Does pain have a home on your team?

I spent many years as a leader avoiding my own pain and trying to create the illusion of a pain-free team.  I constantly thought about how to keep everyone’s focus on how well things were going, and ensure that my leaders were responding immediately to even the smallest challenge team members were facing - lest their experience become painful in some way. 

It helped me create a team culture that was very “positive.”  I’m not sure it helped me create a team culture that was very safe.

When we try to make all the pain go away, we end up trying to control things out of our control, disempowering people, and creating the conditions for people to hold back instead of being honest about the range of human emotions that we all experience.  Not to mention, it’s stressful as hell for the leader to try and control all that.  

More importantly, is it even true that “pain is bad?”  Such a simplistic idea seems to ignore some powerful realities, such as:

• Pain is what allows us to feel empathy.  In some ways, it’s the foundation of kindness.

• Pain is our bodies and hearts telling us that something is not working for us, and it can point the way forward.

• We can’t understand or appreciate true joy without knowing pain.  And as long as we love, we will experience pain.

I’m certainly not trying to suggest that we go from “pain is bad!” to “pain is good!”  I’m suggesting that the only true reality might be: pain is both important and inevitable.  It doesn’t necessarily mean that we (or the people we lead) are broken and need to be fixed.  The only thing it means for sure is that we’re human and alive.  

To what extent - personally or professionally - have you internalized some version of the idea that pain is bad?  What if you saw your job (with yourself AND the people you lead) as creating a safe home for pain to exist, where pain doesn’t have to make us feel isolated but can become an opportunity for deeper connection and empathy?  When we can notice our knee-jerk reactions to pain and slow ourselves down, maybe we can give ourselves and the people we lead something so much more meaningful than a reframe or a quick “fix.”  We can give them a place where our pain is accepted, connects us as humans, and guides us as leaders.