“There are risks and costs to action.  But they are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction.” – John F. Kennedy

People like things to be easy.  Not necessarily because they’re lazy, but because we’ve been wired for ten thousand years to seek safety, and easy feels safe. 

So, most people spend their lives doing the easy thing.  The thing that’s expected, the thing that has the highest probability of success, the thing that no one will criticize them for trying.  And they’ll spend a lot of their lives feeling safe.

Unfortunately, growth doesn’t happen when we’re safe.  Growth only happens when we’re uncomfortable.  Growth only happens when we get that uneasy feeling that we might not know what we’re doing.  Spending a career – or a lifetime – focused on staying safe means next to no growth.

And maybe that works, for a while.  But over the course of our time as leaders, if we never grow, our organizations won’t either, and organizations that don’t grow don’t last.

Think about yourself as a leader.  How focused are you on safety?  How intent are you on never making a mistake?  How concerned are you with what others think of your abilities?  How worried are you about people thinking you’ve made the wrong decision?

The best leaders understand that, while we don’t want to regularly take life-threatening chances, we can’t be focused on staying safe.  We can’t ignore new ideas because those ideas mean change.  We can’t ignore new ways of doing things because we’d have to stretch ourselves to learn those new ways. 

We have to embrace growth and change, and that means embracing discomfort.  It means purposefully seeking opportunities to be uncomfortable and entering those situations with an attitude of learning and growth, not of fear.

As leaders, the long term, negative consequences of avoiding anything and everything uncomfortable far outweigh the benefits of safety.  Push yourself to get out there and be uncomfortable.  Your value as a leader depends on it.