Use Your Pain As A Stepping Stone To Success

Often when this occurs, people get stressed. With stressful or disappointing situations, people react differently. Some people become passive while others become overly aggressive, and there are some who just shut down altogether. Major disappointments can result in personal and professional disharmony, causing our productivity to slow, and our enthusiasm and momentum to diminish. The pain from disappointment can be destructive.

During these times, it is important to stop worrying and to utilize your energy to focus on working to your full potential.

Last year, the Miami Heat was destined to defeat the Dallas Mavericks only to lose in the NBA finals four games to two. Highly scrutinized and criticized, following that loss, the Heat had a difficult year. Their coach, Erik Spoelstra, said, "Nothing worthwhile is easy." The Miami Heat endured a lot of pain and disappointment following the defeat to the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA finals last year. When asked how he built a will to win, Chris Bosh said, "going through the bad situations and having all summer to think about ifs and would'ves and could'ves and should'ves and just living with that gut-wrenching pain every single day."

How often do we not succeed and continue to beat ourselves with recurrent "would'ves" and "could'ves?"

We all have experienced pain and disappointment. It does not feel good, but we must learn to use our pain as a steppingstone to success. In order to be effective in using your pain as a steppingstone, you must:

1. Focus on your goals. Reaffirm your goals on a daily basis. Use positive affirmations to reinforce your goals.
2. Commit to excellence. Like Dwyane Wade of the Miami Heat who focused on improving his strength and stamina, we must stay strong physically and mentally in order to overcome disappointments.
3. Execute our plan. Just like it takes a plan to win a NBA championship - it also takes a plan for us to accomplish our goals. Coaches often use diagrams to illustrate how players should execute the next play. We must also have a written plan in order to achieve our goals. We must write down our goals and have a specific action plan to execute each goal.

When we accomplish the steps of focusing on goals, committing to completing them, and executing our plan, then we will be able to effectively use our pain as a steppingstone to success.

Dwyane Wade has also indicated that he had pain, hurt, and embarrassment from their loss last year. It appears that the PAIN from defeat caused many of the Miami Heat players to be motivated to work hard and to accomplish their goal of winning an NBA championship.

This year, the Miami Heat is the NBA Champion. From their story of defeat to triumph, we learn the importance of utilizing Pain in an effective way to succeed. How easy it would have been for the team to stay miserable and have another painful defeat. Likewise, with our disappointments, we can choose to remain miserable, or work diligently to solve the problem. We too must use our pain and disappointment to motivate us rather than to destroy us. This will allow us to use our pain as a steppingstone to success.

My prescription for dealing with defeat, use your pain as a steppingstone to success.

Featured on NBC, ABC, FOX and CBS, Winifred Bragg, MD is a keynote speaker, author and physician.

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Seen on ABC, NBC, Fox and CBS, Dr. Bragg is a nationally recognized speaker on the topics of success and leadership mastery. Her keynotes, breakouts and programs are particularly geared for university students, corporate leaders and women's groups.

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