Scratchy on Purpose

Most of my working life happens in rooms. Leadership sessions, research debriefs, long conversations about how people think and behave when the pressure is on. The rest of my life happens outside, because my family raises grass-fed cattle on a farm in central Virginia.

Those two things stayed separate for years. They stopped being separate on a damp morning this summer, when we were loading an eleven-hundred-pound steer onto a trailer bound for the processor. Processing day does not move for anyone’s calendar. We were out at the barn early, tired, wet, dirty, scratchy.

A moment like that is not efficient, and there is no way to make it so. Hands go numb on the gate. Boots fill with muck. The animal balks, and you wait, and adjust, and try again, and no one gets to skip to the end. My children were in it with us, cold and hungry and filthy. When the gate finally clanged shut, I looked at them and thought: I have never seen them so alive.

That last word is why I am writing to you. Not happy. Not comfortable. Alive.

We have a word for that feeling here. Scratchy. And most of us treat it as a problem to be solved.

The Signal We Keep Misreading

You know the sensation. You are in a conversation that requires you to work from an attribute that is not your strong preference. The Analytical leader is asked to write a list in sequence. The Conceptual thinker is asked for the implementation plan. The first-third Expressive professional is asked to voice a perspective in a full room. It does not feel like growth while it is happening. It feels scratchy.

Our instinct is to read that scratch as evidence of a mismatch. Wrong role, wrong meeting, wrong assignment. And under pressure, that instinct hardens into something measurable: people retreat to their preferences and overuse the strengths they already have. The Analytical leader asks for more data on a decision that will never have enough. The Social leader keeps building consensus past the point where a call needed to be made. Everyone gets more like themselves, exactly when the situation is asking for range.

The scratch is not telling you that you are in the wrong place. It is telling you where the edge of your current range is. That is different information, and it is far more useful.

What the Research Actually Shows

There is a body of work that gives this experience some context.

Toxicologists use the term hormesis to describe a dose-response pattern: low-level exposure to a stressor can produce adaptive effects, while greater exposure becomes harmful. Psychologists have begun testing whether something comparable holds for perceived stress.

In a cross-sectional study of 1,206 young adults, low-to-moderate perceived stress was associated with more favorable cognitive functioning and lower externalizing symptoms than in either very low or high stress. A companion study associated the same range with stronger working-memory performance.

These are associations that stress causes capability; supporting the idea that difficulty and performance are correlational. There is a range where challenge builds resilience, and a threshold past which the same challenge is counterproductive.

Two other findings sharpen the picture. In a classic effort-justification experiment, people who went through a more demanding initiation valued the group they joined more highly than those who had it easy. Effort does not manufacture value on its own; however, it changes how a person appraises what they gained. And research on what is called benign masochism documents something leaders will recognize: experiences that begin as aversive become genuinely enjoyable when the person perceives them as contained and safe. The reversal depends on that boundary. When the intensity exceeds what someone can tolerate, it fails.

Scratchy is the dose. Burned out is past it. Knowing the difference is the actual leadership skill.

The Leadership Application

Most development conversations stop at self-awareness. People learn their preferences, they name them accurately, and then they organize their working lives to stay inside them. This is where a great deal of value has already been created.

The next move is harder. Preference tells you where you are comfortable. It does not tell you what your team needs from you on a Thursday when the decision is unclear, the timeline compressed and your default approach is not working. Range is what covers that gap, and it can only be built at the edge of preference, in exactly the conditions that produce the scratch.

What makes something scratchy is a reading rather than a verdict. When a leader feels it, three things are usually true at once: they are outside their preference, they are still functioning and they are in the zone where capacity actually changes. Those conditions do not last. They resolve either into a new range or into retreat or chaos.

There is a limit, and it matters. Scratchy is bounded, chosen and recoverable. It has an end. Burned out is chronic, imposed and unsupported, and no amount of it builds anything. A leader who cannot tell those apart in themselves will not be able to tell them apart in a team and will either coddle their people out of growth or push them into damage. Reading the difference is a teachable skill.

One Thing To Do This Week

Pick one recurring meeting you already attend to practice flexing. Choose the attribute or behavior that is least preferred for you, and lead from it for that meeting.

If Structural is your least preferred, ask for the sequence and the owner and the date. If Conceptual is your least preferred, open with a big picture question before the agenda. If your Expressiveness runs 3/3, say less than half of what you normally would.

Then afterward, put one sentence in your notes: Where did it get scratchy and how did you respond? That sentence is a starting place for your range and its edges. It amplifies the data that an assessment gives you, because it is lived and it is yours.

One meeting. That is the whole practice.

Comfort is not the goal, and neither is strain. The goal is knowing which one you are in.

 

Sources

Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59(2), 177–181. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0047195

Oshri, A., Cui, Z., Carvalho, C., & Liu, S. (2022). Is perceived stress linked to enhanced cognitive functioning and reduced risk for psychopathology? Testing the hormesis hypothesis. Psychiatry Research, 314, Article 114644. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2022.114644

Oshri, A., Cui, Z., Owens, M. M., Carvalho, C. A., & Sweet, L. H. (2022). Low-to-moderate level of perceived stress strengthens working memory: Testing the hormesis hypothesis through neural activation. Neuropsychologia, 176, Article 108354. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108354

Rozin, P., Guillot, L., Fincher, K., Rozin, A., & Tsukayama, E. (2013). Glad to be sad, and other examples of benign masochism. Judgment and Decision Making, 8(4), 439–447.

Note. The hormesis findings cited here are cross-sectional and correlational. They support a nonlinear relationship between perceived stress and performance; they do not establish causation, and they are not a basis for prescribing hardship.

A note on method: this begins as me talking out loud, from hours of contemplation. I use AI to transcribe and tighten what I dictate. The thinking, and the final word, are mine.

 

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