Chad Silverstein explains why leaders should choose acute pain, the short-term discomfort of confronting problems directly, over chronic pain, the ongoing misery of avoiding them. Physical rehab, team conflict, breaking ruts: the uncomfortable stuff now prevents worse suffering later.
Chapters
At Build to Lead, we talk about chronic pain and acute pain. And it's a really important concept to understand because the strongest leaders, the leaders who are becoming built to lead, they are able to endure pain and they're able to kind of accept that challenge of being tested when the storm hits and put themselves through acute pain. Acute pain, meaning like right now, right here, to avoid more chronic pain. So if you're normal, you probably have things in your life right now that are chronic. They might be physical. Back pain can be a complete chronic pain that people live with their whole life. And again, on the physical sense, just like our strong core and our six pack, on a physical sense, the acute pain is going to rehab. You know, it's going in there and it's pushing through it. And the reason that you do rehab is so that you can get rid of the chronic pain. And so in the figurative sense, you know, it's the same thing. If I have pain on my team, if I have pain with another person because there's conflict and I have this chronic nagging issues that I just would rather suppress and not deal with because it's easier to not deal with them, then you are choosing chronic pain and you're choosing long term chronic pain. And that's really hard to choose acute pain because that means that you're going to have to do something really hard and you're going to do something really uncomfortable. But it's a choice, you know, and we say in build to lead, your choices have consequences and they do. And if you choose not to do anything right now, that's going to put yourself in some acutely painful scenario because it's easier to not deal with it. Then you're just going to have to accept the fact that you're, you're choosing chronic misery, that unfortunately it's inevitable that like it's going to come to a head at some point. So a lot of times the acute pain isn't as hard as you think it is. We tend to catastrophize it in our head because we're scared of doing whatever it is that we don't want to do and that we've been avoiding. But the truth is the only way to really grow is to actually put yourself in acute pain. It's like not waiting until you have chronic pain and you realize you have it. It's actually saying, you know, where do I want to get better? And then putting yourself in the acute pain so that you one don't even have to experience chronic pain. But more importantly, so you can grow, so you can kind of shoot up that trajectory of like, how far you're going to climb up the hill. And you have to be able to choose the unfortunate suffering up front if you want to lead anything. And if you don't, you're just going to wait for it to hit you. And that's why we have to build a strong core, because you have to be ready for that stuff, because it comes out of nowhere. It just sort of hits you, and you have to be prepared for it. So you got to think about where you need some. Some acute pain to plug into your life so that you can bubble up or recognize where there's chronic pain. And now understand that it's going to take you to have to do something really hard to get out of the chronic pain. And if you're not sure because you haven't even thought about it, well, this is a good time to start. And a lot of times when people feel like they're in a rut, a lot of times when they feel like they're just in Groundhog Day, where it's just like every day is the same thing. Get up, go to work, come home, go to bed, be with family. Like, it's just the same thing. And you feel like you're. You're stalling, you're idle. That is a time to really recognize that something needs to change. And in order to something to change, it's usually acute and painful, and that's usually what kind of gets you out of it. And so you have to recognize where that might be, maybe emotionally, spiritually, physically. It could be anywhere in your life. So where does that chronic pain live right now? What type of acute pain can you walk into? And this is worth spending some time and writing about. And so the most important thing is you understand the difference between acute and chronic pain, figuratively. And then you do something about it.
