For years, I believed something that served me well, until it no longer worked.
The belief was: If something feels uncomfortable, I should lean into it. That mindset helped me to speak up when it would have been easier to stay quiet. It also allowed me to work with strong personalities, or even difficult people as some would say. As a result, I built resilience, and I expanded my conflict capacity.
Then at some point, that same mindset started working against me, because I treated all friction as a signal to withstand, to endure, or to push forward. I even built a whole body of work about how to “release resistance.” The philosophy built on the idea that we just have to be willing to be uncomfortable in order to grow. I still embrace this idea that when it comes to growth comfort isn’t a requirement, but I’ve since come to believe that while comfort isn’t a requirement for growth, neither is misery.
Here’s how it’s shifted for me.
Not long ago, I was considering re-engaging with a leader I had worked with in the past. He was successful, powerful and direct. I might even categorize him as authoritarian, or a bit difficult to work with low level of awareness, and plenty of blame to go around.
A decade ago, I would have described the experience as “challenging,” but in a way that I felt proud to navigate. It’s as if I needed to prove something to myself.
As I thought about re-engaging, I noticed something subtle, and it wasn’t fear or nervousness. Instead, there was a distinct knowing that I had grown past working with this type of leader.
I was asking a very different question.
Instead of asking: What can I learn from this kind of friction and how can I grow? I was asking, “Is this growth or misalignment?” That’s when I realized that not all friction is created equal. Friction can stall you or can sharpen you.
Not All Friction Is Created Equal
In leadership, and in life, there are at least two very different kinds of friction: Growth Friction and Misalignment Friction.
Growth Friction is an acquired taste, the kind of friction that you need to embrace when you’re seeking personal or leadership growth. It feels like vulnerability, risking rejection, and navigating uncertainty. This kind of friction expands you. There’s nothing like the emotional high of feeling things you didn’t want to feel and doing things you were too scared to do. This is called progress, and even when we dread it, something whispers to us that it’s our work to do.
This kind of friction shows up when you’re raising your standards, reinventing your life, entering a bigger conversation, and making change that matters. If you want to grow, you learn how to build the skill of staying with it. You toughen up, become thick-skinned, more forgiving, and quietly effective. If you get a taste for that which is difficult, you start to confuse misalignment friction with growth friction.
Misalignment Friction is the kind of friction most of us misinterpret. It feels like pushing uphill with a person, overriding a system, managing someone else’s ego, over-explaining your value, subtle dread before the conversation even starts. Misalignment Friction has you compromising your standards and over-compensating for someone else’s disagreeableness. Misalignment Friction doesn’t expand you. It drains you.
And here’s the trap:
If you’ve trained yourself to “push through discomfort,” you might override this signal… and stay too long. You’ll be living from the old story that you need to push through, make exceptions, and tolerate the intolerable.
How to Tell the Difference
The distinction between Growth Friction and Misalignment Friction isn’t always obvious in the moment. Both feel uncomfortable. Both can involve strong personalities, ambiguity, and pressure.
So how do you know?
Growth Friction asks you to rise.
Misalignment Friction asks you to contort.
Let’s make that practical:
- Growth Friction says: “This is hard, and I’m becoming more clear, more capable, more grounded.”
- Misalignment Friction says: “This is hard, and I’m becoming more confused, more depleted, or less myself.”
- Growth Friction sharpens your thinking.
- Misalignment Friction has you over-explaining and second-guessing.
- Growth Friction builds capacity.
- Misalignment Friction burns capacity.
One expands your leadership.
The other erodes your standards.
The cost of getting it wrong matters more than it seems.
When leaders misinterpret misalignment as growth, they don’t just drain themselves—they create execution risk.
They:
- tolerate unclear expectations
- delay necessary conversations
- over-accommodate difficult behavior
- and normalize dysfunction in the name of “being adaptable”
And slowly, almost invisibly, standards drift.
Not because leaders don’t care.
But because they’ve mistaken endurance for leadership.
The Question That Changes Everything
So instead of asking:
“How do I push through this?”
Try asking:
“What is this friction asking of me—growth or alignment?”
That single question can save you months of wasted energy, compromised standards, and conversations that should never have been negotiated in the first place.
