Are you comfortable with that?
Imagine this. You're an external contractor, sitting in a staff session that has been put together to bring a team closer. The exercise is light and involves breaking into small groups to create an AI prompt to represent who they are as a team. You are there to support, not to perform, and you've enjoyed watching the group you joined shape something that feels genuinely theirs.
When the time comes to pitch the prompts to the wider room, the senior leader offers, generously, that everyone could have a go. You gesture to the staff in your group, look at them directly, and say this is their session, that they should do the pitch. "But you're part of this too," the leader says, warmly, missing the moment. You smile, say no again, shift your chair back, and gesture once more to the staff. "OK, you don't feel comfortable with it," the leader says, and moves on.
What you'd offered was a professional judgement, twice, with a graceful out tucked inside it and your whole body pointed back toward the people the session was meant to be for. What the leader heard, or chose to translate it into so they didn't have to engage with what you'd actually said, was a feeling. A discomfort. Something to be soothed around, rather than a position to be reckoned with. You sit with the small, hot frustration of being misnamed, and you let it go, because the room isn't about you. But the moment sticks.
It sticks partly because of what came before it. The same leader, across the day, had a pattern of interrupting staff-generated ideas, taking the thread away, and finishing the thought themselves. The performance of inclusion was loud. The practice of it was thinner. The comfort re-frame wasn't a one off slip, it was the language available to a leader who had been performing inclusion all day without doing the harder thing genuine inclusion requires, which is to make space and then stay out of it.
I've started noticing how often it happens, in rooms well beyond that one. "Are you comfortable with that" has become the connective tissue of the workplaces I move through. A project manager I worked with recently asked three times in one meeting whether people were comfortable with the schedule, while the schedule sat on the screen waiting to be adjusted. Meeting facilitators move around the room checking each person's comfort level with a decision, as though any one person's discomfort should be enough to halt the work. Leaders ask the question reflexively, apparently unaware that they are outsourcing their authority to the people they are meant to be leading.
The word has stopped meaning what it used to mean. It has become a kind of permission slip, a way of seeming inclusive without doing the harder work of being decisive, accountable, or honest.
Constantly seeking comfort is a particular kind of trap. Think of getting into a hot spa. The temperature is perfect, you settle in, you feel held. The water cools around you, gradually, and your body, habituated to the warmth, doesn't notice the shift. By the time you register that you're cold, you've been cold for a while. The thing you sought has become its opposite, and you've stayed in it the whole time. Workplaces that have organised themselves around comfort do something similar. The cool water becomes the norm.
There is a confusion underneath this that's worth naming directly. A lot of organisations have spent the last decade trying to build what's called psychological safety. The work of Amy Edmondson, the Harvard researcher who coined the term in her 1999 paper Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams, is clear about what it means: an environment where people can take interpersonal risks, such as disagreeing, raising concerns, or admitting they don't know something, without being humiliated or punished. It is about the capacity for hard conversations, not the absence of them. In her own words, written in 2018 for a wider audience: "Psychological safety is about candor, about making it possible for productive disagreement and free exchange of ideas." And, plainly: "It is not about becoming comfortable at work."
Somewhere in the translation from research paper to corporate training, that distinction got lost. Psychological safety was rebranded as comfort. Safe spaces became spaces where no one was uncomfortable. The result is the opposite of what Edmondson described. Rooms where the interpersonal risks aren't taken. Hard conversations that don't happen. A culture in which the most uncomfortable thing on the table is the one nobody is willing to mention. You cannot have a brave conversation in a room that has been engineered to feel like a spa.
I am not standing outside this, watching with a clipboard. I've never used the word comfortable in the way I am critiquing it here. The pattern underneath the word, though, I have absolutely fallen into. I've stepped in when I should have stayed back. I've smoothed paths that people were entitled to walk for themselves. I've focused so hard on being respectful, on holding a productive conversation that everyone could contribute to, that I've ended up managing the room in a way that quietly took something away from the people in it. The work, for me, has been noticing when I am about to do it, and choosing differently.
Here is what bothers me most. When we treat adults as though discomfort is harm, we don't make them stronger, and we don't make them safer. We train them into smaller and smaller versions of themselves. We teach them that their professional judgement is actually a feeling, that their position is actually a preference, and that the right response to difficulty is to ask whether anyone minds.
It is infantilising. It infantilises the person being asked, and it infantilises the person asking, who has just quietly abdicated the responsibility they were paid to hold. Do this for long enough, in enough rooms, and the effect compounds. People stop reaching for their own authority. They wait to be asked whether they are comfortable, and they wait to ask others the same, and the capacity to simply act, to decide, to take a position and stand on it, quietly drains out of the room. What is left is a workplace full of adults who have forgotten they are allowed to move without permission.
The kindest thing you can do for the people you work with is let them be uncomfortable sometimes. Discomfort is the texture of doing anything that matters. When we design it out, we do not get healthier workplaces. We get workplaces full of people who have lost the muscle for hard things, and then, when something actually difficult arrives, no one in the room knows how to be there for it.
This is the first piece of what I am planning to be six months of writing about the patterns I keep watching humans fall into at work. The publication is called Beyond the Bullshit because that is what I am trying to get to. Not the bullshit itself, which is everywhere and which you don't need me to point at, but what sits underneath it. What it is protecting us from feeling, deciding, or saying.
I am not going to wrap this with five tips for being more comfortable with discomfort. The point isn't comfort with discomfort. The point is that we've made comfort the goal, and the goal is wrong.
More soon.
