Out of My Comfort Zone: Discomfort Zone

By Kath Weider Roos

Kath Weider Roos is a writer, singer, vocal coach, and music facilitator. Along with her husband, John Roos, she owns RoosRoast Coffee where she functions as Chief Creative Problem-Solver. Weider is a long-time Diamond Approach practitioner in the Ridhwan School. You can learn more about her at kathweider.com and more about RoosRoast Coffee at roosroast.com.

This assignment stumped me at first. To begin with, dear Crazy Wisdom, which self are you hoping to hear from? Me as singer, music facilitator, filmmaker, spiritual practitioner, business owner, or merely human being? 

And…hm, am I ever really in my comfort zone? Truth be told, I feel like I’m slightly outside of it, always placing myself into modestly uncomfortable situations, often and seemingly on purpose. Like David Whyte writes:

“Just beyond 

yourself.

It’s where you need 

to be. 

Half a step into self-forgetting and the rest restored by what you’ll meet.”

Frankly, this does not seem like a recipe for inner peace. My new thing, for the record, is learning how to embrace my comfort zone and to grow from inner joy rather than displacement.

So, what to write about here? Perhaps it’s not the small discomforts I have chosen willingly, but the life-altering ones that chose me. 

Let’s talk about owning a small business and what was to become the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life and probably ever will.

Yes, my husband and I own RoosRoast, Ann Arbor’s deep local, art-business project, involving coffee and all the beautiful people who drink coffee. (Turns out, this is a lot of people.)

RoosRoast is John’s baby, really. I have birthed Jozo, our son, as well as numerous songs, music, and film projects, but he birthed RoosRoast from the sheer tenacity,boldness, and joyful hunger that burns inside him. I got on board the project in 2008, as an adoptive parent by marriage, but still holding down my first “real” job at the U of M’s School of Art & Design as a Creative Arts Producer— a vague title for a position that morphed over the years.

By 2015, though, this RoosRoast baby had gotten rather big and uncomfortably unwieldy. We figured that my marketable skills—as a writer, filmmaker, communicator— could be better spent on “the family business.”

Secretly, my hope was to return to the personal autonomy and freedom that being your own boss offers and eventually to get back into my music.

Let’s be clear, riding shotgun to John Roos is to be led out of your comfort zone continuously. Being around him will lead you to places you never intended to go. I suppose, this is and always was, part of the appeal.

Accordingly, the RoosRoast project I signed up for promptly became more than I bargained for. So, 2016, when Ed Renoullet had a dream, (literally, he had a dream), on Valentine’s night, that he should hand over his downtown coffee shop location, Elixer Vitae, to RoosRoast, the two of us said, “okay,” without much thought or planning. 

True, I had never opened a coffee shop or managed a restaurant before, (though I had worked at many back in the day), but, hey, I’m safely riding on John Roos’ coattails, a man undaunted by the fear of failure or the need to “know things before you do them.” 

You do things and in so doing, you know them. So, let’s just do it! Yes, we’re in! 

And so, we did. 

I can count the creation of and opening of the Liberty shop as one of the most thrilling things I’ve ever done. It was insanely fun. At first. But then… it turned hard. Majorly, majorly, OUT OF MY COMFORT ZONE hard. 

Like a flash, RoosRoast suddenly went from an eight to ten person staff to a staff of 30. We needed SOPs (standard operating procedures), a proper training program, we needed managers, a personnel handbook, and risk and liability insurance.

People. People are hard to manage! Things go wrong. All the time. 

And we’re so….busy. We’re doing, so well!  People love RoosRoast and us! This is fun, but also, not fun. 

Who is the leader of this fast-moving mayhem? I look around the sea of young faces we have attracted and realize, with dread, oh, it’s me. I am the elder here. I’m in charge and I will have to learn things and apply myself in utterly new ways—to spreadsheets and health codes and managing people. 

I start receiving executive coaching. We get better at hiring. And firing. And setting up systems that work. We hire a general manager. Things start to slowly stabilize. Our vision is that RoosRoast become “less stressful and more fun.” (We literally put that in our vision statement, because, yes, we have started doing vision statements. Thank you, Zingerman’s.)

Things are getting better, except, a polarizing and disturbing figure has stepped into the White house and our whole town is turned upside down.  Suddenly, in Ann Arbor, it’s important to put a “no Nazis” sign on our door. What is happening?! 

Honestly, this is not a fun time to be an employer of mostly young people in a liberal town. Things are getting better at RoosRoast, but also there is an extra layer of tension and stress and panic over everything we do. 

And then, comes 2020. 

Not-so-normal times become, well, paranormal times. 

The sci-fi movie begins and, shoot, I’m Sigourney Weaver. This is about to get real. 

Seemingly overnight, I am navigating uncertainty and leadership on a whole new level. Our staff is scared out of their minds. We’re getting our information from Twitter, meanwhile, the CDC and Ann Arbor Health Department has nothing for us—no one really knows anything at all. We have to make decisions on our own, holding hands with other businesses, reading the fast-changing tea leaves.

We will get infected by holding a ceramic cup that a customer has touched? Should we let people in the shop? Should we shut down? 

All eyes point to me. Ack, shouldn’t these important decisions be made by much smarter, wiser, more experienced people than me?

Switch to all paper cups. Okay now, rewrite the menu. Simplify, the menu. Put the whole cafe online. Forget that, just close. Close the Liberty shop. Send people home. Whoever wants to work, can work. 

Are we essential? No one knows. 

Yes, coffee is essential! We keep roasting. Essential crew stays working and wants to work. 

I have to learn the word “furlough” and make hard calls about who stays and who goes.

Oh, please God, please, may no one get Covid for we know not what to do. 

(And no one does. For two years we operate without a single case.)

Now, flung together as a covid “pod,” hunkered down at Rosewood HQ, we keep showing up. But what we do changes, seemingly, daily. 

Stay in your car, we will run your order out to you and place it in your car, wearing gloves and masks.  Okay now—no drinks—send everyone home. Beans only.

People are hoarding toilet paper, but also coffee. Our grocery sales go out the roof. The web business explodes 300% and we turn our overflow seating room into a triage center for no-contact coffee.

Time passes and we bring staff back, turning the Rosewood location into a take-out stand—glass windows and a small opening for handing out coffees. Our little cafe is now like a Dairy Queen, but for coffee. John Roos can build anything. My general manager is a godsend—we co-parent together, navigating each and every exhausting pivot.

Ann Arbor floods us with love and support. People hand-sew us masks using our coffee ties as nose clips. They send us love notes, they tip wildly and generously and buy coffee for healthcare workers, supporting our small business and nurses at the same time. “We want you to stay in business,” they say. And we do. We invite displaced farmers to come sell vegetables on the lawn. Is this safe? We don’t know. We are supporting each other. We are holding each other up.

Curiously, we become a work family joined together by distress, but strangely happy to have some kind of purpose. In this uncertainty, we are offering some small bit of normalcy, through a brown hot liquid that is the most important ritual of most people’s day. 

Meanwhile, in the midst of this constantly moving mess, our work family is hit with a real tragedy, not merely a looming, potential one. Our Kitchen Manager, a 29-year-old, brilliant and beautiful young woman, who is single-handedly making all the food for RoosRoast, is killed instantly one night in June of 2020. John and I say goodbye to her on Friday night, as she heads out to an evening bike ride with her girlfriend. The next day, we get a call from her mother. The two young women were killed instantly, murdered really, by a hit and run driver, while riding their bikes along the road into Saline that night.

It’s like you were running a marathon and you find out you were going to the moon. I am the mother of this work family, and we just lost one of our own. We close momentarily. We figure out how to operate with our grief intact, not pushed away but also not destroying us. Again, Ann Arbor pours out its love, sending cards and flowers. I talk with her mother almost every day. We come closer to ourselves and to the love and the real contact we are capable of as human beings, only when we know for certain it can be taken from us.

I am out of my comfort zone, yet strangely in it. I move toward that which scares me—actually, this love—feeling it, receiving it, recognizing it, as we mourn and as we carry on. It’s not just coffee. We always say it, and it’s true.

A friend once said to me when I complained about the relentless stress of small business, “Well, when you decide to start dancing with a bear, you don’t get to decide when you stop.”

In 2020 the bear dropped us. Things did stop, in a way. We were down to the bone—what is essential, who are we really, and what are we made of?  

Now it’s 2022, and we have emerged as a team and as a business, more lean, intact, better, wiser than we ever have been. Our vision, that RoosRoast become “less stressful and more fun,” ironically, seems to have played out. In no small part, thanks to the faith and tenacity of the Roos Crew and the deep-local-loving community we are lucky enough to be a part of.

This is one of those stories where the things you thought were a “bad turn of events,” in fact, grinds you, mauls you, forces you to step into your own hero’s journey. Clearly, I wouldn’t have gone there willingly. 

Out of my comfort zone and into the love zone. And now, I hope, more singing. 

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