CHAPTER 14

FACE THE PAIN THAT GETS YOU SOMEWHERE

IT’S AS SIMPLE AS THIS: If you want to get somewhere meaningful in life, you need a relationship with pain. You must understand how to use and experience your own pain in ways that get you where you want to go.

This principle lies at the core of Hard Way success. Elite athletes understand this; so do military professionals and other high-performing groups. It may be physical pain, emotional pain, or relational pain, depending on your goal. Once you accept this principle and establish your relationship with pain, you will find yourself on your way.

Clearing the Air

Simply put, pain is discomfort. It is a negative experience or feeling of any stripe or category. It might look like any of the types in the following list. (These are just examples for the sake of discussion. Each of the categories has many more examples — you can probably add many on your own.).

• Physical: feeling sluggish and tired from being overweight

• Emotional: feeling overwhelmed, sad, or anxious

• Relational: feeling alienated and alone from someone you love

• Career: feeling frustrated with a lack of fulfillment in your job track

• Financial: suffering losses and struggles in your money management

• Spiritual: feeling disconnected from God and his grace

No one enjoys (let alone loves) the feeling of pain. It hurts. When you put your hand on a hot stove burner, you yell and quickly yank away your hand. You respond to that extreme discomfort as we all naturally do: We want to get away from it!

Let’s clear the air about one thing that will help you to find success in your relationship with pain: Life has no pain-free option. Life has no path on which we have no negative feelings, experiences, or relationships. It doesn’t exist, no matter how much we would like to find it.

I call the quest for that path the Nirvana Search. People on the Nirvana Search constantly look for ways to avoid discomfort and difficulty. They don’t choose to exercise because it makes them uncomfortable. They don’t take career risks because they might fail. They don’t engage in difficult conversations because they would rather think positive thoughts and “not go there” with challenging people. They take shortcuts. They find it nearly impossible to do hard things for an extended time.

And they never do find Nirvana. They don’t even come close.

But who can blame a person for the Nirvana Search? It would be crazy to love pain; in fact, the love of pain provides strong evidence of a psychological disorder. As you’ll see in this chapter, however, while it might be crazy to love pain, it is sane to love the results of the right kind of pain. It makes sense to love the reaping that the right kind of pain inevitably sows in your life.

I have never met anyone who successfully pulled off the Nirvana Search. Sooner or later, we all encounter difficulty and discomfort. It is simply impossible to never hurt, never get disappointed or fail or lose, never feel frustrated. Life doesn’t bow its knee to us; it’s much more likely to roll over us. And we really can’t medicate eternally the hurts we feel. Life is far larger than our self-medication.

In my experience, those who hold on to the search more stubbornly than others are either three years old or drug addicts. Both groups seek pleasure and avoid pain at all costs. They dedicate a lot of life and energy to those feel-good-at-any-cost endeavors. While drug addicts need treatment to help them conquer their condition, three-year-olds need wise and loving parents to guide them into accepting that, while life can be good, they need to accept the presence of pain as a permanent part of their lives.

Entitlement attitudes resist pain. The culture of entitlement constantly presents options to avoid pain of all sorts. Entitlement offers fixes for each of the painful life categories I mentioned above:

• Physical: Begin one of the many instant, dramatic weight-loss fixes.

• Emotional: Distract yourself by eating or working so you won’t have to feel the distress signal from your emotions.

• Relational: When a relationship gets tough, bail out and start over.

• Career: Don’t take jobs that require working overtime and weekends.

• Financial: Go into credit card debt and pay it back later.

• Spiritual: Remind God that it’s his job to make you happy and solve your problems.

Entitlement has a simple mantra for all pain: Feel good at all costs. Life is short, feeling good works, and you should never have to experience discomfort for any reason.

The Hard Way also has a simple mantra for pain: Face the pain that gets you somewhere. The two are diametrically opposed — and while the Hard Way works for you, the entitlement way always fails you in the end, just as surely as the instant weight-loss program you began won’t result in lasting weight loss.

Remember the definition of the Hard Way: The habit of doing what is best, rather than what is comfortable, to achieve a worthwhile outcome. All of this ties together, which explains why I say you need to create a relationship with pain that works well.

Since no sane Nirvana path exists, let’s look at what a helpful relationship with pain might look like. We’ll start with the two types of pain.

Symptom Pain and Success Pain

The first kind of pain I call symptom pain, a sharp discomfort that alerts you to the reality that you need to do something new and different. Consider it a warning. The six pains listed in the beginning of this chapter are all examples of symptom pain. They say to you, “Hey, look! You have a problem, and it’s time to deal with it.” And if you don’t deal with it, they may amp up the intensity until you do deal with it. C. S. Lewis calls pain God’s “megaphone.”¹⁵

You want to diminish your symptom pain as much as you can, but you can do this only by figuring out what lies underneath the symptom, its root. You must address whatever is causing the pain so that you can succeed, solve problems, and have a healthy life.

And the key to diminishing symptom pain is the second type, success pain.

Success pain is different from symptom pain. It is the discomfort that helps you change and grow. It is good for you. It provides answers, hope, and energy. It may be just as uncomfortable as symptom pain, but so what? It brings you good fruit and makes it all worthwhile.

Success pain is also the best way to diminish symptom pain. It is the tree that produces the fruit. This is so because it is the work we have to do about an underlying issue that we have been avoiding, which has led to the symptom pain in the first place. When we face the success pain, we help resolve the symptom pain.

Let’s revisit the six symptom pains, and see the success pains that we need to address:

• Physical: feeling sluggish and tired from being overweight

Success pain: Find a support system and a balanced nutrition/ weight plan and stick to it.

• Emotional: feeling overwhelmed, sad, or anxious

Success pain: Bring to your life team the loss, injury, or struggle that is driving those feelings.

• Relational: feeling alone and alienated from someone you love

Success pain: Learn some healthy confrontation skills and have that difficult conversation.

• Career: feeling frustrated and having a lack of fulfillment in your job track

Success pain: Get a career mentor or coach and calendar some time to work on your passion, talents, and training.

• Financial: suffering losses and struggles in your money management

Success pain: Take a Dave Ramsey course, learn the skills of budgeting, and stick to the plan.

• Spiritual: feeling disconnected from God and his grace

Success pain: Talk to a safe and mature pastor or spiritual director about what is going on and what steps you might take to reconnect to God.

Do you see the pattern here? All of the success pains are work, they are effort, they require energy, they are difficult, they take time. They feel painful. And they resolve the symptom pain.

The Bible says the same thing: “Therefore, since Christ suffered in his body, arm yourselves also with the same attitude, because whoever suffers in the body is done with sin” (1 Peter 4:1). God designed a path to help us be done with sin, in all its forms: the sins of failing, of letting yourself down, of not reaching your potential, of being locked into dysfunctional relationship patterns, of being imprisoned by bad habits and addiction, of not taking care of our bodies and our weight — in other words, missing the marks that God has for us.

God’s solution is suffering — but the right kind of suffering: “Whoever suffers in the body is done with sin.” That is success pain. It is uncomfortable. We feel success pain literally in our body, in the form of fatigue from our workout, feeling anxiety about that tough conversation, boredom from having to go to yet another job interview, feeling overwhelmed with emotions when we deal with our past. But it produces good fruit, and it’s worth it.

We have a lemon tree in our backyard. When I look at plants, they shrivel up and die, but my wife has the ability to nurture plants. Suppose I went out to grab a lemon to make some lemonade and found the lemons dry and withered. In my disappointment, I might say, “You really need to be big and juicy. You’re pretty much a failure as a lemon.”

Any self-respecting lemon would say to me, “This is your problem, not mine. I’m just the fruit. Nothing will improve until you fix the tree.” And that would be true. If we added better fertilizer, water, and sunlight, odds are the lemons would be much better. No amount of confronting the lemons will change a thing.

Jesus used the metaphor of fruit to help us understand growth and the lack of growth: “Every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit” (Matthew 7:17 – 18). God’s structure is to deal with the tree.

“Facing” My Pain

I recently had to “face” my own symptom pain to get this message. My face literally was the symptom.

I woke up one morning to work with two clients who were coming to my home for a scheduled engagement. My face felt numb, but I thought it was because I had slept in a funny position. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and rubbed my face to get the blood going.

Nothing happened. My face remained numb.

In fact, the left side of my face refused to move. I couldn’t move the left half of my mouth, my cheeks, my eyebrows, or my forehead. When I tried to talk, my words came out slurred. I thought I had suffered a stroke, so I tried all the left side/right side movements of my body, and everything else worked fine. So I ruled out a stroke, but I had no idea what was going on.

When my clients came to the door, I told them what had happened. Fortunately, one was a health professional who took a look at me and said, “Get in the car. We’re going to the ER.” On the way, he called another health professional friend of ours and the two of them both thought it looked as if I had Bell’s palsy.

I had never heard of it. They described it as a facial paralysis that is neither dangerous nor contagious. It comes from the virus that causes chicken pox, which most of us had as kids. The virus often doesn’t disappear, but stays in our body in a dormant state. In adulthood, it can activate as shingles or as Bell’s.

The ER doctor confirmed the diagnosis. I went home and finished working with my clients. That night, one of my sons, Benny, walked in, took one look at me and said, “Hi, Harvey Dent!” referring to the two-faced Batman villain. For the next couple of months, I endured a lot of medical regimens. Over time, the paralysis gradually went away.

But in the meantime, what a strange experience for me! I couldn’t talk well, had a patch over my eye because I couldn’t close it, had to drink from a straw, and had to cancel all my video and television engagements.

But I accepted the Bell’s at a spiritual level. I considered it a sign from God about something, but at first I had no idea what. I told him, “I’m listening. I won’t be like Pharaoh. You don’t have to give me plague number two. I don’t want bloody water, frogs, or flies. Please, tell me what I need to hear, and I’ll respond.”

In other words, I will face the success pain that is required to eliminate the symptom pain. Something had to be driving all this bizarre activity. I wanted to find it and fix it, despite the pain.

I have a life team consisting of several close friends, and I talked to them for a long time about the problem. Finally, one of them, Elaine Morris, who directs my leadership program in Dallas, said, “You work too much. You need a board of advisors to keep you balanced.” She thought the Bell’s resulted from overwork.

I hated that idea. I love my freedom, my autonomy, and my work. As I’ve said, I am what I consider a “happy workaholic,” working not out of isolation or depression but from a love of what I’m doing and a high threshold of pain. Because of that high pain threshold, I just didn’t know when I was overdoing it. If a company asked me to work with it in Baltimore on a Tuesday, and a Seattle company asked me for the same thing on a Wednesday, I tended to respond, “No problem. That’s what red-eye flights are for.” Sleep is something you do later . . . right?

I had to admit, however, that my wife and others had already told me I’d been working too much. So I asked four close friends, all mature and accomplished, to be on my board. They all agreed, and we began meeting.

That was a game changer for me. I was transparent with them. I gave them all the documentation and information I had on every major area of my life: my life mission, goals, history, finances, relationships, even my medical conditions. They approached their new responsibility with gravity and began helping me structure my work/life balance so that life became healthier for me. I began better leveraging my time, carving out time for health and balance in my calendar, and saying no to good opportunities to save room for the right opportunities in line with my own mission.

It wasn’t easy. I didn’t like saying no to any opportunity to speak, consult, or coach, because I enjoy these activities so much. But we established yearly and monthly maximum days to work, vacation times, travel limitations, and strategic plans.

And things began to get better. I have become less rushed and less busy. My effectiveness has increased. I’m not finished with this process, but already it’s yielding the right kind of fruit.

I see the Bell’s as the symptom pain that drove me to the success pain of getting my life and work schedule under control. One of my doctors told me that overwork can be a contributing factor to the condition. I want to work and be productive for a long time. I have plans and dreams, like anyone else. And I think the Bell’s has been the suffering in the body that is helping me be done with the sin of overwork and getting out of balance.

How about you? What symptom pain are you facing? A job, relationship, or behavioral issue? Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the symptom pain is the problem. It isn’t. Use these principles to help put your energy into uncovering and resolving the pain that will bring you success.

The Pain of the Grind

In helping people resolve entitlement and move on to success, I have noticed a type of success pain that individuals avoid like a bad movie. When they learn how to face it and embrace it, however, their quality of life increases exponentially. I call it the pain of the grind.

We experience the pain of the grind when we force ourselves to do the same action over and over again, expecting a payoff in the future. It is the way things feel when you apply discipline, diligence, and perseverance. It’s not fun. It doesn’t create passion. It can feel boring and dreary, as if you’re grinding away on some treadmill, and you can’t help wondering when it will ever stop.

And it can make you a success.

Consider a few examples of the pain of the grind:

• It’s 3 p.m. at the office. You’ve made twenty cold calls in your sales job. You have heard rejection after rejection, and yet you have ten more sales calls to go to make quota. You feel tired and rejected (because you have been rejected). But you pick up the phone the twenty-first time.

• You had to set some boundaries with your teenager about her poor grades. If she doesn’t make the grade threshold you set, she will lose many of her phone and social privileges. You’ve already been through one report card period in which she missed the mark and expressed great unhappiness, and now the new report card is no better. You have to stick with the boundary for another report card period, while she escalates, blames, whines, and tries to manipulate you. You feel battle-weary and exhausted. But you stick with it, because to give in will increase the chances that she won’t succeed in school.

• You need more capital to fund your start-up company. The blue-sky phase was exciting and energizing. You loved the dreaming, the visioning, the plotting. Now you have to go, hat in hand, to banks, investors, and even friends, with a proposal and a well-crafted pitch. You gear up your energy for each new conversation, and it feels exhausting. But you ask for that next meeting to get calendared.

• You’re on an assembly line that involves you repeating the same actions on a machine hundreds of times a day. It doesn’t require a great deal of creativity, and there is little room for you to change things. It has more to do with staying precise and on target. You get bored. But you continue it, because you think about how much you love your family and how this job provides security for them.

• You are on a diet. It’s the second month, and the thirty-day honeymoon is over. Your weight loss has become less dramatic, because the water weight is gone. You need your familiar comfort food to help you relax after a hard day. But you grab a raw vegetable instead. It doesn’t taste nearly as good and doesn’t really satisfy, although it eases the hunger. But you continue into month two; you move forward.

The pain of the grind isn’t rocket science, or magic, or a miracle. It’s about engaging with success pain over time. Not getting discouraged, distracted, or bored after the short burst of energy. It’s sticking with the right things over the course of days, weeks, months, and years. The pain of the grind works on the principle that most of the significant things we need in life come from an oven, not a microwave.

Our entitlement culture resists the pain of the grind. The cop movie ends with a great gun battle in which a few minutes of strategic fighting win the day. The tabloids promise thirty pounds of weight loss in thirty days. But that’s just not reality.

I have seen the pain of the grind operate in companies over and over again. The brilliant, creative, flaky executive has great ideas but just can’t stick to the basics, such as finishing things, getting the reports in, checking her work, and doing the due diligence. Everyone likes her and appreciates her, but over time the company gets tired of all the collateral damage she causes. And the not-quite-as-brilliant or creative but steady and dependable person generally gets the promotions and moves on.

Commit to the oven instead of the microwave. I admit, it’s not as fun. But people who continue to start over and over again, in some Groundhog Day fashion, have less and less fun over time. Do this right, and the reward you’ll have is the fun of a great life.

Skills to Help You Do Pain Right

Unfortunately, the skill of having a functioning relationship with pain doesn’t develop overnight. And most people who have a hard time sticking to something hard came from backgrounds in which no one required them to be diligent, or they had chaos in their homes, or they got by on talent and charm.

If you and pain have not been getting you to where you need to go, here are some ideas that will help you.

Ask “why” before “how.” When you encounter an obstacle or a problem, don’t ask, “How do I get a better lemon?” You’ll save time by asking, “Why is the lemon so scrawny?” In other words, step back and train your brain to look deeper than a quick solution that probably won’t work. Be patient. Insist on something more effective and revolutionary than a Band-Aid solution.

Look at patterns in your life. Are there places where you find a pattern of failure? For some people, it’s when others fail to encourage them, or actually discourage them. For others, it’s when life’s demands take too much of their time. For others, it may be when there are no shortcuts, no quick answers. Figure out which patterns are holding you back and direct your energies toward resolving the patterns.

Be clear on the worthiness of the goal. Let yourself feel how much you want the job, the relationship, or the healthy body. Paul was clear about one of his main goals, to fulfill God’s purpose for him: “I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14). If you “sort of” want something, I promise you that life will be hard enough and distracting enough to keep you from it.

Break it down into incremental parts. Having a smaller subgoal of a certain number of phone calls, sit-ups, or deals done in a set period of time makes it less overwhelming and manageable. You may need to have yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, or hourly subgoals. But these incremental moves add up over time. Your model of success is the ant, a genius at the pain of the grind:

Go to the ant, you sluggard;

consider its ways and be wise!

It has no commander,

no overseer or ruler,

yet it stores its provisions in summer

and gathers its food at harvest. (Proverbs 6:6 – 8)

Incremental also means “take breaks.” A great deal of research about the brain recommends a few minutes of break every hour to refresh your mind. That break can be a walk, a book, or a conversation.

Get engaged. The most excruciating time of any success pain is when you anticipate it. It’s not when you’re doing it, but when you think about doing it. The mind plays tricks on you:

• He’s going to blow up at me if I say this.

• I will fail in this project.

• No one will want what I’m selling.

• I’m so tired that working out will be torture.

If you can just get over that hump and actually engage, things become much better. As a writer who also consults and coaches, I always feel the draw of being around people and feeling the energy from the interaction, rather than making myself get into the solitude of the writing cave for a few hours or days. I find myself making excuses to get away from the cave, thinking, It will be boring and isolated. But when I get into it, I find that my thoughts beget other thoughts and the creative juices start flowing. It’s as if I have a stimulating conversation with myself. The engagement is everything.

Get support. Having a couple of people check in on your increments will make things much less dull and dreary. You still have a few good friends on the outside. They aren’t slaving away at what you are doing. So, since they don’t feel the exhaustion of your experience, they can bring in fresh perspective and energy. When I write a book, I have friends who review the day’s writing with me and make comments or suggestions. Or maybe they simply enjoy talking about it with me: “in your company be refreshed” (Romans 15:32).

When you fall off the horse, get back on. If your life has not made pain your friend, you’ll avoid it and try to work around it. Don’t get discouraged or perfectionistic. Give yourself some grace and take the long view. Failure is learning.

For those with ADD. If you have been diagnosed with ADD, you have an extra challenge in sticking to the pain of the grind. Your condition lends itself to distractibility from repetitive tasks. I have seen this damage both careers and marriages. Just go get help.

A great deal of well-researched treatment offers effective help of all kinds. You have no reason to feel embarrassed, to feel negative about yourself, or to pretend you can just buckle down and do this. You can’t. The treatments will help you follow through on the pain of the grind.

Let Pain Work for You

You don’t have to enjoy pain. But use it. Deal with it competently. It will work for you.

A successful business client of mine has an approach that I have long respected; I have seen its benefits demonstrated over and over again. When he meets with his team, he starts with “What are the challenges?” instead of “Tell me the good news.” He believes that when he and his team face the pain of the negative realities of struggles with sales, deliverables, and culture, they will learn from them, dig into them, and succeed. They do celebrate, and celebrate well. But they dedicate their first energies to facing the pains that keep them from their success. Bad news first, good news second.

Skills

1. Meditate on 1 Peter 4:1. This powerful passage is so helpful about pain. Think about the sins in your life, such as fear, perfectionism, distractibility, lack of confidence, self-absorption, or control. Then ask God to reveal to you what sufferings in the body would help you to be done with these. He wants better soil for you, so that your life fruit is healthy.

2. Evaluate what avoiding pain has cost you. Write it down. Did your career suffer? Your marriage? Your health? In my leadership coaching program, I regularly ask the Misery Question: “What difficulty have you been avoiding, and what has the avoidance cost you?” One business owner said recently, “I postponed shutting down one of my sites, and it cost me several million dollars.” That may sound extreme, but it’s not unique — I have heard answers at a scale similar to his often. And the effects aren’t always measured in dollars; it’s about family and personal life as well. This skill will be a good wake-up call for you.

3. Resource yourself. For most of us, the pain we need to experience, whether it’s having a tough talk, taking a risk, or doing repetitive and noncreative tasks, is something you know deep inside you should do. You have just been avoiding it. You need to break that pattern. Do it differently this week. Don’t go into this week thinking positively that, now that it’s been called to your attention, it will just happen. It won’t. Life has many demands and distractions. Instead, whenever your normal planning time is (say, Monday morning), calendar a time for that meeting or activity, and ask your support team for an encouraging text or phone call. Make this the week you get it done.