New research provides evidence that encouraging people to seek discomfort can help to motivate psychological growth. The findings have been published in the journal Psychological Science. “In prior work, my co-authors and I found that the more fun goal pursuit is, the more people persist in their goals (e.g., exercising longer when the workout is fun than when the workout is useful for health),” said Kaitlin Woolley, an associate professor at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business and the corresponding author of the new research. “Yet it is not always easy for goals to be fun. We wanted to…