open a gym or something, I'm putting a version of this on the front door. She said that if we are fixated on feeling good, blissful, or enlightened, then "we need to be disturbed. We need to be upset.... Don't come to this [Zen] center to feel better; that's not what this place is about. What I want are lives that get bigger so that they can take care of more things, more people." This sentiment applies to leadership. Don't come to leadership if you want to feel better. Come to grow bigger. Anyone who believes leadership will make them feel better, or that it is about the self, will be sorely disappointed.

Disappointment brings us to our next piece of wisdom from Beck. She said that our "problems arise because we separate ourselves from our experience. The discomfort and pain are not the cause of our problems. The cause is that we don't know what to do about them." Leadership requires a shift in mindset. It is not about evading problems, but embracing them. The more we run from discomfort, the smaller we become, and the smaller our world becomes. The more we understand pain, the bigger we grow, and the more expansive our leadership.

What might this look like in the context of leadership?

• Facilitating a dialogue about a controversial policy

• Listening to feedback about an unpopular executive decision

• Debriefing an organizational failure

• Tackling a difficult or undesirable project

• Mediating a conflict between colleagues or sharing one's own feelings of frustration

• Doing the right thing, despite there being a more profitable option

And now back to the original thought of welcoming suffering and learning how to end it. All too often we reject suffering wholesale. By rejecting it, we cannot learn from it. Instead, we anxiously and hopelessly construct a small and fragile world where everything must go right. When things don't go right, we get incredulous, upset, angry. When something goes wrong, which it will, here are some alternative responses:

1. While it may be hard, don't freak out. Observe the difficult experience and try to identify what is hard about it.

2. Don't blame anyone. Instead, explain what happened as a matter of fact without making it personal.

3. Ask, is there anything to learn from the difficult experience? How can this be viewed as a test, and how would one pass the test if a similar event happened again?

4. Identify a fresh, replicable practice that would end future suffering and is of value to others. 

As a society, we have become obsessed with reducing friction. We want to make things easier, to remove barriers. We want everyone to have an open road with endless opportunities. But this isn’t life, and it certainly isn’t the landscape in which leaders emerge. Principled leaders take their shape from friction. They feel most alive when life pushes against them, knocks them around a bit, and they roll with it. We’re not here to feel better. We’re here to get bigger.