A few years ago, I came across a comment from David Goggins about mental strength and self-discipline. My first reaction wasn't particularly sophisticated. What a jerk. What does he know?

Once that initial reaction passed, though, I found myself thinking about why it had bothered me.

We have become considerably better at talking about mental health. That is a good thing. Conversations that were once avoided are now happening openly in workplaces, families and leadership teams. But there is another conversation worth having alongside it. Where does self-discipline fit?

How do we support people through genuine difficulty without inadvertently teaching them that all discomfort should be avoided? How do we create psychologically safe workplaces while still expecting accountability, difficult conversations and high standards?

These ideas are sometimes presented as though we must choose between them. We don't.

Mental Health and Self-Discipline Can Coexist

Supporting mental health does not mean removing every difficult experience from someone's path.

• Leadership involves uncertainty.
• Work creates pressure.
• People disagree.
• Feedback can sting.
• Decisions have consequences.
• Sometimes we fail despite doing everything reasonably well.

None of those experiences is particularly comfortable. But discomfort and harm are not necessarily the same thing.

There are obviously environments, behaviours and levels of pressure that are genuinely harmful.

• Bullying isn't character development.
• Chronic unreasonable workloads aren't resilience training.
• Ignoring legitimate mental health concerns isn't toughness.

But a difficult conversation isn't necessarily unsafe. Neither is receiving critical feedback, being held accountable for a mistake, having an idea challenged or being expected to perform when motivation is low.

The challenge for leaders is knowing the difference.

Psychological Safety Doesn't Mean Psychological Comfort

Psychological safety is sometimes misunderstood as an environment where people shouldn't feel uncomfortable. That would be an extraordinarily difficult workplace to create, and probably not a particularly useful one.

A psychologically safe team should be able to disagree. People should be able to challenge an idea, admit a mistake, ask a question, raise a concern and say, "I don't know." Those things can be uncomfortable. In fact, if a team is genuinely thinking, challenging assumptions and holding one another accountable, some discomfort is almost inevitable.

The objective isn't to eliminate it. The objective is to create an environment where people can move through discomfort without fear of humiliation, retaliation or unnecessary harm. That distinction matters.

Control Matters More Than Comfort

One useful concept in this discussion is learned helplessness. The theory emerged from research into what happens when individuals are repeatedly exposed to negative circumstances they believe they cannot control. Over time, they may stop attempting to change the situation, even when opportunities to exercise control later become available.

The workplace application isn't that complicated. When people consistently believe that nothing, they do matters, resilience becomes considerably harder. If decisions appear arbitrary, expectations constantly change, concerns disappear into a void and effort has little relationship with outcomes, people can begin to disengage.

This is where leadership matters.

We cannot give people control over everything. Nor should we pretend, we can. But we can provide clarity around what they can influence.

• What decisions can they make?
• What are they accountable for?
• Where do they have autonomy?
• What does success look like?
• Where can they challenge something that isn't working?

Sometimes the most useful thing we can give someone facing uncertainty isn't comfort. It's agency.

Discomfort Isn't Necessarily the Enemy

There is a reasonable temptation to protect people from difficult experiences. Sometimes we should. But there are also experiences we become better equipped to handle precisely because we've encountered them before.

• Having a difficult conversation makes the next difficult conversation slightly less foreign.
• Recovering from a mistake teaches us that mistakes are survivable.
• Receiving useful criticism can teach us to separate feedback about our performance from judgement about our worth.
• Making decisions under uncertainty develops judgement that can't be learned entirely from a textbook.

This doesn't mean leaders should manufacture hardship in some misguided attempt to make people tougher. Life and leadership will provide enough of that without our help. Our role is to help people develop the tools to navigate difficulty when it inevitably arrives.

Motivation and Self-Discipline Are Different Things

Motivation is useful. It's also unreliable. When we're motivated, the work feels easier. We can see the objective; we're excited about the outcome and momentum pulls us towards it. The problem is that motivation doesn't always turn up for work.

I can recall plenty of occasions during my military career when motivation had all but disappeared. I was tired, uncomfortable and would quite happily have been somewhere else. Self-discipline kept me moving. Part of that came from personal standards. Part came from responsibility. And a considerable part came from knowing that other people were relying on me.

That's an important distinction.

Motivation asks whether we feel like doing something. Discipline asks whether it still needs to be done. We shouldn't expect ourselves or our teams to be permanently motivated. But we can develop habits, standards and commitments that continue operating when motivation inevitably fluctuates.

Resilience Requires Exposure, Not Abandonment

There are two extremes worth avoiding.

• At one end, we can expose people to unreasonable pressure and tell them to become more resilient.
• At the other, we can attempt to remove every source of discomfort and unintentionally deny people opportunities to develop the capability to deal with it.

Neither is particularly useful.

Resilience tends to develop somewhere between the two: challenge accompanied by appropriate support, responsibility accompanied by sufficient authority, and difficulty accompanied by opportunities to learn. That doesn't mean everyone needs the same amount of challenge.

Context matters. Experience matters. Capability matters. What's developmental for one person may be overwhelming for another. Good leadership requires enough knowledge of our people to understand that difference.

What Leaders Are Actually Responsible For

We aren't responsible for ensuring that nobody in our team ever experiences stress, frustration, disappointment or uncertainty. That isn't realistic. We are responsible for thinking carefully about the conditions we create around those experiences.

• Are expectations clear?
• Do people have appropriate autonomy?
• Can they raise concerns without being punished for doing so?
• Are standards being maintained consistently?
• Do we distinguish between someone who can't do something and someone who simply doesn't want to?
• Do we provide support without automatically removing responsibility?
• And perhaps most importantly: are we developing people's capability to deal with the next difficult situation, or simply solving the current one for them?

There won't always be a clean answer.

Support and Challenge

The conversation about workplace mental health has progressed considerably, and that progress matters. But supporting mental health and developing self-discipline don't need to sit on opposite sides of the argument. People can need compassion and accountability. They can need support and challenge. They can be struggling genuinely and still retain responsibility for the choices available to them. And leaders can care deeply about someone's wellbeing while still expecting something difficult from them.

The objective shouldn't be to make workplaces harder in the name of resilience. Nor should it be to remove every difficult experience in the name of wellbeing. Good leadership requires us to understand the difference between pressure that develops capability and pressure that simply causes damage.

That distinction isn't always obvious. Which is precisely why leadership requires judgement.