Take the Hot Pepper Leadership Challenge

Leaders never stop learning. Personal growth is often more critical than professional growth when it comes to elevating your effectiveness as a leader.

For most people, the greatest challenge around learning is that you must first accept that there is something you need to know that you don’t. In early childhood, when learning is an instinctive and essential course for survival and critical human development. But beyond this stage, advanced learning (the kind that genuinely changes how we think, what we understand, and who we are) learning is voluntary and, unfortunately, optional. The process of acquiring and storing knowledge does not indicate learning. It may signal that you are satiated and simply embellishing or protecting what you are comfortable knowing, rather than venturing into the uncertainty of unfamiliar or challenging ideas that interfere with your beliefs about the world.

Memorizing facts and citing statistics and thinking that is currently in vogue may serve as a way to make yourself seem educated or worldly – but it doesn’t demonstrate the curiosity that serious learning demands.

The level of advanced learning that defines exceptional organizational leadership demands both vulnerability and humility.

Patrick Lencioni, the author and founder of The Table Group, notes, “If leaders, and ultimately their team members, cannot be genuinely vulnerable with one another if they cannot be uncomfortably honest about their strengths, weaknesses, mistakes, needs for help, they will not develop trust. That’s what makes trust so rare. Of course, the key to being vulnerable is humility. People who cannot come to terms with the truth about themselves—and truth is the essence of humility—will not be comfortable with vulnerability.”

Fear of being uncomfortable is why successful adults are particularly impervious to learning. From your very earliest experiences in school, you came to understand that it is far safer to have the correct answers. Mistakes had consequences and carried the very real risk of failure.

Classroom experiments were not designed to unlock hidden secrets but to lead you safely to the secrets you were meant to find.

Classroom experiments were not designed to unlock hidden secrets but to lead you safely to the secrets you were meant to find. Certainty was encouraged (and rewarded) more than curiosity. Of course, curiosity was desirable, but only in so far as it took you down the path to the answers you were expected to provide.

Overly curious children (and here I am writing from personal experience) were considered incorrigible, stubborn, and even wrong-minded. Comfort could be sought in the safety of conformity. Being deemed precocious might land you in trouble if your intellect led you to challenge the status quo, likely landing you in a world of shame and hurt. Institutional teaching means that students must be well-mannered and well-behaved. Cheerfully and vigorously producing the right answers was the sure-fire formula for academic success.

Yet achieving success in most things that really matter rests more firmly on the quality of the questions you ask than the answers you provide. Great questions provoke better thinking, shift perspectives, unseat settled assumptions, and foster collaboration and innovation in groups.

Knowing the answer should never preclude searching for a better question. Not doing so may be a symptom of intellectual laziness, but more likely is a function of remaining where you feel safe and comfortable.

Getting comfortable being uncomfortable has recently become something of a cliché that depicts more conformity than actual courage. It can ironically be part of that vessel of acquired knowledge that you hide behind — knowing when it is the right thing to espouse — when you feel the need to assuage the discomfort of being relied upon for your guidance.

Learning when and how to get uncomfortable does have real value; however, it is often easier said than done. It requires practice, and the more experience you have staying clear of the boundaries of where you remain comfortable, the harder it is to learn to make yourself uncomfortable.

That is where the Hot Pepper Challenge comes in.

Motivational theories suggest that while people will move towards things they perceive as pleasurable, they are far more apt to move away from something they expect to be painful. There is a fundamental human drive around both tendencies (driven by the primitive instincts driven by the amygdala, located in the medial temporal lobe of your brain), but pain is a primal warning of danger and even impending death.

Pain signals that something is wrong, and action needs to be taken. And while it is possible to steel yourself to a certain level of discomfort and pain by discerning that it is a necessary and perhaps a useful sacrifice, it is far more difficult to do so than to forgo pleasure.

Delaying gratification is the foundation of emotional intelligence, but there is no benefit to being a masochist. The benefit comes from discerning when pain truly represents danger or is a perception driven by fears that are the product of your imagination.

Human beings can endure far more physical pain than most of us imagine. Childbirth is a prime example, where women’s tolerance for pain outstrips what most men can imagine for themselves. But boxers and other athletes train to push through physical pain, much as women push through labor, and on the other side, find enormous satisfaction in their accomplishments.

The Hot Pepper Challenge is a simple, highly instructive exercise that quickly demonstrates what it really feels like to choose to make yourself uncomfortable.

The searing heat that noxiously hot peppers generate is caused by capsaicin, a colorless and odorless oil-like substance found in the membrane around the seeds. Capsaicin binds to the same pain receptors on your tongue that respond to physically hot things that would actually do damage to your body. The capsaicin in the pepper triggers your body’s response without any potential to do harm. The pain you feel is purely the perception of heat. It may feel like your skin is on fire, but there is no damage to anything, except perhaps your ego, should you be sensitive to people seeing you cry. But the perception seems real, and the reaction is unavoidable as your body seeks to purge what it deems to be dangerous.

The pain you feel is purely the perception of heat. It may feel like your skin is on fire, but there is no damage to anything, except perhaps your ego

What you are experiencing is purely a function of perception and extreme awareness of your physical sensations. The challenge involves eating a pepper hotter than you normally tolerate. You can safely experience being rather uncomfortable while understanding that nothing is dangerous about what you are doing.

The preparation is simply understanding that the pain is purely perception and that the peppers are otherwise not toxic and “relatively” harmless. Capsaicin can cause minor skin irritation and undoubtedly some gastric upset as your body seeks to purge the source of distress.

Incidentally, the “safe word” is milk. Apparently, milk contains molecules that dissolve and absorb the capsaicin from the pain receptors providing effective relief. Water just tends to spread it around.

Why go to such an extreme? The reason is simple. You can defy your sense of safety while viscerally experiencing what it feels like to push, bending the boundaries of the comfort you normally seek.

Beyond this, it is a perfect way to surface both humility and vulnerability. When you confront a little bit of harmless pepper – and focus on the pain, knowing that it is more perception than reality, you might develop the courage to lean into other fears you may have. You also learn to trust things that feel foreign, that challenge your beliefs, and stretch your strengths. And, who knows, you might even open yourself up to a new world of culinary delights unavailable to the faint of heart.