The OffBeat #38: Guest Post From Bonfire Collective: Good Struggles
Embrace the uncomfortable to become a better leader
Excited to try something new this week: a guest post from The OffBeat friends and of Bonfire, a creativity accelerator which helps brands and the people who build them kindle their creativity through better storytelling. Bonfire offers consulting, coaching, and content for young companies and creative people looking to define and differentiate themselves. You can subscribe to their newsletter here for thoughts and advice on increasing your creativity at work.
Enjoy the post below, and hit reply if you have any feedback—want more guest posts, fewer, different kinds?
“The music is struggle. You have to want to struggle. And what most leaders are the victim of is the freedom not to struggle. And then that’s the end of it. Forget it!” — Keith Jarrett, composer-pianist
You’ve probably heard that struggle “builds character.” And you’ve maybe even heard someone—an artist, a leader, a visionary—say that their struggles have made them who they are, so much so that they’re afraid to be without them.
Yet we tend to treat struggle as a bug, not a feature—something to be optimized away. But as composer-pianist Keith Jarrett would say, when we rid our lives of struggle completely, we limit our ability to succeed and to be our most creative selves.
Now, let’s be clear: We’re not here to glorify struggle. The notion that one must suffer for greatness is heavy with problematic ramifications. It’s been used by society to justify continued marginalization or bias against various populations, and it’s been weaponized by individuals against themselves when they feel like they can’t ask for help without losing some essential motivator pushing them to succeed.
So when we talk about struggle in this post, we’re referring to the day-to-day challenges that we might encounter in the workplace as brand marketing leaders and how those things do tap into some deeper anxieties we have around our purpose, our worth, and our futures. While these challenges are perhaps not life-threatening, they could be career-defining. And even if they’re not career-defining, we could regard them as useful fodder for learning more about ourselves as professionals and as people.
Even if we aren’t musicians, we can take something critical away from the Keith Jarrett quote above: The higher we get in the hierarchy, the more “important” we get organizationally, the more experienced and advanced we are in our careers, the more effortless things are supposed to be—and the more likely we are to actually have the time, resources, money, and clout to make our work lives cushier. We’re supposed to have “arrived.” We’re supposed to know. And we’re supposed to give moral and strategic support to others.
We can get carried away in our sea of “supposed tos,” and if Keith Jarrett is right, we might be doing ourselves and our teams a disservice by not engaging with and even leaning into the struggle from time to time.
Struggles like:
1. How to be a better leader
Who leads the leaders? Unless you’re working in a very large or sophisticated marketing or creative organization, brand leadership is pretty thin at the top. Who do you learn from? After all, leadership is not static. The struggle lies in self-awareness, adaptability, and the pursuit of personal and professional growth. It involves not only leading others but leading yourself whenever it’s not obvious who you should be following anymore.
2. Needing to “know” all the time
You have all the answers…don’t you? It's vital to realize that, at least in functional and reasonably healthy work environments, it's not about knowing everything, but about knowing how to find solutions and relying on your team's collective knowledge. The struggle here is feeling inadequate. Accepting that you don't need to be the expert in every domain is liberating and humbling—and gives time and space for others to really shine.
3. Losing touch with the day-to-day
You’ve heard about people getting promoted out of their competencies? “You’re so good at this thing, so let’s move you into something you’ve never done before! Wait… why aren’t you immediately great at it?” The struggle is to stay connected with the actual executional work that you likely used to do—and maybe even loved! It’s hard to feel totally distant from the roles and duties that got you to where you are today.
4. Advocating and campaigning
You probably didn’t anticipate how much of your role was going to be making the case and getting resources for work that is often ambiguous or undervalued. Brand work is notoriously squirrely in that way. The struggle is to effectively communicate the value of these endeavors to secure the necessary resources and support—work that can often feel demoralizing because it can put you on the defensive.
That’s a lot of different ways to struggle!
Our tendency is to compartmentalize these struggles away or ignore them completely. But in doing so, we end up losing the ability to be our full selves and missing out on opportunities to be the best leaders we can be.
Believe it or not, there can be joy in struggle.
Rather than label all struggle as bad, there is plenty of struggle as good. In fact, there is even a whole science around the virtue of productive struggle when it comes to our effectiveness at our jobs. Struggle is due for a re-brand. Or at least a fresh perspective. For hidden inside the struggle are myriad opportunities for us as leaders:
1. Instead of struggling with “how to be a better leader,” what if it were an opportunity to grow your leadership practice?
Our brains need a bit of struggle, physiologically, so that we can keep learning: “Neuroscientists have found that mistakes are helpful for brain growth and connectivity and if we are not struggling, we are not learning.”
Not only does the biology check out, the psychology of growth mindset also relies on struggle. In growth mindset, you see challenge and failure as part of your process of developing as a human, not as a reason to mope or to quit. The more struggle, the merrier.
2. Instead of struggling with “needing to know” all the time, what if it were an opportunity to express your vulnerability?
We’ve all worked with leaders who are unrelatable because they, unlike us, seem to have their act together. (Or they very obviously do not have their act together, but can’t admit it!) The leaders who aren’t shy about their fears, uncertainties, and doubts make it easier to build connection with their teams and their peers who are full of fears, uncertainties, and doubts themselves.
3. Instead of struggling with “losing touch with the day-to-day,” what if it were an opportunity to get back into the weeds?
Sometimes it can seem that the main point of servant leadership is to do the dirty work. But it’s actually more nuanced than that. Doing the dirty work is a way to be in service to others, but it also will give you better empathy for those in individual contributor roles throughout your org, better connections with the people executing on the strategies of leadership, and better processes and systems since you yourself get to see what’s possibly broken or inefficient.
4. Instead of struggling with “advocating and campaigning,” what if it were an opportunity to be more creative in your approach to problem solving and to your role?
When we’re feeling stuck, we are often in need of creative solutions to get unstuck—the current way isn’t working, so we need something new. This is the concept behind the popular stoic idea of “the obstacle is the way.” To get past our obstacles, we need simply to embrace them as creative opportunities.
Additionally, every leadership role is unique, with its own set of unique circumstances and challenges. This can be a very freeing idea because it means that you can be your most creative self when solving the struggles that are unique to you. Get advice from others, learn the best practices, fill your cup with ideas from all walks of life, and then bring it all together to find creative solutions for the you-shaped role that you’re creating.
Identifying struggle as “good” is, of course, easier said than done.
Even if you don’t go all the way to a full embrace of struggle and making the most of all its opportunities, you can at least start in a small way: Give yourself permission to struggle every now and then. You are not alone in this struggle. You aren’t “supposed to be” an invincible leader. Your struggle can even come with upside.
“The music is struggle.” Leadership is struggle.
And no one says the music isn’t worth it.
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