Realizing the lesson within the pain. One of my mentors, Glenn Dietzel is huge on this lesson. It boils down to knowing yourself and understanding the value in what you’ve endured and overcome. He has a motto:
“He who reflects the most will win big in the marketplace”
Only in understanding yourself in the context of your experiences, can you hope to become a leader of others, or just an effective salesperson for whatever it is that you’re offering the world.
It involves being introspective and retrospective.
- What is it that drives you?
- Why was your life as it was?
- Why is your life now like it is?
- What led you to here and now?
- What themes seem to repeat themselves in your life?
- What hurt have you endured that has left you stronger than if you hadn’t experienced it?
Another of my mentors, Bill Harris has something to add to this too. His trainings and technology focus on helping you to develop your “witness.”
This is the part of you that is separate from your actual life and persona. It is the quiet part of you that simply witnesses you as you go about being you, without questioning your own motives or judging your intent and goals. Just witnessing.
By developing this ability to witness, you can learn to see how you do a day and then decide if this way of doing and being are bringing you the results in life that you desire.
Are your decisions serving you?
If so, continue. But if not, you are free to change. There is no right or wrong in this. There is only “Is what I’m doing taking me toward my goal or away from it?” Answer that to yourself, then decide.
The only way to know if you’re hitting your mark is to make this witness part of you strong. The thinking part of you cannot be trusted to make this decision on its own. The thinking part of you has to be trained to act on what the witness part of you is telling it.
So, there are two great sources of information and guidance, well beyond the scope of what I offer, whom I wholeheartedly wish for you to investigate further.
What these men will teach you and what I can vouch for in my own experiences, is that all pain holds value.
Beneficial, life altering information is contained in your trials
As they are happening, as you beat them, and as you look back on them.
Often, the pain is too intense to step away from to see where it’s headed. It’s also an active training and if you try too hard to see through it to the message, you’ll never finish the lesson.
Most suffering must be borne and then catalogued for later inspection
But make sure that inspection takes place.
All that I am today has been created by the understanding of what it was I endured and why, which then led me to reinvent myself (a couple of times) in order to reach the goals I desired most within my heart.
The me that I was was never going to see these goals come true. He had to go. In my case, the agent of change came in the form of bipolar disorder.
But once the many years of suffering were over and I considered all that had been and why, I realized it had been the greatest gift the Universe could ever have handed me.
What are you suffering through right now? How is it impeding the attainment of your goals? What can get you through it faster? What can you learn from it to take you to even greater heights in this life? How can it aid you in teaching or selling to others?
What are you hiding in there that might help you become king or queen of your domain? Let’s look at that together and see what strengths can be pulled from it.
The photographer of this post’s featured photo: Gerome Viavant
