The question is whether you’ll shrink to stay comfortable.
I had a coaching conversation this week that deserves some airtime here because I know so many of you will recognize yourself in it.
One of my clients was telling me how increasingly frustrated and disappointed she had become with some of the people around her. She couldn’t understand why they didn’t seem to see what she saw, care at the same level she cared, or hold themselves to the expectations she believed were necessary for where the company was going.
And underneath all of that frustration was a much more vulnerable question:
Is something wrong with me?
Am I expecting too much? Am I too intense? Too demanding? Should I be more understanding? Should I lower the bar?
I told her something I’ve come to believe more strongly the longer I work with high-growth female founders:
The higher you climb, the more courage you need to have to be disliked.
The women I work with inside POP Leadership Academy are operating at a level very few people ever will. They are building multimillion-dollar companies, employing teams, supporting families, taking significant risks and carrying visions that often exist only because they had the audacity to believe they could create them.
That changes you.
Your standards change. Your tolerance for wasted time changes. Your expectations of yourself change, and inevitably, your expectations of the people around you change too.
And that can be incredibly uncomfortable.
Because women are taught, both explicitly and implicitly, to pay attention to how we are being received. We notice when someone is disappointed in us. We feel the tension when someone doesn’t agree with us. We wonder whether we could have communicated it differently, softened it, made it easier to hear.
There is value in that self-awareness. Great leadership requires it. But there is a difference between examining yourself and abandoning yourself.
There comes a point where the mission becomes significant enough that preserving everyone’s comfort cannot be the objective.
Not everyone will understand why the standard matters so much to you. Not everyone will understand why “good enough” doesn’t feel good enough anymore. And some people will interpret your growth through the lens of what it requires from them.
They may think you’ve changed.
They’re probably right.
Leadership should change you.
A bigger mission requires a greater capacity to hold the discomfort that comes with it. To make decisions people don’t agree with. To have difficult conversations. To maintain a standard even when lowering it would make you more popular. To accept that being respected and being liked are not always going to arrive together.
This doesn’t give us permission to become assholes. It doesn’t mean every criticism is evidence that we’re operating at some extraordinary level. Sometimes we’re wrong. Sometimes our expectations need adjusting. Sometimes we need to communicate better.
But sometimes the discomfort you’re feeling isn’t evidence that you need to shrink. It’s evidence that you’re being asked to expand.. If the vision you’re carrying is bigger than it has ever been, the leadership required to hold it has to become bigger too.
And part of that expansion is developing the courage to be misunderstood, to disappoint people, and occasionally, to be disliked without immediately assuming you’ve done something wrong.
