15. GROWTH + PAIN

When’s the last time you thanked your pinky?  The one on the hand that you write with?  Though I suggest it often from front stage during keynote speeches, I confess I don’t offer gratitude to my pinkies often. 

And then last Sunday…

I was doing a little spring cleaning and walked from one room to another holding a coffee maker.  I tripped. The full weight of my body and the coffee maker smashed into my pinky, breaking the bone at the tip and damaging the nerves.  I was flooded with, um…gratitude.  Throbbing, instantly purple, and rapidly swelling gratitude.  And nausea.

A week out, I can bend my little finger, I’ve learned to type without using it, and I can nearly grip handles without wincing.  As that pain has subsided though, a new sensation is building.  Most of the day, it feels like there’s a tourniquet cutting off circulation for my pinky and I have jolts of what I can only describe as electricity shooting from pinky to elbow.  I have a constant “pins and needles” feeling. It’s a bother and it’s uncomfortable, but this is the feeling of nerve damage repairing.  It turns out, nerve regrowth is undeniably good AND unpleasant.

Hmm.

What difficult, tingly, uncomfortable sensations are YOU feeling as you heal from damage?  What growth feels like pain? 

As we go through life’s most difficult and unavoidable challenges, we experience pain and growth all at once.  You know the drill.  “What doesn’t kill us…” 

Here’s my recipe for finding the advantages to a painful experience:

PAIN:   Take this moment to identify your pain—really call it out.  Get crystal clear.

NAME:   Name the emotions you’re feeling—all of them.  What do these feelings tell you about yourself and your experience?

REFRAME:   Expand perspective to find additional ways to see the challenge.  In my example, let’s consider the pain a sign of growth and healing.

GAIN:    Make a list of the advantages coming from this painful growth experience.  What have you learned?  How are you kinder, wiser, and even more loveable than before?

I fully understand the gift of my right pinky and all of the strength and dexterity jammed into the tiny package.  I appreciate all the kind gestures of support and assistance from my family—lifting this, opening that—it’s an opportunity to remember the little ways we show love to one another every day.  I’ve got renewed clarity that growth and pain go hand in hand. It still hurts. It’s still uncomfortable. AND, there are advantages to the experience.

So if today is a challenge and you feel like you’re smashed under the weight of a grown woman and a coffee maker, remember this:  We grow through what we go through.  Every time. 

I pinky promise.

Rachel