Pain is not always a bad thing.
Pain can be a great motivator. Pain is what will make you get off your butt and get you to accomplish your goals in life. Pain will make you continue moving in a certain direction until you get to your destination.
The problem however, is that we like to live in comfort. We will tolerate a little discomfort – but as soon as it’s too much, most people will tend to quit whatever it is they originally set out to do.
Think about it for a moment, what happens at the beginning of each year?
New Year’s resolutions, right? Everyone starts saying to themselves, “Oh man I need to get on a diet and exercise program. Come January 1st that’s it I’m going to do it, I’m going to start! No excuses.” Then January 1st rolls around and you are all excited fired up on day one. You start training or a new diet program in the first week, then by the second week it gets a little harder, then by the third week, you start saying to yourself, “Man this is a little harder than I thought.”
Then comes the destructive inner dialogue.
“Well… I have trained two weeks in a row, that’s good enough for now. I mean I can’t spend all my free time in the gym for crying out loud. I want a social life. Besides I don’t want to over train, you know that’s how people get injured, right? By training too much. Also, the boys want to hang out tonight (or the girls want to go have a couple of drinks after work). So, maybe I will just skip this one time. “
Something else comes up, then another, and your pattern starts to go back to your old ways, maybe not overnight, but in time. Then you find you have completely quit what you started.
You see, the pain you were going through was not enough to push you to cement this permanent change. We all go through some sort of pain in our life. However pain happens to you will determine whatever your level of actions and commitment are.
Here, I will prove my point. Have you ever had a toothache before? I have had plenty for various reasons. I can tell you this, I have broken many bones and had plenty of other injuries in life, but none of them come close to a toothache.
If you have never experienced tooth pain before believe me you don’t want to. I can guarantee you this, you won’t care about what your friends are doing, what’s on TV, what your work is doing, what your family is doing, what politics are saying. All you care about is getting to the dentist to make the pain go away. Your only focus is getting rid of the pain. Nothing else matters in that moment due to the discomfort you are experiencing.
If you treated your goals in life the same way as you are trying to treat that toothache, you wouldn’t quit going to the gym by the third week of January. You wouldn’t eat that cake or ice cream or donut or whatever is causing you to keep gaining fat. You wouldn’t drink as much alcohol and use excuses like, “I’m just having one drink. I am with friends, we’re hanging out having a good time. I deserve it!”
If the pain that you were going through was equal to a toothache, you wouldn’t let any excuse hold you back from accomplishing your goals. You see, the pain of what you’re going through will motivate you. The level of your pain is what will continue to carry you through the hard times of achieving your goal.
There will be hard times in life, you must get used to it. Get comfortable with the pain that you are experiencing. The only way that you will get anything accomplished in life is dealing with pain – not running from it.
If I didn’t get a toothache, I wouldn’t have gone to the dentist to have them fix the problem. Then who knows how bad this issue would have become? A root canal, a crown, maybe total extraction?
It’s simple, take a good look in the mirror and ask yourself before quitting whatever goal that you set out to do, “Did I give 100% of my time, energy, and effort to achieving this goal?”
You will already know what the answer is before finishing the question. Did you tolerate enough pain? Was the pain you started with enough to keep you going?
If you have a toothache, your pain is in the nerve, and soon to be pain from needles and drilling.
If you have a broken bone, your pain is skeletal and felt immediately upon impact.
If you are pre-diabetic or diabetic, your pain is needles and possibly missing limbs.
If you have heart disease, your pain may eventually be a heart attack.
So, what’s your motivation to change your decisions?
Welcome pain, don’t be afraid of it. Let it grow you and help forge you for greatness.
As always, train hard, be a beast!