You’ve been invited to a gathering where you won’t know many people. Your first thought is that you don’t want to go. Then you wonder whether you’re avoiding something simply because it makes you uncomfortable.
So you decide to go.
Usually, that would mean arriving when everyone else does and staying until the evening winds down. But this time you make a different plan. You’ll arrive early, before the room gets crowded, and you’ll stay for an hour. You tell the friend who invited you that you may leave early.
When the day comes, you still don’t particularly want to go. But you go.
For the first twenty minutes, you mostly talk to your friend. A few other people arrive. Eventually your friend moves away and you find yourself talking to someone you haven’t met before.
The conversation is a little awkward. You stay anyway.
By the time the room gets crowded, you’ve been there almost an hour. You say goodbye and leave.
You could look at the evening and focus on everything you made easier: you arrived early, gave yourself a stopping point, and left before the gathering became more difficult.
But you also went.
Making something easier doesn’t necessarily mean removing the challenge. Sometimes it means changing the conditions so the challenge is one you can actually take on.
If you’re unsure whether you’re accommodating yourself or avoiding something, you might try asking a different question:
What would make this difficult enough to matter, but manageable enough to attempt?
Maybe you stay for twenty minutes instead of two hours, ask someone to come with you, have the difficult conversation in writing first, or try the unfamiliar thing once instead of committing to it indefinitely.
You don’t have to prove that you can do the hardest version. Sometimes making the challenge smaller is what allows you to meet it at all.