Embracing the cold.
Inertia — Nº157
Too often we are reluctant to change until circumstances force us to. It’s human nature to seek warmth and familiarity, clinging to present patterns that have worked for us before. Because why disrupt what’s already going well?
Resistance to change can be our undoing. We crave comfort and shy away from the cold, bitter winds, even if we only have to embrace it for a short time. But, the winds will eventually blow through, whether you’re ready or not. You either embrace it — leaning into the discomfort and challenging yourself to change before your hand is forced — or you sink beneath the waves.
It’s easy to rely on leaders to take action while we stick to doing whatever we’re told, thinking, “Well, if it’s important, then someone else will speak up or deal with it. If not, then my hands weren’t on it, so it’s not my problem.”
But when we’re in the middle of this mild success, steering away from any new opportunities to adapt, we don’t learn from our mistakes. We don’t learn responsibility. We don’t learn resilience. We don’t learn anything.
Embracing the cold is realising that, one day, things will become your problem. You might’ve spent your life being denied agency or seeing many of your efforts fall flat, and from that, you feel a lack of control. Taking action doesn’t feel natural. But, if you see your life as a voyage that helps you learn, change, and grow, it becomes obvious why you must continue to avoid learned helplessness.
This is where intentionally “embracing the cold” through small, daily practices can be transformative. Taking a cold shower, doing a gruelling workout, or meditating — any act that shakes you out of your climate-controlled comforts and into the present, where you are conscious of the seconds that pass. These tiny jolts will help you stop, feel, and pay attention in a world constantly trying to lull you into the warmer trance of automatic routines.
When you feel the cold on your skin, the burn in your muscles, or the discomfort of sitting still with your thoughts, you cannot help but be where you are. It will spur on a sense of captaincy — no longer acting as if you are incapacitated or simply incapable. The feeling will be slight at first, but eventually, it will grow and work you into a leader.
And the better you are at being a leader, the more you care about outcomes — not credit or blame — and create the conditions that reward taking initiative and being proactive and preventing problems from happening. The little shocks of the cold will wake you up when you need it and remind you that growth comes from venturing into the invigorating chill all along.
Fortitude is invaluable as it allows you to face bigger, inevitable storms of change and treat them like mediocre showers with light gusts. Embracing the cold we face will help us remain resilient, open to opportunity, and alive to what’s possible in this ever-shifting world. Because only by being in the moment when we experience the chill can we eventually be comfortable in any climate.