Turning pain from a liability to an asset
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In the business world, we value the concepts of strength, perseverance and beating the competition. Businesses often think in terms of assets and liabilities, strengths and weaknesses. This perspective encourages employees to mitigate weakness—pain being one of them.
However, pain is the common denominator of life. Nobody is impervious to it.
I know from my own experience that you can’t separate your personal life from your business life. Whether it’s personal, family, relational or business, you’ll have times and seasons of life where you experience stress and pain.
I experienced unimaginable grief and pain in 2015 when my wife and unborn child were murdered in a home invasion. Though many will not endure the depth of heartache or the kind of earth-shattering tragedy I experienced, there is a relatable message for all.
Over these past nine years, I’ve experienced incredible healing that has given me the ability to serve others. I’ve turned my pain into a greater purpose.
Healing through the process of pain – if you grow through it and pursue what trauma-informed psychology calls “post-traumatic growth” – will turn even the most devastating of tragedies into your greatest asset. However, you must make this decision yourself. You can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how to respond.
Leaders who practice vulnerability in the workplace will lead by example in this pursuit of health and wholeness. It creates a culture of support and authenticity, which greatly benefits the way a team interacts and performs. When people are willing to be vulnerable in the workplace, they’re also more willing to take creative risks, share their perspectives without fear of judgment and make valuable contributions.
There are three things you can do to turn pain from a liability to your greatest asset.
Lean into it, don’t run away.
People often try to suppress and avoid the pain they’re going through. But stuffing it down, like stuffing balloons under water, will only work for so long. What ends up happening is that the pain will inevitably come back up, seeping into daily life as a liability in how you show up in the world and in the workplace. It will come up in how you interact with people and how you perform at work.
Triggers resulting from pain aren’t villains. They are invitations into deeper healing. If you lean into them rather than run away, you’ll find healing.
Let it shape you.
These are the seasons of life that can either shake you or shape you. Oftentimes, when looking back at seasons that were difficult in our career, we can see it was the most transformative and where we grew the most; the challenges were chiseling away at areas where we needed to improve and strengthening positive ones.
If you allow the process to positively impact your character and build your resilience, it will aid you and help serve you as you move forward.
Leverage it for good.
Pain can easily cause us to turn inward and become self-absorbed, but that is a recipe for a shallow and hallow life. If you use your pain to help other people, it’s a recipe for a very satisfying life. Once you begin to use your pain to help others, there will be natural opportunities that become available to you. Pain can become your platform. People will be attracted to the transformation, as they’ll want to heal their pain too. Pain is the common denominator after all.
One way to use your pain for good is to offer productive outlets to help solve problems in your workplace. For example, do you feel disconnected from your team and struggle to connect beyond the details of business? If you’d like to begin to set the stage for authentic connection, you could start a social committee to plan activities to get to know each other better. Instead of feeling the pain of loneliness and isolation, you become an ambassador for relationship building.
Maybe you’ve had a painful experience and were let go from a job. You realize that it taught you a lot of lessons and now, you may want to start your own company with your own values. Your authentic expression attracts clients who appreciate your unique style.
In both situations, you’re sharing your own painful experience and finding ways to improve your work and how you interact with others.
I believe that as you wrestle with your own pain, if you lean into it, let it shape you and leverage it for good, you will find more than success; you’ll find unimaginable fulfilment and impact in your life and in business.
Davey Blackburn is the founder and director of Nothing is Wasted Ministries, host of the Nothing is Wasted podcast and author of the recently released book “Nothing is Wasted: A True Story of Hope, Forgiveness, and Finding Purpose in Pain.”