To return to the gym analogy: a good fitness trainer will help you to safely exercise and grow your muscles. And you will be uncomfortable. But you will be safe.

The job of a leader is not to protect their team from discomfort. It’s to protect them from harm—and to help motivate them to push through the discomfort and harness it for growth.

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Psychology research is clear that the most reliable way to overcome psychological pain and discomfort is not to avoid it; it’s to gradually dimish the effects of discomfort by systematic exposure. “Avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it,” write Haidt and Lukianoff.

In other words, the more you face cognitive friction, the

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The term “psychological safety” has been around since at least 1999, when Dr. Amy Edmondson of Harvard University published  this influential paper on the subject . In her study, Dr. Edmondson proposed that regardless of its makeup, a team’s success will largely boil down to its members “tacit beliefs about interpersonal interaction,” and whether

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