Why Change Feels Uncomfortable: Gina Mollicone-Long on Adapting

Dec 19, 2024

5 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

Most people read discomfort as a sign something is wrong. Gina Mollicone-Long reads it the other way. Her napkin says change can only occur when you are perturbed, and change is not comfortable. Your comfort zone has a boundary. The moment you step over it to get something you want, you are uncomfortable by definition. That is true for a founder chasing the next stage of growth and for anyone hit by a truck in the economy. Gina trained as a chemical engineer and now does breakthrough coaching. She explains why successful people still stall when something new gets hard, why the brain fights change, and how to bring enough awareness to the moment to adapt instead of retreat. This is part two of our conversation.

https://youtu.be/IFdN75X9NbY

Inspired by Paper Napkin Wisdom Episode 201 with Gina Mollicone-Long.

Why discomfort means you are changing

Gina draws two points on her chart. Point A is your comfort zone, where everything is predictable. To get anywhere else, you have to step out of it. That is how you find out what you don't know.

She borrows from chemistry. Take a clear solution in a beaker and perturb it. Shake it, heat it. Things start to change inside the system, and crystals form. Prigogine won the Nobel Prize for showing that some systems, when perturbed, do not fall into chaos. They reorganize so they are robust to the pressure. Her image for it is carbon atoms in a forest that, under the right circumstances, rearrange into a diamond.

So when people in her trainings feel uncomfortable and look at her like something is wrong, she tells them this is great. It means they are out of their comfort zone. Discomfort is not a signal to stop. It is a call for adaptation.

Three ways people respond to an obstacle

Gina sees three patterns when someone trying to change hits an obstacle.

The first person quits, and calls it a sign from the universe. Gina says the obstacle only means you were in motion. The work is to learn how to get around it.

The second person blames the obstacle. They couldn't do it because of you, or them. When you do that, you give your power away. Nobody takes it. You give it, by giving up the ability to respond.

The third person is the one most founders will recognize. They have been successful. They try something they could normally do with ease, and they hit a block. Gina says the gap is rarely about action. You probably have the actions down. The gap sits underneath, in thoughts and feelings, the state that comes before action. People dismiss that as soft skills. Her view is that if you have a clear picture in your mind and know how to manage it, the actions come easily.

What the amygdala is really doing when you stall

People call the amygdala the fear center. Gina calls it the sameness predictor. Its job is to keep you in a stable state. Inside its band of tolerance, everything is fine. Step outside the band and it sounds the alarm.

In real danger, that alarm saves your life. But it fires the same way when you pursue something you want. If you don't bring awareness to it, your brain will produce whatever logic it needs to get you back to your old set point.

Gina compares the fix to breathwork. Breathing is automatic, but you can bring consciousness to it and do things with it. Change works the same way. When the alarm goes off, you notice it, remind yourself what you want, and keep walking. Once you override the alarm, she says, the brain switches from closed to wide open and starts finding connections it ignored seconds before. That is what a breakthrough is.

When I told Gina I had turtled for a while after a painful stretch, she said that was a smart thing to do. It was the most advanced coping skill I had at one time. It had just never been upgraded.

How to build capacity the way a trainer builds muscle

Gina's trainer wrote a book called Deep Fitness, and he explained to her that there are three types of muscle fibers. The long ones handle routine work. When those are exhausted, the medium ones kick in. Short fibers only engage when you have run out of everything else, and those are the ones that matter most. To reach them, you have to fail at the first level and the second.

Then the body rests and repairs, and treats what happened as an emergency. It lays down new strength. The next week, something that was impossible becomes easy. Gina says that is what she does for the mind.

Life works in the same three levels. Surface stress you cope with. Deeper stress might teach you a technique. Every once in a while you get perturbed at the third level. Major adaptation happens there. In her book Successful Failing she writes that "self-esteem doesn't come from never failing". It comes from being face down in the mud and deciding to get back up. For me, coming back to these conversations was that moment.

How to use discomfort in your business this week

Gina is clear that she is not the change police. If you are happy where you are, good for you. But if you want something more, discomfort is part of the price.

A few ways to work with it this week:

When something feels hard, name it as perturbation. Ask what coping skill you are missing, not whether you should stop.
Watch for blame. Notice when you say you couldn't because of someone else, and take back the ability to respond.
Check your state before your actions. Gina's advice is to focus on what you want, choose positive emotions and hold a physiology of power, then take massive action.
When you hit a block in something you have done before, look for the old program you reverted to. Then upgrade it.

Gina keeps an Eckhart Tolle line in front of her trainings. "Accept the present moment as if you had chosen it yourself." The word that matters to her is choose. Pick the hard thing on purpose, because that is where the next level of performance is built.