The Discomfort of Leading With Your Heart In the Mix
A few weeks ago I wrote about what it means to bring your heart into the work. To lead with genuine care, to let what matters to the people around you actually matter to you, to show up fully rather than professionally. I meant every word of it. The positive relational side of this work, the connection, the care, the decision to show up with your whole self feels good, but there is a cost. Bringing your heart into the mix also means you must risk exposure and vulnerability, sometimes even saying things out loud you would rather keep hidden.
I know how to navigate a community's recovery from a flood. I know how to sit with a wildfire on the horizon and make decisions without certainty. The kind of discomfort that comes from analytical challenges I can hold. What most of us find harder is sitting in a room where something important is going unsaid, feeling the pull toward resolution, and choosing to stay in the tension instead. That discomfort is relational and emotional, and it is a different kind of hard: the discomfort of being excluded by someone who should be a partner, the discomfort of watching colleagues not notice your absence, the discomfort of walking into a room knowing the adversarial dynamic and having to hold your ground without showing the cost of holding it. We are often drawn toward the relief of smoothing things over, but it is the wrong move.
When you resolve the discomfort too soon, you protect everyone in the room from the very experience that might have changed something. The problem goes underground. The thing that needed to be surfaced never sees the light. I used to tell my kids that we don't keep secrets in this family. We drag them into the light, and whatever it is, we will get through it together. The same is true in the rooms where we lead. The discomfort is not the enemy. It is often the only path to the thing that actually needs to happen.
Productive disequilibrium, the kind that comes from genuine engagement with a hard problem, is how organizations and people change. Not the performance of conflict, not disagreement for its own sake, but the real friction of something important trying to surface. That friction is doing work.
A word of caution before you try this. Not all tension is generative and not all discomfort is doing useful work. There is a difference between holding tension because the situation requires it and being contrary as a habit, using disagreement to get a reaction or to feel sharp. One serves the work. The other mistakes disruption for insight. Read the room carefully and know which one you are doing.
The practice is simpler to describe than it is to do. When you feel the urge to smooth something over, pause and ask: has this tension done its work yet? Name the discomfort explicitly rather than managing it around the edges. Say the thing out loud: "I notice we keep circling this. I think it's worth staying with it a little longer." Or simply: "It feels like there is something still unresolved. Can we talk more about that?" Resist the impulse to fill silence with resolution. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is hold the space and let the difficulty be difficult.
I want to be honest about something. This is not a skill you develop once and then have. It is a practice, and some days the practice fails. Some days you smooth it over because you are tired, or because the room is not ready, or because the belonging wound is activated and staying in the tension feels like too much to ask of yourself in that moment. That is not weakness. That is being human in a hard role.
What changes over time is not that the discomfort goes away. It is that you get better at recognizing the tension that is necessary and the tension that is just pain. Little by little you get more comfortable with the silence. You get better at asking the question: has this done its work yet? And more often than you would expect, the answer surprises you. The thing you were sure would blow up if you named it didn't. The colleague you thought wasn't ready to hear it was. The room that felt stuck turned out to be waiting for someone to say the thing out loud. The surprise, over time, becomes its own kind of evidence that the practice is worth it.
The alternative, smoothing it over, rushing to get out of the tension, leading from a safe emotional distance, costs more. It costs you the experience of becoming a better leader. It costs the people around you the growth they need. It costs the organization the change that will move it forward. And it costs you the thing that made you want to do this in the first place: the belief that leading with your heart in the mix can actually change something.
The discomfort is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is often a sign that something important is about to happen.
