The Safety That Keeps You Small

Apr 14

3 min read

The other day, I had one of those sacred conversations.

A dear friend, a wildly talented writer, teacher and performing artist accepted my invitation to reflect to her what I see about how she is getting in her own way professionally.

Before we began, I said, “I’m taking off my professional coach hat. I don’t have to follow all my own rules here which is fun for me. I’d like to offer you what I see very directly. You know how much I love and respect you. You know I’m aligned for your highest good. What will feel safe for you?

“I’m so sick of safety. Every time I think I feel safe, I realize I’m basically running away from something. I don’t want to be safe anymore. I want to be brave.” She responded with a scrunched up face and tight shoulders.

What I heard, what I distilled back to her is this:

That’s not real. What you are describing is false safety.

That’s a maladaptive defense mechanism that lets you think you’re safe while you’re actually protecting yourself from soaring. From failing. From being too exposed. From being seen in your full magnitude.

False safety keeps us from risking the very thing we say we want most.

"Real" safety is different. It is a grounded sense of safety. It’s your body and your heart knowing you are not in danger, even as you stretch into something uncomfortable. Safety and discomfort can coexist, they have to to really grow. And from there, doing the thing becomes the act of bravery.

Some of us call that sequence a leap of faith.

For all of us, it’s the moment we stop negotiating with fear and act anyway.

Real safety can coexist with bravery.

Black distressed baseball cap embroidered with “LOVE Yourself” in colorful block letters and white script.

In fact, it must.

If our nervous systems genuinely feel under threat, we are not growing. We are protecting. We are armoring up. We are contracting. Brené Brown, is one of my most prolific teachers and her primary thesis, the foundation of ALL her work is that there is no courage without vulnerability. And guess what, friends? Vulnerability is fundamentally uncomfortable.

Discomfort is not the enemy.

Discomfort is the posture REQUIRED for growth.

It is the playground. The laboratory. The place where evolution actually happens.

You don’t have to choose between safety and bravery.

You have to understand that there is safety in discomfort.

That bravery is not the absence of fear. It’s the willingness to stay inside the discomfort without abandoning yourself.

This does not mean bypassing fear, anger, hurt, resentment. As one of my wisest dear ones (Hi Joanie!) always reminds me “We do not skip steps.” We do not pretend everything is fine. We deeply feel the hard feelings and sometimes we have to sit in the hard place. The dark-ish place. The tender place. For a while.

But from there, when the nervous system settles enough, we get curious.

What is this here to teach me?

How is this stretching me?

How is this strengthening me?

I deeply believe in the mantra: always protected, always provided for.

And I also believe that life is not happening to us, but for our growth.

That doesn’t mean it feels good.

It means we can orient to discomfort differently.

We can be safe and brave.

Regulated and stretching.

Grounded and exposed.

All at once.