What is comfort?
“COMFORT: a state of physical ease and freedom from pain or constraint.”
comfort: a state of physical ease and freedom from pain or constraint.
a Google AI generated definition…
The Empathy Athletes and I have explored the word/concept of “comfort” multiple times over the years in Empathy Standup practices. Different seasons with different people, a similar starter definition, and very similar thoughts and expansions of the definition of “comfort” from the attending people. Like many words, despite having a rather simple dictionary definition, people have very different view of what they find comfortable and their capacity for discomfort. We are all comfort snowflakes - unique, special, and impossible to replicate. Why are we unique snowflakes? Well, we all lead vastly different lives - even those in partnerships/marriages, that are siblings, or have similar roles at a company. We can only see the world from our own eyes and makes sense of it from our own mind. We are stuck on an island of human-living. It is a good island until you start to realize how comfort can stale, comfort can corrupt, and comfort can ultimately destroy.
For a while now, I’ve been less concerned with sustaining comfort and more focused on removing false comfort and building smaller resilient comforts. I’ve learned the hard way that few people willfully seek out discomfort (like empathy practice), but many people realize that challenging comfort is where we grow, where we change, where we expand and evolve. We get so engrained in our ways of living, thinking, breathing, doing, that it becomes overwhelmingly detrimental to our sense of order to initiate any alterations or change. With this sense of dread looming over our heads, how do we get people to challenge their own comfort and explore stripping off its vanity layers so that they can tend to their unique comfort’s core?
Stop trying to lead horses to water. Stop trying to expose humans to their dirt. They will drink and clean up when they are ready and willing. This is a really fucking difficult life-lesson though - we have got to let people stubborn people fail and hold them accountable for their failures. What we can do is lead by example and challenge their worldview by challenging ourselves to check our comforts, biases, hangups, etc. Show them growth, show them change, show them a pathway.
In other words, do your own dirty work!
As my dental hygienist told me years ago, “Floss the teeth you want to keep.” Maybe my “let’s get dirty” line is, “Play in the dirt you don’t want to be buried under.”
From my personal blog, Let’s Get Dirty.
Highlights.
Back to what we learned over the years about comfort. Here are some thoughts from the practice’s sticky notes.
“Physical” is too narrow. Comfort includes mental, emotional, and spiritual ease.
Freedom from pain may not be possible or even the goal
Constraint is a useful tool to promote progress and job
No constraints = chaos
Boundaries are crucial for good leadership
Constraints aren’t always comfortable and can lead directly to better comfort (getting to bed at 9:30p)
Consent and agency are necessary for comfort to be started and maintained
Too much comfort leads to atrophy and less comfort over time
Comfort and discomfort form a cycle, they aren’t opposites of a spectrum
Comfort has a shadow side
Comfort as avoidance
Comfort with only the familiar
How do we maintain our comfort?
Ain’t that the million dollar question. Here’s what was shared.
I don’t
It was honest…and a sign for all of us that it takes work
Surface peace is not the same as justice
Constant comfort leads to atrophy, meaning I am less comfortable over time with the same thing(s)
House slippers by the door!
Subconscious comfort maintenance + conscious maintenance.
What are my comfort intentions and needs?
Constraints are NOT universally uncomfortable
Comfort, redefined.
Comfort: a chosen state of ease; physical, mental, emotional, and/or spiritual, that restores us enough to re-enter discomfort on purpose in order to grow, change, or expand ourselves.
Homework.
How do you actively maintain comfort?
