BSB 79
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[00:00:00] welcome to the Bitesize Brilliance Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley, and throughout my career in both medicine and a coach, I have occasionally run across people who have particular issues with pain. I'm not talking about physical pain because for a huge chunk of my career, I did work in addiction and pain management.
It's about people who have an aversion to psychological pain. And I can understand why. I mean, none of us like pain, alright? We don't wanna feel it. But there's a difference between someone who doesn't wanna feel it, but is willing to, versus another person who avoids it at all costs. So why is that? Your brain is naturally designed to take you away from pain and toward pleasure.
The problem is that you have three different brains, a logical, emotional and survival, and what's pleasure to one [00:01:00] is often pain to another and vice versa. So it creates this inner conflict that affects our actions and behavior. For example, going to the gym. If you are a couch potato, live a sedentary lifestyle, and you decide to go to the gym after your first workout, you are going to feel pain.
Your muscles have been stretched. You've had muscle fibers, tear. That's how we build muscle. As they tear our body rebuilds them stronger. You bulk up, you get muscle. But if you are a person who is so distressed by the pain of working out, the inconvenience of working out is another form of pain. Making time for it, having to create new habits and let go of old ones.
These are sources of pain too, but if you don't want to go through that pain or any [00:02:00] pain, you're going to stay stuck in situations that actually end up causing you pain anyway. It's just a different kind of pain, and it's a pain that you're willing to go through or settle for. It's weird how we do this as a human and all of us have done it.
I do not know a single human who has not had some pain, whether that's a heartbreak, whether that's a broken bone ever having worked out at the gym, PE class, I mean into each life, a little rain must fall. But if you are terrified of getting wet, you're never gonna go outside. That is the very thing that's gonna cause you to feel more suffering psychologically, emotionally, versus going to do the thing.
And you'll often hear this referred to as like growth mindset or fixed mindset. Those with a growth mindset or who are resilient, which is what I [00:03:00] teach in my Bespoke Brain System, my private one-to-one coaching program, is I do show people how to recognize, is this good pain? Meaning is this a stretch?
Is it a little uncomfortable? Or is this a harmful pain, which is you're going against your own value system, you are creating scenarios that aren't gonna make you happy. And that could be from a lack of self-awareness or lack of self-esteem. So which direction is that pain taking you? And this is a very important distinction.
If you have a growth mindset, the fear, that stretch, this little tiny bit of stretch fear is pain to some part of your brain, to the survival part of your brain. But if you are unwilling or unable to override that piece of you that says, "Hmm, I don't know about this. It may not work. It could be risky, we could fail.
We [00:04:00] could end up all alone". If you're not willing to stretch a little further past that, then it keeps you small. And that smallness is the very thing that can create this emotional pain for yourself. If you feel like you are meant for more, if you let the fear shut you down, versus overriding it, accepting that the stretch is going to be a little painful, that the fear itself is gonna be a little painful, but you trust yourself to handle it. And "on the other side of fear is everything you want" that old saying, or here's another cliche. "The only way out is through". All of these are right, because we need to be stretched as a human for growth.
This is how we learn things. We don't learn by always succeeding all the time. So my clients that [00:05:00] prefer it to be that way, I will often reference science fiction movies because there are so many movies out there about a utopia of existence where we've solved all the biggest things. There's no war, there's no sickness, there's no poverty.
All of these things have been solved, so we should be happy. Right? Well, humans are a quirky little species and that we are actually designed to have a little chaos, and if chaos is not present, we tend to create it ourselves because we need the balance for growth. Just like those science fiction movies where everything is utopia, there's some sort of shady plot line going on where, oh, everything is utopia.
It's because we're all drugged or we've all like lost our free will. We had the pieces of our brain removed. Right? So you find out there's somebody who wakes up from the matrix [00:06:00] and sees the shadiness for what it is. That utopia isn't a real utopia, it's just a facade, a created utopia, and that they have to incite a little chaos to bring balance back.
It's the same way as if you see a big red button that says "Do not push". There are actually going to be very law abiding people who follow rules that will not push it. But there will be some people who cannot help themselves. They're so curious, or little chaos monsters will just cause them to push the button.
It's part of our human nature. So just know that we don't always want peace. We don't always need peace. Sometimes we need chaos to push us farther and faster than we could go at our own leisurely less painful pace. All pain isn't bad pain, [00:07:00] but if you view all pain emotionally as bad pain, you will stay stuck.
That, my friend, is actually more painful to the piece of you that knows that you are meant to be more, to do more, that you have a purpose and you're here to make an impact. At the end of the day, you get to choose your pain. Do you want that to be a pain of growth or the pain of suffering and stuck in smallness?
And at the end of the day, the choice is yours. But if you need a little help moving past this frozen place where you feel stuck or you feel powerless, where you feel afraid and you need a support system or a structure to teach you how to think differently, to feel differently, to re-pattern your thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and actions.
That's what I do inside of my Bespoke Brain System. It is a system that I use to help people [00:08:00] advance in a way that's congruent or in alignment with them and the way they naturally are wired. And if there is wiring that we find any conditioning or programming that's harmful instead of helpful. The brain is beautiful, it's brilliant, and we can split that apart and rewire it with ease.
If you would like to learn more about how the Bespoke Brain System can get you into a place of growth so that you can stretch just a little bit more, then head over to aprildarley.com and schedule a free phone consultation. It's right at the booking tab at the top, and I would love to hear all about where you are in life, give you some structure and some strategy to help you go to the next phase more comfortably in a way that's aligned with you. All right, I'll see you next week, my friends. Bye bye.
