I want you to think about how many decisions you make every day because you don’t want to feel uncomfortable.
You answer a work email after hours because you’re worried someone might be disappointed if you don’t respond. You agree to another commitment even though your schedule is already full because saying no makes you feel guilty. You step in to solve a problem for your child because watching them struggle makes you anxious. Or you put off having a difficult conversation with your partner because you’re worried about how it might go.
Most of us don’t think about these decisions as attempts to avoid discomfort. We have perfectly reasonable explanations for why we make them. We’re being responsible, taking care of the people we love, and doing our best to keep everything moving.
But after more than 20 years of working with mothers, I’ve become increasingly interested in what happens when we make these decisions over and over again. You see, while avoiding something uncomfortable might make us feel better in the moment, we often underestimate what we’re giving up in the process.
And sometimes, what we’re giving up is exactly what we say we want most.
Why Discomfort Has So Much Power Over Us
One of the things we know about human behavior is that we’re often more motivated to avoid losing something than we are to gain something of equal value. We tend to pay more attention to what could go wrong than what could go right, especially when the potential loss feels personal.
And for high-achieving mothers, there can be a lot that feels like it’s at stake.
If you stop checking your work email in the evening, you might worry that someone will think you’re not committed enough. If you set a boundary with a family member, you might have to deal with their disappointment. If you allow your child to struggle with something, you might worry that you’re failing to give them the support they need.
In each situation, there’s something you want to gain, and these gains are important to you. More time with your children, more freedom to make your own decisions, or more confidence in your child’s ability to handle challenges.
But there’s also something you might have to give up, even if it’s only the feeling that you’re in control. And when you’ve spent much of your life learning how to stay ahead of problems, be responsible, and make sure things turn out well, giving up that sense of control can feel surprisingly threatening.
So you keep doing what you’ve always done. And you may not even realize how much those choices are costing you.
When Helping Your Child Gets in the Way of Helping Your Child
I see this play out in parenting all the time. A child comes home upset because something happened with a friend at school and their mother immediately starts asking questions, offering advice, and thinking about whether she needs to contact the teacher or another parent.
She’s concerned about her child, and understandably so. Nobody enjoys watching someone they love struggle, especially when that person is their child. But I often ask moms to pay attention to what’s happening inside them during these moments.
What does it feel like to see your child upset? Do you notice an urge to make the feeling go away? Does your mind immediately start searching for a solution? Is it difficult to listen without doing something?
Sometimes our kids absolutely need us to step in. There are situations that require our protection, guidance, or direct involvement. But there are also plenty of moments when the most helpful thing we can do is stay close, listen, and allow our kids to work through something difficult. Even when they’re really little.
For many mothers, that’s much harder than it sounds.
When our children are struggling, we often feel as though we’re supposed to do something about it. We want them to feel better, and when they do, we feel better too. The problem is that when we repeatedly step in to remove our children’s discomfort, we may also be taking away opportunities for them to learn that they can handle it.
Think about what happens when a child has hundreds of opportunities to work through manageable challenges while knowing that a loving adult is nearby. They begin to learn that frustration doesn’t mean failure, that disappointment is something they can recover from, and that making a mistake doesn’t mean they aren’t capable. They learn these things through experience, which means we have to be willing to let them have those experiences.
And that requires something of us as parents. We have to be able to tolerate watching our children feel things we’d rather they didn’t have to feel.
(I am betting that these are some of the things that you, as an adult, never learned when you were a kid and so you’re having to learn them now. How different might your life be if you had learned these things when you were 3, 4, or 5?)
The Ways We Avoid Discomfort in Our Own Lives
Many high-performing women have become really good at organizing their lives around avoiding certain uncomfortable experiences. They work hard to make sure nobody is disappointed in them. They stay ahead of deadlines because falling behind makes them anxious. They take on more responsibility because they don’t trust that things will get done the way they want. And they keep themselves busy because slowing down can bring up feelings they’d rather not deal with.
These are often the same women who appear to have everything together. They’re successful in their careers, involved in their children’s lives, and capable of managing a crazy amount of responsibility. But when I sit down with them, I often hear something very different.
They’re exhausted. They have trouble relaxing, even when they have the time. They feel guilty when they’re not being productive, and they struggle to enjoy their families because there’s always something else that needs their attention.
Many of them have spent years believing that if they could just get a little more organized, work a little harder, or figure out a better way to manage everything, they’d finally feel better.
But what if the very strategies they’re relying on to feel better are part of what’s keeping them stuck? What if constantly staying ahead, making sure everyone is happy, and trying to prevent things from going wrong has become so important that there’s very little room left to actually enjoy the life they’ve created?
We need to talk about this more. There’s a difference between being responsible and feeling responsible for making sure nothing ever goes wrong.
And that second job is impossible.
What We Lose When We Keep Avoiding Discomfort
There’s something else about this pattern that’s particularly important. Every time we avoid an uncomfortable experience, we lose an opportunity to discover whether we could have handled it.
Read that again.
Think about the woman who has trouble saying no. Someone asks her to take on another responsibility, and even though she knows she doesn’t have the time, she agrees. She avoids the discomfort of disappointing someone, which feels good in the moment, but she never gets to discover what would have happened if she’d said no.
Would the other person have been disappointed? Possibly. Would the relationship have survived? Quite possibly. And could she have handled that disappointment without changing her decision? Almost certainly, even if it felt difficult.
The same thing happens when we repeatedly step in to solve our children’s problems, when we avoid difficult conversations, or when we refuse to leave something unfinished. We don’t get to learn what happens when we allow the uncomfortable experience to unfold. Over time, this can create a very limiting belief about ourselves.
We start to believe that we need to prevent certain feelings because we won’t be able to handle them if they show up. And the more we organize our lives around that belief, the smaller our world can become.
I want to be clear that I’m talking about everyday discomfort, not situations that are unsafe or overwhelming. There are times when protecting ourselves or our children, getting help, or stepping away is exactly the right thing to do.
But when we’re dealing with discomfort that we actually have the capacity to handle, avoiding it can keep us from developing that capacity even further.
The Life You Want May Require You to Feel Things You’ve Been Trying to Avoid
This is something that comes up frequently in my work with moms like you. Like so many of us.
I’ll be talking with a woman who is very clear about what she wants. She wants to be more patient with her kids, feel less anxious, have more time for herself, and enjoy the family she’s worked so hard to create. And when we begin looking at what would need to change, the answers are often pretty straightforward.
She may need to stop checking work emails after a certain hour. She may need to allow her child to be disappointed when she says no. She may need to stop stepping in every time her child gets frustrated, or start leaving some things undone so she can get the rest she needs.
None of this is particularly complicated to understand. In fact, she probably knew most of it before we started working together. But knowing what to do and being able to do it are two very different things. Because when she tries to make those changes, she has to deal with the feelings that come up.
She worries about falling behind at work. She feels guilty when her child is disappointed. She gets anxious when things aren’t going according to plan. those feelings can be powerful enough to send her right back to the behaviors she’s trying to change.
This is why I don’t believe we can solve these problems by giving moms more information or another set of parenting strategies. Most of the women I work with already have more information than they know what to do with.
What they need is the ability to stay present with the discomfort that comes with doing something different.
Why I Teach Relational Intelligence
Relational intelligence is the ability to stay connected to yourself, to other people, and to what’s actually happening, even when things feel uncertain or uncomfortable. Developing this capacity changes the way we experience motherhood.
When you can tolerate your child’s disappointment, you no longer have to say yes just to make them happy. When you can tolerate uncertainty, you don’t have to spend hours researching every possible outcome before making a decision. When you can tolerate someone else’s frustration, you can set a boundary without feeling responsible for how they react. When you can tolerate the discomfort of leaving something unfinished, you can actually enjoy the time you’ve set aside for your family.
What do I mean by tolerate? I mean you can have all those experiences and, at the same time, trust that both you and the other person are still okay.
Of course, there will still be times when you need to solve a problem, take action, or make a change. Relational intelligence doesn’t mean sitting back and allowing everything to happen around you. It means being able to recognize what the situation actually needs, rather than automatically reacting to whatever feels uncomfortable.
Sometimes your child needs your help. They might need you to listen. Sometimes they need you to trust that they can figure something out for themselves.
The more comfortable you become with the fact that discomfort is part of life, the more freedom you have to choose how you want to respond. That freedom can change your relationships, your work, and your experience of being a mother.
There’s Risk in Staying Where You Are, Too
I want you to imagine looking back on your life 10 years from now. Think about the relationship you want to have with your kids, the work you want to have done, and the experiences you hope you’ll have had along the way.
Now think about how you’re spending your time today. How many of your decisions are moving you toward that life? And how many are being made because you don’t want to feel uncomfortable right now?
We tend to think of risk as something that comes with making a change. There’s risk in setting a boundary, letting go of control, allowing your child to struggle, or pursuing something without knowing whether you’ll succeed. But we often forget that there’s also risk in continuing to do what we’ve always done.
There’s a risk in spending years trying to make sure nobody is disappointed in you. There’s a risk in stepping in so often that your children don’t get enough opportunities to learn what they can handle. There’s a risk in putting off your own goals because you can’t be certain how things will turn out. And there’s a risk in spending so much of your time trying to manage your life that you don’t actually get to enjoy living it.
Those risks don’t always feel as urgent because the consequences tend to show up slowly. But that doesn’t make them any less important.
A Question Worth Asking Yourself
The next time you notice yourself feeling an urgent need to step in, fix something, say yes, work harder, or take control, I want you to get curious about what’s happening.
Ask yourself, Am I doing this because it’s what the situation actually needs, or because I don’t want to feel uncomfortable?
There will be plenty of times when taking action is exactly the right choice, but there will also be moments when the most useful thing you can do is allow yourself to feel uncomfortable without immediately trying to change what’s happening.
You might discover that your child can handle more than you expected, that someone can be disappointed in you without it damaging your relationship, or that you can make a mistake and recover from it. You might find that you can leave work unfinished and still enjoy your evening, or that you can feel anxious about a decision without needing to change it.
And with enough practice, you begin to trust yourself in a different way. You no longer need to know that everything is going to turn out exactly as planned before you can feel okay. You begin to understand that you can handle things even when they don’t.
That’s one of the most valuable things we can teach our kids, and one of the most important things we can learn for ourselves. Because our kids are going to experience disappointment, frustration, uncertainty, and failure. We can’t prevent those experiences, and trying to do so isn’t going to prepare them for life.
What we can do is help them develop confidence in their ability to move through those experiences, and we can show them what that looks like in the way we live our own lives.
The goal isn’t to make discomfort disappear. It’s to become more capable of experiencing discomfort without letting it make your decisions for you.
I want you to think about what might become possible for you and your children if you developed that capacity. How might your relationships change? What would you do differently at work? How much more freedom might you have to pursue the things you care about?
You don’t have to give up your ambition, stop caring about doing things well, or become someone who never worries. But you can learn to stop letting the fear of discomfort decide so much of how you live.
Both you and your children deserve that opportunity.
If you recognize yourself in this article, I’d love to invite you into my Calm Connection Experience. This is where we work on understanding what’s driving your reactions, building your ability to stay present when things get hard, and learning how to make choices that reflect the mother and woman you want to be. You don’t have to give up your goals or your ambition to have the kind of relationship you want with your children.
Learn more here.
