Teacher of the Year: Sir Pain

I always thought the idea that you learn more from your losses than your wins was kind of hokey and was whispered by motivational speakers and bosses as a platitude. However, now that I am both, I can begin to see the wisdom. One of the oldest and most efficient teachers all of us have had is Sir Pain. Nothing grabs your attention like pain. Pain can stop you in your tracks, change your direction, change your attitude, remove any signs of depression, and stop your laughing outburst immediately. Sir Pain focuses your attention. As a matter of fact, if the pain is severe enough, it is the only thing that gets your attention. It is the only thing that exists, and if you have read my stuff before, you know I am a huge fan of attention because, quite literally, what you give your attention to you get more of.?

Pain forces you to pay attention to what is going on right in front of you. Without pain or a reason to focus attention, we have a tendency to wander, or attention will flit from subject to object to whim and to fancy. It’s absolutely fascinating when you begin to observe your own thinking and how much you think about and the amazing variety of thoughts you have that are often radically different from each other with only tangential connection. Our minds are strange. But when we experience pain, all of the sudden, our thoughts become singular: how can we stop or prevent the pain? And it becomes the dominant focal point.

But when we win, we celebrate! We reflect on our greatness and how amazing our systems and structures are. We often don’t think about how we can make it better or improve anything; we just look to repeat what works. I know that is not true for all of you. I know that some of you are ultra critical in all that you do and constantly look to improve, but I submit the improvements you are considering are incremental, making the deliverable only slightly better.

But when we miss, we lose the big sale, the big client, or our business partner or our relationship ends suddenly, Sir Pain gets us to pay an immense amount of attention. Our quote “You are the sun and whatever you shall shine upon shall grow” (made famous in the book The Journey, The Evolution of a Financial Advisor) forces us to examine with full attention what is going on, and we try to stop the pain and or prevent it from happening again. When this attention is fully focused, it creates an opportunity for a breakthrough, not just for incremental improvement but exponential improvement.

Wisdom comes from experience, and the above wisdom came to Getting Results from a recent experience with Sir Pain. We recently had a half-day event scheduled with a large group of advisors who work at a particular firm. The event was spearheaded by one of our Champion Relationships who wanted to introduce Getting Results to his colleagues because he was making a lot more money and having a lot more fun. It would be a half-day event during which we would share business-by-design tips we’ve gleaned from 20 years of creating million-dollar-plus producers. Everyone was excited, but then out of nowhere, the firm requested that the event be canceled and that our Champion not share the ideas and principles that helped him be successful with others. I know it's strange, but things like this happen, and I must submit that this was a shock to all of us… especially knowing the impact we’ve had on people from this firm across the country. Perhaps you can be so good at what you do that you become a threat.

Sir Pain hit us hard. This was going to be the first of many of these programs for this firm across the county, and the first got kiboshed!! It was going to help us serve even more people, but the powers from afar crushed it. I could go on a rant about centralized control and how that is deleterious to the future of the company, but that’s another article.

Once the shock began to wear off and attention was on the situation, we began to think, ponder, and reflect. In real life, what actually happened was that I was pretty bummed out about the event cancellation, and I felt our entire business model was under attack. I was not sure how we would come out on the other side. My young daughter saw that I was upset and asked me what was going on. I said, “We got canceled.” So my wife asked her, “What would you do if somebody took away your ability to help people?” She very confidently thought about it for a little while and simply stated: “Find another way.”

Find another way. If you are not thwarted, you do not have to find another way. Sometimes we experience the curse of success, meaning we find something that works and keep repeating it despite its inefficiency.

Find another way. Part of the power of our work is that we help an individual achieve alignment with themselves, their calendar, their clients, and their systems and structures. When you are in alignment, you will go further and faster with less fuel. That sounds like a natural law, but I am no scientist. I do know that if you remove friction, you increase velocity. We also help people really understand that high levels of performance occur because of slight edges not Herculean effort, ability or intelligence, and if you can figure out what your slight edges are, you play at an advantage. We usually deliver this message in the form of a coaching intensive, but that got canceled.

Find another way: The pain of this event made us ponder how we can deliver this message but not be in the same room. I know some of you know the obvious answer, but to us it was a revelation. Film the damn thing! Through filming, suddenly we have a scale that we did not have before, so instead of getting our message of hope and growth to 20 people, we can now share it with 2,000.

Pain makes you pay attention. If we had not been canceled, we would have gotten a flood of business from the event and that flood would have absorbed much of our attention and we would have never enhanced our systems. Now we will enhance the systems and get an even bigger flood of business, which will cause more pain somewhere to get us to pay attention again and the cycle continues! LOL

Business is a game that can never be won, only played. But if you enhance the player, the game itself improves. But you still can’t win. Shrug Atlas shrug, and don’t be so serious. Take advantage of Sir Pain when he makes himself available to you because improvement is on the other side.