Change begins with discomfort

Last week I had the privilege of giving the opening keynote at the Workforce Management Congres of Vlirdens . A few hundred people in a large festival marquee on the Zonheuvel estate in Doorn. A beautiful location. A subject that is close to me. A story I had prepared well for: From planning to matching.

I was looking forward to it.

And then everything went differently.

My laptop crashed completely. Even a hard reset no longer helped. Then the connection to the screen turned out not to work. The clicker did not work. Later my sound dropped out as well and my headset had to be replaced in the middle of the stage.

Normally you would say: that is bad luck.

But looking back I think that morning was about something completely different.

About discomfort.

We want to change, but not to feel the discomfort

We talk a lot about change. About innovation. About transformation. About lifelong development. About leadership.

But what we often forget is that change almost always begins with discomfort.

And yet we spend a large part of our lives avoiding it.

We want certainty. Control. Predictability.

We want the technology to work. We want people to do what we expect. We want the schedule to be right.

And when that does not happen, we feel tension.

That happened that morning too.

Because of traffic jams and bad weather the organisers decided to postpone the start twice. Half an hour in total.

The people who were already there stood waiting in a closed marquee. It got warm. Restless. The energy changed.

Meanwhile I was standing behind the stage.

Ready to begin.

And waiting.

Not knowing how the morning would go.

That is where learning begins

What strikes me more and more is that learning often begins at the moment reality no longer matches our expectations.

When the script falls away.

When control becomes less self-evident.

When you have to improvise.

That is true on a stage.

But just as much in organisations.

In change programmes.

In teams.

In relationships.

In life.

As soon as things go differently than planned, a choice arises.

Do I resist what is happening?

Or do I stay present?

Do not leave with your attention

When the technology failed again and a sound engineer had to come on stage to replace my headset, I felt something many people will recognise.

The urge to want to get away.

Not literally.

But with your attention.

Disengaging. Shutting down. Focusing on something else.

We all do that.

With feedback. With conflict. With uncertainty. With change.

As soon as it gets uncomfortable, we often leave.

Not with our bodies.

But with our presence.

So I named it.

"Stay with it."

This is discomfort.

This is exactly what change is about.

Not solving it straight away. Not pushing it away. Not analysing it.

Experiencing it first.

A marquee full of life

As if the universe wanted to give the message a bit more force, it then started to rain hard.

People who were outside on the festival grounds talking came into the marquee en masse to shelter.

Understandable, of course.

Only they brought their conversations with them.

The murmur at the back got louder and louder.

At the front people sat listening attentively.

At the back there was more and more distraction.

I felt irritation coming up.

Maybe even anger.

Not because people had bad intentions.

On the contrary.

Most of them probably did not even realise what impact their behaviour had on the rest of the room.

Still I felt I had something to do.

Not talk over it.

Not pretend nothing was going on.

But not attack either.

So I stopped.

I named what was happening.

Clearly.

Firmly.

But without losing the connection.

I felt the anger in myself. At the same time I also felt that those people meant no harm. That they were simply not aware of their effect on the group.

Perhaps that was the most interesting moment of the whole morning.

Not a slide.

Not an AI demo.

Not a statistic.

But simply staying present with what was there.

Discomfort as a training space

More and more I see discomfort as a training space.

Not as something that has to go away.

Not as a fault in the system.

But as an invitation.

Because the more you learn to stay present with discomfort, the greater your capacity to learn becomes.

To change.

To grow.

Of course that also calls for boundaries.

You do not have to throw yourself into everything.

You do not have to seek out every discomfort.

But when you are standing firmly, you can consciously choose a dose of discomfort that you can handle.

Not to prove yourself.

But to discover what is really underneath it.

Often it turns out to be less frightening than you thought.

The question is not: but how?

After a story like this I often get the same question.

"But how do you do that then?"

A logical question.

And perhaps at the same time the wrong question.

Because as soon as we ask how, we often shoot back up into our heads.

To solutions. Methods. Step-by-step plans.

While the invitation is somewhere else entirely.

In feeling.

In becoming honest.

In daring to admit that you do not know.

In staying curious about what is happening inside you.

That is where the capacity to learn arises.

Not at the moment you find an answer.

But at the moment you can stay present without an answer.

The nicest feedback of the day

Afterwards someone came up to me.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Of course."

"Was the technology failing actually part of your script?"

It made me laugh.

No.

Absolutely not.

But perhaps that was exactly the lesson of that morning.

Change rarely lets itself be planned.

Life does not stick to our scripts.

And perhaps growth is not in carrying out the plan perfectly.

But in the ability to stay present when the plan disappears.

I still practise with that every day.

More relaxed in the tension.

More play.

More trust.

Not because I am already there.

But because I see more and more often that it is precisely there that something new can arise.