I used to subscribe to the ‘no pain, no gain’ mentality for growing my business. Today I’ll share how I overcame that belief and started developing success with more ease, joy, and creativity. When we seek painful work as an agent of growth, we invite unnecessary struggle into our businesses and lives. Pain can certainly lead to growth, but it can also be an indicator that we’re doing things the wrong way. Let’s stop holding our hands to the hot stove and learn how to reach our goals with less pain and more gains! 

Read the transcript below:

Steve Napolitan: Welcome to More Business, More Life Daily. And today I’m going to talk about when we have that whole saying, “No pain, no gain.” And so many of us believe that, and I did too. And I’m going to tell you how I overcame that and started developing my success with more ease.

So when we talk about this whole idea of no pain, no gain, it’s kind of driven into many of our cultures. It’s not just in the United States, I’ve heard other places as I’ve spoken internationally, other people think the same thing. And it’s this whole idea that most things in our life are going to come through pain. Now can we gain from going through pain? Absolutely. Do we learn from going through those trials and tribulations? Absolutely. Do we have to? No. That’s where the belief comes in and I’ve met many people and even I think I believe that too, if it’s not painful, then I’m not gaining. And in fact, the more painful it is, the more that I’m going to gain. And some of those things can be still true. But the fact that it’s the only way that we gain is not true, that I’ve found.

This is my belief that we can actually grow from ease. And so when we seek pain in order to gain, then that’s where we start making more and more troubles in our life. And so if we truly reinforce and tell our subconscious mind that, “Hey, this is how we gain, we’re going to have to work harder, you know?” So I just noticed that my shirt was unbuttoned. So anyways, so then, and of course I had to fix it while I’m on camera. So let’s just talk about this.

Now what I do in my life, like for me it’s kind of like, let me just use the metaphor if we put our hand towards hot fire, right? Like a fire, like it’s just blazing, like you’re at a bonfire at the beach or you have a fire in your fireplace or it’s your hot stove, whatever you want. You put your hand towards it, your body wants to turn away. Hopefully it pulls away before we touch it, right? It already knows get away from this, but sometimes if you touch it like instantaneous that you want to pull away, it’s a total reaction. This is all of our nerves that are working for us and it’s stopping us from touching and burning ourselves and hurting ourselves. So it’s a mechanism that saves us right? Now if we put our hand on because we’re like, “Ah, I’m going to go through this, I’ve got to go through this pain.”

And then you know, if we use this as a metaphor, then sometimes we’re doing that. We’re putting our hand on the grill, maybe we’re going to say, “Oh, maybe my left hand, that hurts just as bad.” And then we’re putting our hand on there. And if we do it long enough, then what happens is we start to realize that, why are we even doing this? And our hand goes numb because all the nerve endings burn off and we don’t even remember why we were choosing to go down this path. And what I want to encourage you to do now is think of the smaller things in life. Not like burning our hand, but when we don’t feel good about something, when something doesn’t feel right, and this is where we have to start trusting our feelings. A lot of times we get into our head and we start getting overly logical.

And I’m not saying that process and reason are not a good thing. They are. But when we overdo that, then we stop listening to our heart and our intuition and the things that are actually guiding us on a bigger level. And this is very, very important, so we have to start trusting our feelings. Now I have to also discern between comfort zone and our feelings that go with this. Because our comfort zone is when we come up against fear, like of the unknown a lot of times. I noticed that’s the majority of the time. So if it’s something new in my life that I’m not feeling comfortable with, if I feel like not good about it, I have to notice is it because I’m afraid? And if it’s because I’m afraid, then I usually step through it. I’m getting through my comfort zone.

So you have to check in with yourself. But if it’s something that just doesn’t feel good to you, you don’t want to do it, or it’s something that you’re doing and it’s just like a grudge and it’s like, ah, and we’re losing life. We’re losing energy. You know, I talk about energy a lot, then that’s a time to step back and find another way, which we talked about in our last episode. Find another way. Bruce Lee didn’t say no pain, no gain. He says, “Be water, my friend. Be water. Find another way. Go around the rock, go over the rock, go under the rock.” So if you’re bumping up against that rock, you need to stop. The only time we should be breaking rocks in business is if we’re in the mining business, right? Other than that we shouldn’t be breaking rocks. If we come up against a rock, we should find another way. And if you can’t find the other way yourself, then ask for help.

But we don’t have to go through pain in order to have what we want. In fact, you can have a lot of what you want with more ease. So I hope these are new ideas because we’re talking about more business and more life. And in order to have that, we have to have business be easier so that we can have the life that we want as well. And we’re going to keep talking about this through this series, through our daily episodes here on YouTube. I hope you got value from this and if you did, let us know what the biggest eyeopener was in the comments. Please let us know what you’d like to hear on future episodes. We’d love to hear your feedback. If you’re getting value from this, please subscribe. Hit the bell so you get notified when these new episodes come out. I look forward to continuing to serve you and as always, remember, choose gratitude and create freedom. We’ll see you tomorrow.