I used to say I hated networking.

Small talk felt like punishment. I could never remember anyone’s name two seconds after they’d told me. Pitching and listening to people’s pitches was embarrassing. And within five minutes of arriving, I’d usually attached myself to someone who was more than happy to talk at me for the rest of the evening. I didn’t even need to participate. I could just nod politely and tell myself I’d done my duty by turning up.

I thought I was just bored. But boredom, I’ve realised, is never the real problem. It’s anxiety about being bored, because when we take the time to be bored, to be unstimulated, to have nothing to distract us, all sorts of “taboo” thoughts pop up: “What if I’m not interesting?” “I’m wasting this person’s time. I’m wasting my time.” “I don’t belong here.” “I’m not good at this.” “I shouldn’t have to do this.” And these thoughts make us feel scared and resentful, they’re uncomfortable, unacceptable, intolerable.

Allowing ourselves to feel bored means facing our fears, which mostly don’t hold up to scrutiny. When we clarify our fears, they often turn out to lack substance, like my fear of wasting my time at networking events.

I’ve always been jealous of my time. I guard it fiercely. I schedule it, optimise it, and spend half of it watching Netflix. So, the thing I fear most at a networking event, wasting the evening, is often the very thing I do when I get home. But that feels… ok. No one can watch me fail to be interesting from my sofa.

Anxiety is preferable to boredom. Anxiety also feels excruciating, but it’s a kind of generalised discomfort that masks what we’re afraid of, being boring, wasting our time, forgetting people’s names, and drives us, literally, to distraction.

Arthur C. Brooks in the Harvard Business Review talks about this fear of boredom. He says we’ve become so afraid of being bored that we’ve trained ourselves out of creativity, reflection, and presence. We’re addicted to stimulation. And it’s socially acceptable. Scroll your feed. Watch another episode. Check your email. Again. It’s not laziness, it’s … soothing. It’s “self-management”.

When we allow ourselves to be bored, we risk encountering what Jung called the shadow: the parts of us that don’t match our self-image, that we’re competent, confident, positive people. The thoughts we’re trying to suppress, the ones that emerge when we’re bored, that’s our shadow: unacknowledged, embarrassing, banished beneath the surface.

And the shadow doesn’t just come knocking with words. It makes us feel bad, scared and resentful; it makes us squirm and reach for our phone. Or vanish into a one-sided conversation. Or set up camp by the refreshments stand.

In Clarification Coaching, we don’t try to override that discomfort with mindset tricks or breathing hacks. We don’t label it “anxiety” and move on. We take the time to feel the anxiety until it reveals the fears it’s masking, often things we have not said out loud to ourselves or anyone else.

Sometimes the connections we make between our fears and reality are surprising. I connected my fear of what I was calling “wasting my time” – which was in fact a fear of failing – to a maths teacher from my schooldays in France, when I was twelve years old, who would award zero points if you didn’t answer a question, and subtract two points if you tried to solve a maths problem and got it wrong. I remember a classmate of mine joking, when we got our maths tests back, “I’m going to tell my parents I got minus six out of twenty on my test, and when they go berserk, I’ll tell them, ‘It’s ok, I actually got zero!’”

Boredom is a doorway, and what lies on the other side might be insight. Permission. Authenticity, that comes not from being impressive, but from being real.

Like this week, someone asked about my coaching. I opened my mouth… and absolutely nothing came out. I blinked, laughed, and said, “I’ve completely forgotten my pitch.” It was fine. It was funny. I remembered it eventually. And in the meantime, we had a real conversation, not a rehearsed one.

I didn’t fail. I connected. And that’s the thing I always forget when I’m trying to manage discomfort: that honesty opens more doors than performance ever could.

So, the next time you feel boredom rising, or reach for your phone for the seventh time in ten minutes, try this:

Pause.

Notice.

Ask yourself, “What am I trying to hide from myself? What’s my shadow saying to me?”

You might be surprised by the answer.