General Info - Upskill to Own

"When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." This is such a common saying that people utter it without actually thinking about the meaning behind it. Yet, their wisdom reminds us that as human beings, we either grow or wither. The mind is a muscle that must be exercised daily to keep it sharp. Any event in our lives can trigger growth, though it is when we are least comfortable that we grow the most if we choose to make the most of the experience. Hurt can take many forms, whether a professional event such as not getting the desired promotion or being sidelined on an important project due to a scheming colleague, or a more personal event such as a divorce or a death in the family. Men and women have been socialized differently to respond to various scenarios, such as aggressiveness in career growth and the response to setbacks in life. These emotions can cripple your growth in the long run, especially if you end up falling into a depression or state of exhaustion and sorrow. If the hurt is deep enough, there is a real chance that you get mired so deep that you cannot escape the prison of your emotions. Facing our emotions Being a leader means being able to set aside your personal emotions and make decisions based on the best outcomes for your colleague or team. If unattended, small hurts can become large and sway your decision-making abilities either towards becoming too lenient, damaging to your hard-working colleagues or too negative, damaging to the colleagues needing extra support. A simple trick to managing emotions is not to bottle them up, allowing them to fester under your skin until they erupt at the worst moment, but rather to face the pain head-on, facing them and taming them. When emotions start to well up, the best is to simply take out a pencil and catalog them on a piece of paper, briefly exploring their origin, why you are feeling them and what they represent. By examining each emotion in turn, you can tame that emotion and understand it and what prompted it. By isolating each emotion, you can overcome each individually and stop them from overwhelming you as a group. Mastering our hurt Some emotions just cannot be escaped and need a distinctive focus to master them. Loss, sadness, and grief are all understandable and relatable. Hurt, though, is in a special category. Hurt is the one emotion that can cause us to lash out and which threatens to master us. By focusing on the roots of the hurt, it is possible to expunge it from our psyche, to break its power over us. Were you unfairly accused of impropriety? Did it trigger thoughts of revenge or paranoia as you desperately try to find the culprit? Why waste energy on these activities? Why risk a public lashing out at a random moment when you can explore the root cause of the hurt and develop a deeper understanding of yourself, the other party, and the situation? Why not use kindness, compassion, and patience to set the hurt aside and embrace the other party? Hurt versus loss Sometimes the hurt we feel is more a sense of loss, maybe the loss of a loved one or the loss of innocence or sense of belonging. This is a different kind of hurt, one over which one has less control, but the reward of managing the situation is exponential growth. Loss is part of life, a very big part of life, and yet, so little is taught about how to accept loss. The most important part of loss in the grieving process that allows you to come to terms with the situation. Loss comes with a sense of powerlessness, yet loss can be the biggest empowering emotion. "There is more to life than winning, there is also losing." Losing something or losing at something is always bad. The difference between a normal person and a hero is that the hero picks himself up, dusts off the hat, and strides purposefully forward. The measure of a man is how they deal with loss. Loss is a special hurt requiring a robust response. Were the events predictable or controllable? If so, then why not put yourself in a positon where you will not experience the loss again? For example, if you lost an opportunity due to a lack of experience, why not explore online training courses or asking to shadow your role model for a while? Were the events random? Then the best you can do is simply shrug them off, giving your emotions the space to run their course while not letting them affect whom you are. Framing hurt In the end, hurt is only damaging if we misrepresent what the hurt means in our lives. Do we want to shut down for a decade while we grieve the loss of a partner, or do we attack life with zest and fervor, making our very existence an ode to our partner? The biggest reward comes to those who learn to acknowledge their innate viewpoints, biases, and trigger responses, reframing this lens to include the others around them. This lens is how we as humans interact with hurt and synthesize it into growth or true hurt. Choosing to use hurt to become a better person, reviewing the circumstances that hurt us to understand how one should respond better in the future. Pain as a catalyst for change. Pain is a catalyst for personal and spiritual growth. Pain allows us to learn how to endure, to strive for inwards peace and enlightenment, for peace, calm, and comfort from within, and to understand that we have the required resilience to overcome. Ironically, it is only in this pain that we make these discoveries of our own internal reservoirs. Pain forces us to change, to find peace and calm within, and separate it from the chaos without. Once we overcome pain, we realize that this too can be born and overcome. Pain also gives us the empathy required to understand our colleagues and to resonate with them when they are struggling. Through our shared "pain experiences," we can lead with kindness and compassion as we can understand what the other is going through. Pain guides us and toughens us up, armors us against future setbacks, and gives us the mental strength to overcome and to know deep down that "tomorrow is another day." It is ironic that it is pain and hurt that teach us to be complete human beings, to be satisfied with whom and what we are, or to improve ourselves until the moment when the pain recedes, and we are that person. Where personal growth may seem to be "just too much effort," once the alternative is pain, new energy and time can be found, and a renewed hunger for improvement and self-sufficiency can be fed.