What If the Discomfort Is Actually the Work?

For five years, I lived a double life.

Three - four days a week, I was a CFO. Running finance teams, managing reporting cycles, sitting in executive meetings.

The other days, I was building something else entirely. Studying coaching, practising with anyone who would let me, building a network, assessing financial feasibility.

The brave thing, according to every "follow your dreams" meme I'd ever seen, would have been to make the leap. Back myself. Go all in.

I didn't. Not yet.

I needed the CFO income to fund a transition I hadn't yet earned. And I needed to keep investing in the new path to make it real. Honouring one made the other harder. That is not comfortable coexistence. That is genuine friction.

Learning to stay in that friction, without forcing a resolution before it was ready, turned out to be important work. The tension resolved not because I made a brave decision on a whim, but because I held it long enough, and built enough of a client base, that the path forward became clear.

This shows up everywhere in leadership.

Short-term profit versus long-term value creation. Cost discipline versus investment in people. Decisiveness versus the humility to stay curious.

Most of us are trained to resolve these tensions. Pick a side, make a call, move on. And sometimes that's exactly right.

But sometimes the most important leadership act is to resist that urge - to stay in the discomfort of both/and rather than retreat into the false safety of either/or.

Vice Admiral James Stockdale understood this at an extreme level. As a US Navy pilot held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam for nearly eight years, he observed that it wasn't the pessimists who didn't survive - it was the optimists. The ones who told themselves they'd be home by Christmas, then Easter, then the following Christmas. When each deadline passed, they were crushed.

What kept Stockdale alive was holding two things at once: an unflinching acceptance of his brutal reality, and an unshakeable belief that he would ultimately prevail. Author Jim Collins named this the Stockdale Paradox: confronting the brutal facts of your current reality, while never losing faith in the eventual outcome.

I saw this play out recently with a finance leader. Caught between head office pushing for short-term results and a divisional CEO focused on longer-term value creation, his instinct was to find the answer. To resolve it.

What shifted was the realisation that this wasn't his problem to solve. It was a tension to name. He brought both parties into an open conversation, surfaced the competing priorities, and created the conditions for a new way forward to emerge.

The tension didn't disappear. But it stopped being his alone to carry.

What problem are you currently trying to resolve - when it might actually be a tension to be named and held?

With love

Sue