“Embrace the hurt, people! Love the burn! No pain, no gain!” Once again, I asked myself why I paid good money for people to devise creative ways to subject me to sheer agony.
Grace was the W.O.D. or “workout of the day” (with no relation with the theological concept). I was only on rep number 19 of 30 and most of the others had already finished. I was thinking I might be finished too.
Then came the voice of the coach, this time only in my head: “Know the difference between real pain that comes from injury and the inevitable discomfort that comes with progress. Pay attention to the former; ignore the latter.” Okay then, eleven more reps to go.
Pain really is an amazing physiological phenomenon. In fact, there is actually a disease called CIPA which prevents a person from feeling pain. Sign me up! Right?
However, it is actually a pretty scary condition. Kids with undiagnosed CIPA can have all sorts of secondary medical problems due to the fact that they do not know when they get hurt or even burned, which can lead to serious infections, complications and death.
So the ability to experience physical pain is actually a good thing. But what about emotional pain? None of us likes to feel fear, doubt, anger, betrayal, rejection or shame. In fact, I would venture that most of us go to extraordinary lengths to avoid emotional pain.
But what if I treated physical pain the same way? If every time I got that jackhammer of a headache I just downed twice the regular dose of what my high school football team used to call vitamin I (ibuprofen), I might miss the chance to catch a brain tumor before it becomes inoperable. If ignoring physical pain is never good for our bodies, what risks does ignoring emotional pain imply?
Avoiding this pain can easily spiral into a vicious circle: experience emotional pain => repress, avoid or numb it => drive it deeper into our subconscious => more repression, avoidance or numbing => lather, rinse, repeat => until something breaks…
What if, instead, I listened to the pain? Just like the physical pain — which I trust to keep me from burning myself on the stove or chopping my fingers off instead of that ripe tomato I’m trying to dice — what if I trusted the emotional pain I experience to tell me that something might really be wrong?
Many of us might have been brought up to ignore or repress our emotions. If we felt bad, then something was wrong with us. I have caught myself plenty of times instinctively wanting to tell my small kids to “Stop crying!” when I know the logical and rational reaction to a child in distress is to comfort them and find out what is the matter.
Undoing that ingrained, subconscious, knee-jerk reaction to ignore, repress, hide or judge our own emotional pain is difficult and time-consuming work. But it can unlock a whole new world we never knew existed.
Here’s how it works: I look at my team’s sales numbers for the period and realize they are down. I might experience fear, embarrassment, maybe even a little shame. My usual reaction to these emotions might look something like blaming my team, or the market, or the competition, or the aliens that ate my sales plan (or was it the dog?). I might even take the supposedly “better” approach of motivating my team to redouble our efforts and push them to work harder, longer hours, etc. Either way, I am avoiding the pain of those emotions.
Instead, let’s accept and listen to the pain, almost as if it were another person in and of itself that I am trying to connect with. It might look more like: “Whoa! Those numbers don’t look so good! Wow, my heart is racing, my face feels flushed and my hands just started to sweat. I’m really afraid right now. I wonder why? I should get curious about this. Maybe there is something important hidden deep down here that is causing this reaction in me. I know the fear is trying to tell me something for my own good, so I better listen and drill down here.”
Sometimes what we find scares us. Sometime what we find surprises us. But self-understanding, acceptance and knowledge is never a bad thing.
Here’s the other advantage: once we have listened to and made the effort of understanding where our emotions are coming from and why, we are able to face the external problem that triggered them with more calm, clarity and courage. This allows us to make more objective analyses and better decisions around corrective measures.
This is the difference between reacting to emotional situations and using our emotions to help us respond to them in a constructive way.
Just like our nervous system’s ability to feel and experience physical pain, our emotions are a vital and essential tool for our own performance and our ability to lead and help others perform at their best. Instead of repressing, ignoring, avoiding or numbing our painful feelings, we can actively and intentionally accept them, connect with them, listen to them and learn from them in order to help us perform and lead from that inner place of calm, clarity and courage, even in the most challenging times.
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