A short spoken monologue by Chad Silverstein encouraging leaders to accept pain and make difficult decisions rather than complain. He emphasizes reframing situations, using simple decision exercises (pros/cons), seeking feedback from mentors or coaches, and cultivating the discipline to stop catastrophizing and act.
Chapters
I find myself in pain a lot, personally and professionally. Life is hard, and you have to learn how to embrace it. Embracing situations where you have to make a decision, and depending on the choices that you have, one's worse than the next. You have to get comfortable being uncomfortable and embracing the fact that you've got to make tough decisions. And if you're in a position to make a tough decision, the longer you delay that, the more stress and the more anxiety it's going to cause. Building the skill to make a choice, make a decision. That's an important skill for leaders to have. There's no one way to do it, and it's not easy. But if you slow down and stop catastrophizing and take out a pen and paper and make two columns and put out all your pros on one side and put out all your cons on the other, and you study what you're seeing, something should become glaringly obvious than what you should do. And sometimes it takes just a few minutes to be able to do an exercise that simple. So compare the good and the bad and to see which one you can live with, even though they both might be bad. And embrace the fact that, one, you're in a position to make that decision. And two, you'll probably learn something from it, and it's probably for your benefit whether you can see it or not. And one day you'll probably be able to look back at and see it, but right now, maybe you can't. And so you have a choice. And your choice is whether or not you should embrace it or complain about it. And I gotta tell you, I can't stand when people are just complaining about situations that they can't change. Because here's the facts. You can't change a situation that you're dealing with unless you actually make a decision and change it towards a path that you want. You have a choice. Your choices have consequences. You can't change certain situations that come up. So you can either complain about it or you can embrace is a choice. And how you think about it, how you frame it in your head, has everything to do with how you're going to feel about it, and then what you're going to go do about it. And so being able to reframe the situation, being able to see it from a different angle, a different perspective, sometimes is all you need in order to completely change the situation and the outcome, how we think about things. So if you are negative and you complain, guess what? You're gonna get more of exactly what you don't want. So build the discipline to have some awareness of reframing a situation when things are tough. And embrace pain and suffering. Embrace having to make tough decisions. Stop complaining, Step up and understand that you have more control over how you think about a situation than you believe. And that will have a lot to do with how you behave and have a huge, huge impact on the outcome of whatever it is that you're dealing with. This is where it's important that you don't go about it by yourself. This is why it's so important to have a truth teller, a coach, a mentor, a someone who loves you, who can help you see things that you can't see, and illuminate that blind spot, help you see it from a different perspective. Typically, when you have someone give you a breakthrough, it's because they help you see something that you couldn't see before, and that seems to somehow change everything. And everybody's experienced that. And if you've experienced that, that just means that that can keep happening, which should tell you something that you know. Not as much as you think you know. We know nothing. We think we know, but that doesn't make it so. Make sure that you have some awareness of where you are. When you have a really difficult situation that you're dealing with, make a conscious decision to embrace it. That's a principle that you can have. Catch yourself when you're complaining, have people hit you and give you feedback. Nobody wants to be around a complainer. And be careful about what you're planting in your head, negative thoughts and positive thoughts, because again, that will have a huge impact on your behavior and the outcome of whatever it is you're dealing with.
