Here’s a poster that speaks to the Profitability of Pain. I believe, as leaders, we can often succumb to the misbelief that our job is to protect our followers from pain. However, as we chart out our own lives I believe some insights can come our way.

Imagine if you drew a line and you are crawling as a baby at the beginning and your tombstone’s at the end.  On that line there’s a star indicating where you are in your life.  Then you charted your three to five highlights in your life. The higher the dot above the line, the bigger the thrill of that particular high.  You would also then chart your three to five low points.

You plotted those out and then you wrote above the line and off to the right, “What I learned from my highs.”  There you write out everything that your successes gave you in terms of lessons learned.  Then, below the line and off to the right you wrote “What I learned from my lows,” and you’d write out everything your lows taught you about yourself and about life.

I have yet to see where more wasn’t learned from the lows than from the highs. Anybody who charts this out seems to come to the same conclusions (i.e. the strongest lessons, the lessons that stayed with me the longest, the lessons that went into my long-term memory, the lessons that literally changed my behaviors) came from my lows.

So, for us as leaders to protect our followers from the pain that can change them is to actually do them a disservice. I believe every leader needs to be convinced beyond any shadow of a doubt that there is profit in pain and rescuing their followers from  pain is the opposite of what they want for those followers.

Categories: Empathy

Tags: empathy