25. Pain vs. Suffering: The Leadership Skill No One Talks About
As women in leadership, especially in male-dominated spaces, we face unique challenges that can trigger painful emotions like disappointment, frustration, and feelings of being overlooked. But what if I told you that pain isn't something to avoid—it's actually essential to your growth as a leader?
In this episode, I explore the critical distinction between pain and suffering. Pain is inevitable when you're pursuing ambitious goals, but suffering is the optional story we attach to that pain. When we avoid pain through distraction, blame, or denial, we actually create more suffering for ourselves and limit our leadership potential.
Join me this week to learn practical strategies for embracing pain as a catalyst for growth rather than something to fear. By learning to process your pain, you can build extraordinary resilience that sets you apart as a leader. This isn't just about surviving difficult moments—it's about transforming them into opportunities for deeper connection with yourself and greater effectiveness with others. The most powerful women leaders don't avoid pain; they learn to move through it with purpose.
Whether you're leading a team, making big bold decisions, or tackling tough conversations, confidence is the key to showing up powerfully. That's why I created the Confidence Hack, a simple yet powerful tool that has helped tons of women just like you break free from limiting beliefs and step fully into their potential.
Click here to download the Confidence Hack for free now!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
How to distinguish between inevitable pain and optional suffering in your leadership journey.
Why trying to avoid pain actually creates more suffering and limits your potential.
How emotional resilience directly enhances your critical thinking and decision-making abilities.
Why pain is actually a doorway to greater aliveness and intelligence.
The importance of normalizing pain as part of leadership growth, especially for women in male-dominated spaces.
My 5-step framework for processing pain without getting stuck in suffering.
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Full Episode Transcript:
If you're an ambitious woman with big dreams, you will feel pain. Whether it's disappointment, frustration, or perceived failure, it will come. But here's the thing. Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
In today's episode, I'll show you how embracing your pain, rather than avoiding it, can actually make you a more resilient, more powerful, and more resourceful leader. And I'll remind you that this isn't just true for women in male-dominated spaces. It's a universal truth for all of us. Let's dive in.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey podcast listeners, I have a very special episode for you today. We are talking about how pain is an inevitable part of life, but how suffering is optional. And I think that this is a really important episode for women leaders in male-dominated spaces because women, if you have decided to be a leader in a space where there's mostly men, you are going to face a lot of barriers, a lot of obstacles, and a lot of pain that comes with pushing for leadership roles.
You might feel dismissed, diminished. And I teach my clients, and I want to teach you, the difference between pain and suffering. This is something that I also had to learn on my journey to leadership and in life in general.
We're mostly focused on the professional world here, but this can be used for any parts of your life because as a woman with big dreams, whether you want to get married and have kids or lead a huge team, you're going to feel some sort of pain because this is the price you pay to play it big. I often tell women that I coach that are really shifting from either individual performers or managers to the VP level or to the C-suite level, that you're going to feel many more emotions.
And a lot of those emotions may be negative, will probably be negative, because you're not going to have as many people saying to you, you're doing an amazing job. They're going to expect you to do an amazing job. They're going to expect you to deal with complexities.
And you're going to need to learn how to affirm yourself and take care of yourself more and more because as a leader, you aren't really able to look to other people to affirm you. But if you can look towards yourself and be with the pain and understand it and not be in the suffering, then you will thrive. You will actually accelerate, and you will grow, and you won't feel burnt out, and you won't feel exhausted.
So this episode is for you if that is, you know, where you're moving. But just for you to know in general, being a woman with big dreams and a big life, pain is going to come. Pain is part of life.
So, let's talk about the difference between pain and suffering as we dive in. Pain is a natural response to challenges and setbacks. Suffering is the mental and emotional struggle we attach to it. So sometimes the way I like to explain it is that suffering is staying attached to the story around the pain versus just feeling the pain.
So I'm just going to say that again one more time because I think sometimes people are like, what's the difference between pain and suffering? So, what I've come to is that suffering is staying attached to the story around the pain. There's some sort of story, there's some sort of narrative that you're attaching to, that actually doesn't help you to just experience the pain. It's more like the logical part of your brain is working to tell you a story versus another part of your brain and body that's actually processing and allowing yourself to be with the pain.
Pain is part of the growth process, especially for women in leadership. And acknowledging that we all feel pain and just normalizing it can help you understand, you know, what you're going through. So whether you're leading teams, striving for success, or juggling personal ambitions, pain is just part of it. So it's okay to feel the pain.
And it's how we know what matters to us. And moving through it is really the part of the process that a lot of people don't know how to do, because in our world, we might not have a lot of people that are able to experience pain in a way that helps them feel more resourceful, more powerful, more resilient. So this a lot comes back to who was surrounding you.
And if you're somebody like me who didn't have a lot of family members or network of people in corporate growing up or didn't have people to talk to them about emotions, you might feel alone in it. But here's the thing, you're not alone in it, and it's totally normal to feel pain and to feel frustration and to feel anger and to feel disappointment.
And what I'm going to go through today is talking about the role of pain in leadership. And then I will share with you the importance of not suffering through pain. And I'll also give you some examples of my clients and myself and how we've used pain to empower ourselves, to show up even more resilient. And then I'll give you some practical steps to deal with pain as you're on this journey to have a relationship with pain.
So let's start off with just understanding the role of pain. And listen, if you're also listening to this and being like, I don't feel pain, I don't know what you're talking about. I want you to just think about pain as any type of hurt, upset, fear that you might be having, frustration. Maybe it could be lack of recognition.
Maybe you open up your team meeting and you realize that everybody's late and nobody's on time, and there's a little ouchie and pain with that. A lot of times when people can't associate with pain or don't see pain in their lives, it's because they avoid it. So this is just an opportunity for you to listen and see what comes up for you if you feel like you don't really know what it means to identify with your pain.
But let's dive in and as you start engaging with yourself in a more curious way, I promise the pain or the upset or those emotions are going to come up because you are allowing yourself in a safe space to look at your emotional landscape. So, let's first talk about pain in leadership.
Pain is a natural part of pursuing big dreams and leadership. An analogy is like pregnancy. You have this big dream to have a baby, and it's a painful process. Your body expands, all this stuff happens. Of course, a lot of people are like, it's a beautiful thing. It's like so natural.
Well, it may be natural, but your body is actually going through a lot. And birth and delivery itself is a huge transition. And then having the baby is another huge transition, right? But I think in our culture, there's a way where positivity overrides pain, and that is actually at a disservice to us, you know, the people experiencing life.
So ambitious women will experience pain, whether it's disappointment again from some unmet expectation. Maybe somebody promised you a promotion or they promised to sponsor you, and then they left the company. Or maybe you didn't get recognized for a big project you did, and actually your male counterpart got recognized.
So you want to notice how that disappointment shows up when things don't go as planned. Noticing the resentment, noticing feeling misunderstood or overlooked, especially in a male-dominated space. Finding out that all of the members of your leadership team got invited to a golfing event and you didn't. Or even facing tough criticism. Somebody telling you that your leadership is not up to par and that you need to work on it.
Having pushback when you are speaking up for things. This pain is part of the fight, is part of the learning, is part of table stakes for wanting to be at the adults' table. This is part of it, and learning how to be with that pain is going to set you apart from the women that are suffering and exhausted and don't ever want to go into a highly political environment or really worried about people with certain personalities because they make that the reason that caused their pain versus just dealing with the pain and learning the skill sets to deal with those people.
So when I'm coaching women, I often times tell them that learning how to be with your emotions is the first step to building emotional resilience. And as you build emotional resilience, you also build the ability to see things more expansively and to see complexities in a different way and to see these inner office dynamics. So I won't call them political, but there are games that people play at this level.
And often times when women are just experiencing it for the first time, and they're it's like their first rodeo, they think there's something wrong with them, or they think there's something wrong with the culture. So if you're not just sitting with your pain and learning about it, often times people go to blaming others. So this is the part where the suffering happens.
So suffering, again, like I say, is optional, but it's when we avoid or deny the pain, when we create unnecessary suffering. So again, something happens at work. Maybe we were promised a promotion and it didn't happen because we got a new boss who doesn't like us and actually undermines us every corner that we're going.
So, you know, maybe you are like this. You blame yourself. I did something wrong. I didn't show up in some way. I didn't create this relationship that I needed to. So there we stick with that pain story that we're somehow broken or a victim. Or we push it externally. We blame it outside and we say, this is the person that is causing all of my pain and frustration.
This person, this dynamic, maybe it's a merger and acquisitions that's happening, like something external to us is causing us this pain. So instead of dealing with the pain, we focus on the story about the pain and the people that are causing it. And again, we hold resentment or frustration, and this weighs us down.
Our ability to be engaged and activated with our pain actually helps us to connect with ourselves deeply. And when we can connect to ourselves deeply, we are able to connect with other people, and we're better able to emotionally regulate ourselves, which helps us with our critical thinking, our prefrontal cortex thinking. Versus when we are sitting with heavy feelings, resentment, frustration, it's holding us down, it prevents us to move forward. All of our power is stuck in either blaming ourselves or blaming other people.
And so when our emotions are high like that, again, our critical thinking, our resourceful thinking is low. So how being with the pain instead of avoiding it? And here are other ways that people avoid. They avoid through going on vacations. They avoid through drinking, through drugs, through sex, through engaging in ways of escaping your pain. So instead of actually just dealing with the pain, if you dealt with the pain, you could actually grow your resiliency to pain and grow yourself. Embracing that discomfort, feeling the emotions, expressing them and moving on.
This skill is truly table stakes for women in leadership. The more we avoid pain, the longer we stay stuck, the more we suffer. We need to feel the pain, process it, and let it fuel us instead of hinder us. This is a leadership skill no one at the top is talking about, but it's the key to your long-term success, especially being a woman in a male-dominated space.
So I want to share some examples of what it looks like to feel the pain, move through it, and to take ownership of it, to learn from it. Before I dive into those stories from my clients and from myself personally, I want to share that I was on a trip in Mexico City, and we went to the famous artist Frida's house. And I remember reading about how she experienced pain.
She had a lot of pain in her life. And she didn't talk about pain as something that caused her to be broken. She actually talked about it as kind of like transformative. Like pain is transformative. And she talked about how when she experiences pain in life, it's like a flowing river. So it's always moving and it's always changing and it's not holding her back. That is how she described pain.
And even as she famously talks about life and all of her experiences, both physical pain, she had a really bad injury that she grew up with, that, you know, happened on the bus when she was like, I think she was like a teenager. She also had a lot of emotional pain with her relationships. And so she talks about pain as more like aliveness, like being alive to them.
And I think it's an important aspect because often times in our society, we're always being sold to be positive, to think positively, to be grateful, and to almost fear pain, to almost fear that experience of pain and aliveness in us. It's almost like our society is like, don't feel pain, just feel the good stuff. And what actually happens is it holds us back from truly living, from truly experiencing life because if you're so scared of pain, you're not going to take those risks that allow you to feel alive, that allow you to open yourself up to possibilities.
So this is a quote from Frida. “Pain, pleasure, and death are no more than a process for existence. The revolutionary struggle in this process is a doorway open to intelligence.” So my question to you is, what if just like pleasure, we opened up ourselves to feeling pain? What if we allowed ourselves to feel that pain and be with that pain versus the story about the pain or the story about what's causing us pain or attaching to all of that other stuff?
What if we allowed that pain to come in? And often times when we allow pain to come in, we're opening ourselves to more experiences, more possibilities, and even more pleasure. Often times people are scared to celebrate or to really be alive to their pleasure because they're expecting some sort of pain to happen later, you know? And they are like, I can't deal with it. So let's not celebrate too much because it's scary and I can't handle it, right? Which is total opposite of emotional resiliency.
So I'm going to actually share a story about my client that I'm currently coaching and talking about how she showed up with her pain in leadership and instead of getting attached to the setback or the disappointment and suffering, she actually took ownership and responsibility. So not just reacting to the situation, but being with the pain and then consciously choosing how she wanted to react.
So what actually happened with her is she joined a company, and like many people, they join a company, they're very excited, and then they realize that the leaders in the company aren't what they thought that they were going to be. And she is really in the midst of it, midst of all of these political games that are happening, a lot of things that are, you know, happening not the way that she expected. So a lot of pain coming up.
And what actually happened was her boss reached out to her team members and said, I want you guys to fly here. You know, they are like across the country and he was like, I want you to all fly here to California and spend the day with me talking about product. And unbeknownst to her, she didn't know that this was happening, and she actually heard from her team members.
They're like, hey, he reached out to us, should we go? And she felt incredible pain and upset and rage. Like, how could he just do this? He didn't ask for my permission. He is undermining my leadership. He's reaching out to my direct reports. He's having them fly across the country. He's not even letting me know. So there was upset and she allowed herself to feel it. Really getting angry in her body, upset, hurt, also sad, fear, like all of the emotions.
That is pain. So she felt all of those things, and she sat with it. She didn't go and take action. She didn't run into his office and yell at him. She didn't reprimand him. She sat with that. And she felt the pain, and she experienced it. And what she did next was that she decided. She decided that, you know, let's go ahead and have that meeting. I'm going to show up. I am the leader of product, and I'm going to show up.
And that's actually what she did. She became resourceful. She told her team members, fly out, I'll be there. She was there. She didn't mention all of this stuff to her boss. She didn't engage in these political games. She just showed up and did her job and felt super proud and empowered in herself.
And she had the pain with her. The pain was part of it. You know, it wasn't in the driver's seat. She was in the driver's seat as the leader that's resilient and resourceful, but she had pain, and she had access to other emotions too. And she was deeply connected with herself, but also deeply connected to purpose.
She does want the best for this company. She does want her team to succeed. She wants herself to succeed. And so she showed up. And I actually shared with her, like, you're a force to be reckoned with. She's not going to allow anything to hold her down. She's not going to allow pain to define her. Pain is just something she felt. And she didn't allow suffering to hold her back.
She was like, I am focused. I'm going to do what I set out to do. So, again, she showed up more assertive, more authentic in her communication, in what mattered to her, and she moved straight ahead without suffering, without staying in the drama of the story. So this is really the power of processing pain and being with it.
An example for me is, you know, when I have gone for things as a leader, when I've come up with a strategy or a plan and I've shared it with people. And, you know, you want to celebrate those times, of course, when people are like, that's a great idea. But when people blow it away, you feel pain. It's hurtful. It's upsetting. You're like, I spent hours on this presentation, and nobody likes my idea.
But then sitting with the pain and the more I sat with the pain, the more I could shift towards more clearly thinking about it, not from a worthiness standpoint for me or making me bad or wrong, but more from a standpoint of what was missing in a really neutral way. What was missing? But I can't move to that until I sit with the pain and I experience it and I'm alive to it and I connect with myself and take care of myself in it.
This is really the part of the pain that is important. We need to take care of ourselves so we're not leaving ourselves behind when we are out there doing big bold things in the world. Let me share these practical steps to start dealing with pain and emotions as they come up.
First, you want to acknowledge and feel your emotions. I have a whole episode on that that I'll have the people put in the links for the show notes. Don't suppress or ignore pain. Let yourself feel it. It's okay to be upset. It's okay to be disappointed. It's okay to be frustrated.
Often times I tell my clients, you have a lot of heavy feelings. I want you to write it all down or I want you to be able to write all of your thoughts down and really acknowledge yourself and notice your disappointment and be with it.
The next piece is expressing it in a healthy way. Talk to someone you trust. Journal about it. That's just part of that exercise of writing it all down or channel the pain into a creative or productive outlet. I have been to anger gyms where I yell and scream. I've been to the boxing ring where you can punch it out. You want to have these outlets for you to discharge that pain.
This is the third step, discharge the pain. Engage in activities that allow you and help you release emotional tension, whether it's through physical movement, breath work, or meditation. You want to have some things in your back pocket to be able to discharge the pain.
And then lastly, this is from the point of feeling emotionally regulated and grounded, reframe the experience. Shift from a mindset of this is happening to me to this is happening for me. What lesson can you extract from the pain? What lesson can you teach yourself? How can you still be on your own side in that pain? And then what do you need to do to show up with this pain and still be big and bold and brave in the world?
So don't let that pain keep you stuck. The fifth one is keep going. Keep moving towards your goals, learning from each experience and building resilience. This is how you build resilience. You allow yourself to feel the pain. You acknowledge it, you express it, you discharge it, you reframe the experience, and you keep going. That is the process.
And the more you practice this, the more you embody this, the more powerful of a leader you will be, and the more resilient you'll be, the more resourceful you'll be. So I urge you to practice these steps and see how it lands for you.
But it's so important to embrace that pain is part of the journey and to normalize it, especially for women striving for leadership roles. I want to hear your stories of pain and resilience. And I want you to create space for yourself and other women in leadership to be able to experience this.
I'd love to hear what you think about this episode and how it's impacting the way that you're showing up for yourself and for your world. When you start allowing pain to be part of your experience and not allow suffering to be your main experience, this is going to really open up for yourself this next level of leadership.
So if you're a woman navigating pain in your leadership journey, remember, you don't have to suffer through it, and you're definitely not alone. There are women feeling pain too, and it is normal, and it is natural. And I'm here to help you build resilience and step into your power.
If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review and share your thoughts. And if you're ready to take your leadership to this next level and you want support and you want to have accelerated support and growth in learning this skill, reach out to me about coaching. Let's walk through the pain together and come out stronger on the other side.
All right, have a great week, everyone, and I will see you soon.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
In today's episode, I'll show you how embracing your pain, rather than avoiding it, can actually make you a more resilient, more powerful, and more resourceful leader. And I'll remind you that this isn't just true for women in male-dominated spaces. It's a universal truth for all of us. Let's dive in.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey podcast listeners, I have a very special episode for you today. We are talking about how pain is an inevitable part of life, but how suffering is optional. And I think that this is a really important episode for women leaders in male-dominated spaces because women, if you have decided to be a leader in a space where there's mostly men, you are going to face a lot of barriers, a lot of obstacles, and a lot of pain that comes with pushing for leadership roles.
You might feel dismissed, diminished. And I teach my clients, and I want to teach you, the difference between pain and suffering. This is something that I also had to learn on my journey to leadership and in life in general.
We're mostly focused on the professional world here, but this can be used for any parts of your life because as a woman with big dreams, whether you want to get married and have kids or lead a huge team, you're going to feel some sort of pain because this is the price you pay to play it big. I often tell women that I coach that are really shifting from either individual performers or managers to the VP level or to the C-suite level, that you're going to feel many more emotions.
And a lot of those emotions may be negative, will probably be negative, because you're not going to have as many people saying to you, you're doing an amazing job. They're going to expect you to do an amazing job. They're going to expect you to deal with complexities.
And you're going to need to learn how to affirm yourself and take care of yourself more and more because as a leader, you aren't really able to look to other people to affirm you. But if you can look towards yourself and be with the pain and understand it and not be in the suffering, then you will thrive. You will actually accelerate, and you will grow, and you won't feel burnt out, and you won't feel exhausted.
So this episode is for you if that is, you know, where you're moving. But just for you to know in general, being a woman with big dreams and a big life, pain is going to come. Pain is part of life.
So, let's talk about the difference between pain and suffering as we dive in. Pain is a natural response to challenges and setbacks. Suffering is the mental and emotional struggle we attach to it. So sometimes the way I like to explain it is that suffering is staying attached to the story around the pain versus just feeling the pain.
So I'm just going to say that again one more time because I think sometimes people are like, what's the difference between pain and suffering? So, what I've come to is that suffering is staying attached to the story around the pain. There's some sort of story, there's some sort of narrative that you're attaching to, that actually doesn't help you to just experience the pain. It's more like the logical part of your brain is working to tell you a story versus another part of your brain and body that's actually processing and allowing yourself to be with the pain.
Pain is part of the growth process, especially for women in leadership. And acknowledging that we all feel pain and just normalizing it can help you understand, you know, what you're going through. So whether you're leading teams, striving for success, or juggling personal ambitions, pain is just part of it. So it's okay to feel the pain.
And it's how we know what matters to us. And moving through it is really the part of the process that a lot of people don't know how to do, because in our world, we might not have a lot of people that are able to experience pain in a way that helps them feel more resourceful, more powerful, more resilient. So this a lot comes back to who was surrounding you.
And if you're somebody like me who didn't have a lot of family members or network of people in corporate growing up or didn't have people to talk to them about emotions, you might feel alone in it. But here's the thing, you're not alone in it, and it's totally normal to feel pain and to feel frustration and to feel anger and to feel disappointment.
And what I'm going to go through today is talking about the role of pain in leadership. And then I will share with you the importance of not suffering through pain. And I'll also give you some examples of my clients and myself and how we've used pain to empower ourselves, to show up even more resilient. And then I'll give you some practical steps to deal with pain as you're on this journey to have a relationship with pain.
So let's start off with just understanding the role of pain. And listen, if you're also listening to this and being like, I don't feel pain, I don't know what you're talking about. I want you to just think about pain as any type of hurt, upset, fear that you might be having, frustration. Maybe it could be lack of recognition.
Maybe you open up your team meeting and you realize that everybody's late and nobody's on time, and there's a little ouchie and pain with that. A lot of times when people can't associate with pain or don't see pain in their lives, it's because they avoid it. So this is just an opportunity for you to listen and see what comes up for you if you feel like you don't really know what it means to identify with your pain.
But let's dive in and as you start engaging with yourself in a more curious way, I promise the pain or the upset or those emotions are going to come up because you are allowing yourself in a safe space to look at your emotional landscape. So, let's first talk about pain in leadership.
Pain is a natural part of pursuing big dreams and leadership. An analogy is like pregnancy. You have this big dream to have a baby, and it's a painful process. Your body expands, all this stuff happens. Of course, a lot of people are like, it's a beautiful thing. It's like so natural.
Well, it may be natural, but your body is actually going through a lot. And birth and delivery itself is a huge transition. And then having the baby is another huge transition, right? But I think in our culture, there's a way where positivity overrides pain, and that is actually at a disservice to us, you know, the people experiencing life.
So ambitious women will experience pain, whether it's disappointment again from some unmet expectation. Maybe somebody promised you a promotion or they promised to sponsor you, and then they left the company. Or maybe you didn't get recognized for a big project you did, and actually your male counterpart got recognized.
So you want to notice how that disappointment shows up when things don't go as planned. Noticing the resentment, noticing feeling misunderstood or overlooked, especially in a male-dominated space. Finding out that all of the members of your leadership team got invited to a golfing event and you didn't. Or even facing tough criticism. Somebody telling you that your leadership is not up to par and that you need to work on it.
Having pushback when you are speaking up for things. This pain is part of the fight, is part of the learning, is part of table stakes for wanting to be at the adults' table. This is part of it, and learning how to be with that pain is going to set you apart from the women that are suffering and exhausted and don't ever want to go into a highly political environment or really worried about people with certain personalities because they make that the reason that caused their pain versus just dealing with the pain and learning the skill sets to deal with those people.
So when I'm coaching women, I often times tell them that learning how to be with your emotions is the first step to building emotional resilience. And as you build emotional resilience, you also build the ability to see things more expansively and to see complexities in a different way and to see these inner office dynamics. So I won't call them political, but there are games that people play at this level.
And often times when women are just experiencing it for the first time, and they're it's like their first rodeo, they think there's something wrong with them, or they think there's something wrong with the culture. So if you're not just sitting with your pain and learning about it, often times people go to blaming others. So this is the part where the suffering happens.
So suffering, again, like I say, is optional, but it's when we avoid or deny the pain, when we create unnecessary suffering. So again, something happens at work. Maybe we were promised a promotion and it didn't happen because we got a new boss who doesn't like us and actually undermines us every corner that we're going.
So, you know, maybe you are like this. You blame yourself. I did something wrong. I didn't show up in some way. I didn't create this relationship that I needed to. So there we stick with that pain story that we're somehow broken or a victim. Or we push it externally. We blame it outside and we say, this is the person that is causing all of my pain and frustration.
This person, this dynamic, maybe it's a merger and acquisitions that's happening, like something external to us is causing us this pain. So instead of dealing with the pain, we focus on the story about the pain and the people that are causing it. And again, we hold resentment or frustration, and this weighs us down.
Our ability to be engaged and activated with our pain actually helps us to connect with ourselves deeply. And when we can connect to ourselves deeply, we are able to connect with other people, and we're better able to emotionally regulate ourselves, which helps us with our critical thinking, our prefrontal cortex thinking. Versus when we are sitting with heavy feelings, resentment, frustration, it's holding us down, it prevents us to move forward. All of our power is stuck in either blaming ourselves or blaming other people.
And so when our emotions are high like that, again, our critical thinking, our resourceful thinking is low. So how being with the pain instead of avoiding it? And here are other ways that people avoid. They avoid through going on vacations. They avoid through drinking, through drugs, through sex, through engaging in ways of escaping your pain. So instead of actually just dealing with the pain, if you dealt with the pain, you could actually grow your resiliency to pain and grow yourself. Embracing that discomfort, feeling the emotions, expressing them and moving on.
This skill is truly table stakes for women in leadership. The more we avoid pain, the longer we stay stuck, the more we suffer. We need to feel the pain, process it, and let it fuel us instead of hinder us. This is a leadership skill no one at the top is talking about, but it's the key to your long-term success, especially being a woman in a male-dominated space.
So I want to share some examples of what it looks like to feel the pain, move through it, and to take ownership of it, to learn from it. Before I dive into those stories from my clients and from myself personally, I want to share that I was on a trip in Mexico City, and we went to the famous artist Frida's house. And I remember reading about how she experienced pain.
She had a lot of pain in her life. And she didn't talk about pain as something that caused her to be broken. She actually talked about it as kind of like transformative. Like pain is transformative. And she talked about how when she experiences pain in life, it's like a flowing river. So it's always moving and it's always changing and it's not holding her back. That is how she described pain.
And even as she famously talks about life and all of her experiences, both physical pain, she had a really bad injury that she grew up with, that, you know, happened on the bus when she was like, I think she was like a teenager. She also had a lot of emotional pain with her relationships. And so she talks about pain as more like aliveness, like being alive to them.
And I think it's an important aspect because often times in our society, we're always being sold to be positive, to think positively, to be grateful, and to almost fear pain, to almost fear that experience of pain and aliveness in us. It's almost like our society is like, don't feel pain, just feel the good stuff. And what actually happens is it holds us back from truly living, from truly experiencing life because if you're so scared of pain, you're not going to take those risks that allow you to feel alive, that allow you to open yourself up to possibilities.
So this is a quote from Frida. “Pain, pleasure, and death are no more than a process for existence. The revolutionary struggle in this process is a doorway open to intelligence.” So my question to you is, what if just like pleasure, we opened up ourselves to feeling pain? What if we allowed ourselves to feel that pain and be with that pain versus the story about the pain or the story about what's causing us pain or attaching to all of that other stuff?
What if we allowed that pain to come in? And often times when we allow pain to come in, we're opening ourselves to more experiences, more possibilities, and even more pleasure. Often times people are scared to celebrate or to really be alive to their pleasure because they're expecting some sort of pain to happen later, you know? And they are like, I can't deal with it. So let's not celebrate too much because it's scary and I can't handle it, right? Which is total opposite of emotional resiliency.
So I'm going to actually share a story about my client that I'm currently coaching and talking about how she showed up with her pain in leadership and instead of getting attached to the setback or the disappointment and suffering, she actually took ownership and responsibility. So not just reacting to the situation, but being with the pain and then consciously choosing how she wanted to react.
So what actually happened with her is she joined a company, and like many people, they join a company, they're very excited, and then they realize that the leaders in the company aren't what they thought that they were going to be. And she is really in the midst of it, midst of all of these political games that are happening, a lot of things that are, you know, happening not the way that she expected. So a lot of pain coming up.
And what actually happened was her boss reached out to her team members and said, I want you guys to fly here. You know, they are like across the country and he was like, I want you to all fly here to California and spend the day with me talking about product. And unbeknownst to her, she didn't know that this was happening, and she actually heard from her team members.
They're like, hey, he reached out to us, should we go? And she felt incredible pain and upset and rage. Like, how could he just do this? He didn't ask for my permission. He is undermining my leadership. He's reaching out to my direct reports. He's having them fly across the country. He's not even letting me know. So there was upset and she allowed herself to feel it. Really getting angry in her body, upset, hurt, also sad, fear, like all of the emotions.
That is pain. So she felt all of those things, and she sat with it. She didn't go and take action. She didn't run into his office and yell at him. She didn't reprimand him. She sat with that. And she felt the pain, and she experienced it. And what she did next was that she decided. She decided that, you know, let's go ahead and have that meeting. I'm going to show up. I am the leader of product, and I'm going to show up.
And that's actually what she did. She became resourceful. She told her team members, fly out, I'll be there. She was there. She didn't mention all of this stuff to her boss. She didn't engage in these political games. She just showed up and did her job and felt super proud and empowered in herself.
And she had the pain with her. The pain was part of it. You know, it wasn't in the driver's seat. She was in the driver's seat as the leader that's resilient and resourceful, but she had pain, and she had access to other emotions too. And she was deeply connected with herself, but also deeply connected to purpose.
She does want the best for this company. She does want her team to succeed. She wants herself to succeed. And so she showed up. And I actually shared with her, like, you're a force to be reckoned with. She's not going to allow anything to hold her down. She's not going to allow pain to define her. Pain is just something she felt. And she didn't allow suffering to hold her back.
She was like, I am focused. I'm going to do what I set out to do. So, again, she showed up more assertive, more authentic in her communication, in what mattered to her, and she moved straight ahead without suffering, without staying in the drama of the story. So this is really the power of processing pain and being with it.
An example for me is, you know, when I have gone for things as a leader, when I've come up with a strategy or a plan and I've shared it with people. And, you know, you want to celebrate those times, of course, when people are like, that's a great idea. But when people blow it away, you feel pain. It's hurtful. It's upsetting. You're like, I spent hours on this presentation, and nobody likes my idea.
But then sitting with the pain and the more I sat with the pain, the more I could shift towards more clearly thinking about it, not from a worthiness standpoint for me or making me bad or wrong, but more from a standpoint of what was missing in a really neutral way. What was missing? But I can't move to that until I sit with the pain and I experience it and I'm alive to it and I connect with myself and take care of myself in it.
This is really the part of the pain that is important. We need to take care of ourselves so we're not leaving ourselves behind when we are out there doing big bold things in the world. Let me share these practical steps to start dealing with pain and emotions as they come up.
First, you want to acknowledge and feel your emotions. I have a whole episode on that that I'll have the people put in the links for the show notes. Don't suppress or ignore pain. Let yourself feel it. It's okay to be upset. It's okay to be disappointed. It's okay to be frustrated.
Often times I tell my clients, you have a lot of heavy feelings. I want you to write it all down or I want you to be able to write all of your thoughts down and really acknowledge yourself and notice your disappointment and be with it.
The next piece is expressing it in a healthy way. Talk to someone you trust. Journal about it. That's just part of that exercise of writing it all down or channel the pain into a creative or productive outlet. I have been to anger gyms where I yell and scream. I've been to the boxing ring where you can punch it out. You want to have these outlets for you to discharge that pain.
This is the third step, discharge the pain. Engage in activities that allow you and help you release emotional tension, whether it's through physical movement, breath work, or meditation. You want to have some things in your back pocket to be able to discharge the pain.
And then lastly, this is from the point of feeling emotionally regulated and grounded, reframe the experience. Shift from a mindset of this is happening to me to this is happening for me. What lesson can you extract from the pain? What lesson can you teach yourself? How can you still be on your own side in that pain? And then what do you need to do to show up with this pain and still be big and bold and brave in the world?
So don't let that pain keep you stuck. The fifth one is keep going. Keep moving towards your goals, learning from each experience and building resilience. This is how you build resilience. You allow yourself to feel the pain. You acknowledge it, you express it, you discharge it, you reframe the experience, and you keep going. That is the process.
And the more you practice this, the more you embody this, the more powerful of a leader you will be, and the more resilient you'll be, the more resourceful you'll be. So I urge you to practice these steps and see how it lands for you.
But it's so important to embrace that pain is part of the journey and to normalize it, especially for women striving for leadership roles. I want to hear your stories of pain and resilience. And I want you to create space for yourself and other women in leadership to be able to experience this.
I'd love to hear what you think about this episode and how it's impacting the way that you're showing up for yourself and for your world. When you start allowing pain to be part of your experience and not allow suffering to be your main experience, this is going to really open up for yourself this next level of leadership.
So if you're a woman navigating pain in your leadership journey, remember, you don't have to suffer through it, and you're definitely not alone. There are women feeling pain too, and it is normal, and it is natural. And I'm here to help you build resilience and step into your power.
If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review and share your thoughts. And if you're ready to take your leadership to this next level and you want support and you want to have accelerated support and growth in learning this skill, reach out to me about coaching. Let's walk through the pain together and come out stronger on the other side.
All right, have a great week, everyone, and I will see you soon.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
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