Who doesn’t love motivational posters? Nothing gets you working together, achieving more, or treating each other better like a National Geographic quality photograph coupled with a succinct inspirational quote! Just ask anyone in any police station ever. #motivation
Growing up I played a lot of soccer. I played on town teams, travel teams, indoor teams, and high school varsity. At times I played on at least two teams during a single season. I loved everything soccer: Adidas shoes, team jerseys, stupid hair cuts, and of course, the World Cup. My bedroom was decorated with soccer-inspired posters, one of which I can still picture in my mind and quote to this day. The poster was a picture from a player’s point of view lying on the turf of the soccer field looking up at the goal, holding his leg. It said,
No pain, no gain. No gain, no goals. No goals, scouts. No scouts, no college. No college, no cheerleaders. No cheerleaders? Get up, man, get up!”
It was a funny motivational message intended to get you to suck it up, get off the ground, walk it off, and keep going. Little did I realize at the time that soccer didn’t have cheerleaders. Although, I suppose if you were amazing enough you could steal them from another sport, but I digress. The point is that pain is temporary and it will keep you from achieving your goals if you let it. With the right perspective you can choose to move past the pain, learn from it, and come out stronger on the other side just like a broken bone that has healed.
The Law of Pain
In John Maxwell’s book The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth¹ he covers what he calls the Law of Pain in Chapter 8. As he walks his reader through the topic of pain, Maxwell says that, “Pain prompts us to face who we are and where we are. What we do with that experience defines who we become.” (pg. 121)
Referring to bad experiences, Maxwell goes on to note that everyone has them, no one likes them, and that few people turn bad experiences into positive ones. He says that learning from pain is essential for anyone who wants to grow. It’s easy to want the growth but to pass on the pain. Unfortunately, we can’t have our cake and eat it too.
Pain can take many forms and each of us have had, and will have, our own painful experiences that are uniquely ours. Maxwell lists some types of pain that he has personally experienced to illustrate the different forms pain can take:
The Pain of Inexperience
The Pain of Incompetence
The Pain of Disappointment
The Pain of Conflict
The Pain of Change
The Pain of Bad Health
The Pain of Hard Decisions
The Pain of Financial Loss
The Pain of Relationship Losses
The Pain of Not Being Number One
The Pain of Traveling
The Pain of Responsibility
So, we had a bad experience and suffered, now what? How do we grow through it? Maxwell lists five actions we can take to turn our pain into gain. I summarize them here:
1. Choose a Positive Life Stance
What is your overall view of life, society, and the world in general? Do you think that the deck is stacked against you or everyone is out to get you? Are things completely out of your control? Are you a victim? The truth is that we cannot control everything that happens to us, but we can control how we respond. A positive attitude is necessary for growth.
2. Embrace and Develop Your Creativity
Maxwell tells the story of a farmer whose chicken farm flooded every spring, killing his chickens. He griped and complained every year, moaning about why this kept happening to him. He couldn’t afford to keep buying chickens. The farmer finally told his wife that he had had it — he was done. The farmer’s wife responded: “Buy ducks.”
They say that necessity is the mother of invention, but so is pain. Instead of letting a bad experience crush you, find a way to get creative and turn what happened to you into an advantage.
3. Embrace the Value of a Bad Experience
You are going to have problems and go through pain, it is inevitable. Whether you learn from them or not is up to you. The opportunity is there, but you must see it for what it is and embrace the suck.
4. Make Good Changes After Learning From Bad Experiences
Lessons are useless unless we do something with them. Use the emotions you experienced from the pain as the catalyst for change. Then, use your intellect to determine the best choices, and finally, take action. Pain may be the missing ingredient that transforms your situation.
5. Take Responsibility for Your Life
We live in a world of professional victims. Being a victim has become some sort of twisted badge of honor. We must never allow ourselves to wallow in self-pity or to be defined by our failures. Sometimes we go through pain because of our own dumb choices, but no matter what we have gone through, whether self-imposed or not, we all have the opportunity to grow from it. Pursuing growth is a choice, it will not happen by default.
The Problem of Pain
Pain will find us. It is not a matter of if, but when. And when we have a bad experience and pain enters our life it may also be a spiritual wake-up call. C.S. Lewis offers this perspective in his book The Problem Of Pain². He observes that, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” (p. 91)
A few pages later, Lewis continues, “Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us. We ‘have all we want’ is a terrible saying when ‘all’ does not include God. We find God an interruption. As St. Augustine says somewhere, ‘God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full — there’s nowhere for Him to put it.’ ” (p. 94)
If you’re having a rough time right now and are going through some stuff at home, at work, or in your spiritual life, you may be on the brink of quitting. Remember, everyone has bad experiences, no one likes them, and few people turn them into positive ones. Consider these thoughts, change your perspective, and then be one of the few and get up, man, get up.
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- How do you view pain?
- How have bad experiences shaped your life?
- What could you have done to use them as a catalyst for growth?
- Could God being trying to give you something but your hands are full?
- Have you been down long enough, and now it’s time to get up?
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- Maxwell, John C. The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth: Live Them and Reach Your Potential. Center Street, 2012.
- Lewis, C.S. (Clive Staples). The Problem of Pain. Harper One, 2001.
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