Choose your pain
There are several people I follow who talk about “choosing your pain”. Which, in its essence, boils down decision-making to choosing which outcome and its consequences that you can best live with. Every decision we make has an outcome, and every kind of outcome has pros and cons (and those cons include pain). Hence…whatever choice you make, with the expected associated outcome, has pain. So we are, therefore, choosing our pain with any given choice we make.
So I started to wonder – why do we think there is some choice that avoids pain entirely?
Take hard conversations, for example. Lots of people avoid these. They find them awkward, scary, sad, tricky, disappointing…so they avoid them, thinking they are avoiding pain. Instead, they feel the hard feelings of not being heard or understood or considered or cared for instead of the feelings that come with the conversation. There is pain on both sides of that equation. We’re just choosing a certain type of pain.
Which got me thinking…what is there to learn about myself based on the type of pain I keep choosing over other types of pain?
I started looking at various choices I make, and the associated pains, as well as the options I DON’T choose, and the pains associated with THOSE choices. And I noticed something interesting.
I choose pain that only really results in pain to myself. If it creates pain with or for others (even if I am also feeling the pain), I opt for the pain that is only in my sphere.
You could probably look at this and say, Gee, that’s noble. And maybe it is. (And maybe I’ve hidden behind that sometimes). But maybe it’s also cowardly – that taking on all the discomfort myself means I avoid the harder things and to prevent myself from even having to try to deal with the hardest things.
It’s certainly not a path to growth.
So maybe that will be something I allow myself to factor into my next choices. Am I making the bravest choice? Do I have enough courage to take on the hardest things in service of the best outcome?
I guess we’ll see…
