Be With It (all!)
Joayne’s Guide to stay sane, Chapter 2
How to Sit With Discomfort, Fear, and Uncertainty (Without Letting Them Run the Show)
What’s the thing you cannot be with?
Back in 2014—right in the middle of my coach training and a particularly dynamic (read: tumultuous) season of my life—I was asked a question that stopped me in my tracks:
“What’s the thing you cannot be with?”
Strange grammar. Powerful insight.
My honest answer (after some soul searching and raw feedback from friends):
I don’t like being wrong.
Not the small mistakes — those I can own.
But the big relational misses? The conflicts? The moments when my internal standards felt unmet?
Those hollowed me out.
And, over time, I learned something essential:
Your “thing you can’t be with” will run your life if you don’t learn how to sit with it.
Why Sitting With Discomfort Matters
Emotional discomfort is part of being human. And when we resist it, suppress it, or outrun it, the pressure builds.
Psychologists call this experiential avoidance — when avoiding a feeling creates more suffering than the feeling itself.
The truth is:
You can feel fear and still act from wisdom.
You can acknowledge discomfort without letting it hijack your decisions.
You can hold uncertainty and stay grounded.
This is the heart of emotional regulation and conscious leadership.
Two Tools That Help You “Be With It”
1. Seat Fear in the Back (Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic Metaphor)
In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert writes that she expects fear to show up every time she creates. She even speaks directly to it, here’s my paraphrase of her brilliance:
“You can come along for the ride.
You can share your opinion on music choice.
But you do not get to touch the controls.”
Fear exists… but it doesn’t get to rule the airwaves.
This metaphor changed me.
2. “What You Resist Persists.”
A two-part mantra from my Co-Active coach training:
What you resist, persists.
Face your fear and watch it disappear.
Disappear not as in “gone forever,” but soften— become workable, understandable, maybe even humorous.
Allowing what’s true is often the doorway to choosing what’s next.
A World That Requires Emotional Resilience
We’re living in a time that is tender, disorienting, and wildly uncertain. A true VUCA world — volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous.
If you want more context, I wrote about it here.
Learning to be with your inner world is becoming a leadership competency, a spiritual practice, and a mental health strategy all at once.
A Tool to Help You Take Stock (Free Download)
I created a simple, grounding Check-In Worksheet that offers you a gentle way to take stock, ventilate what’s swirling, and reconnect with your center so you can see your way forward.
👉 Download the WWW Check-In Worksheet
Or book a session if you want support learning how to apply it in your day-to-day life.
Let This Be a Gentle Invitation
Naming the thing you “cannot be with” is powerful work.
Learning to let it ride in the backseat? Even more so.
If you want support, reflection, or a co-regulating presence, I’d love to walk with you.
Your inner world deserves care.
Your nervous system deserves space to breathe.
And you don’t have to do any of this alone.