On Unwanted Feelings: Pain

Lean in, embrace the suck, fuck your feelings — if you’re looking for a stick to beat yourself up with you need never look far, but I have yet to see management advice that suggests it might be helpful for us to more fully feel the pain we experience in our professional lives. There’s nothing inherently wrong with capitalizing our pain for the promise of some future payoff. The problem is that what begins as an intentional decision to trade off present pain for future reward too easily becomes a numbing and forgetting of what pain feels like entirely.