Mental, emotional, physical.

All forms can be a catalyst for incredible transformation.

Sometimes, the pain is loud and demands our attention. An emotional event, a fight, harsh words, the damaging of the body.

Sometimes, pain is just an underlying, shameful hum in our daily lives. Consider even something as simple as always feeling self-conscious about your body or whether you’re “good enough” in general. That’s all still pain.

So much of it sits unresolved and avoided because it’s easier to numb and look away.

But, if we acknowledge it and use it, we can turn those pains into remarkable progress.

Something to always remember:

“The body is slow, but the mind is fast.”

When we decide we need a healthier and stronger body, that will never happen in an instant. It takes time. Work is put in. Healing is involved. Patience is required. The body responds through consistent action, behavior, and choices.

But the mind…we can change important parts of the mind immediately through decision.

Not a hope and a prayer and a “maybe one day”.

It may take time or a solid low point to reach a place where you can make a choice, but once you’ve made that concrete decision within yourself…it’s done.

It demands discipline.

It’s not that any of this is easy.

It just…is.

You tell yourself what will be and what will not be. What you will do and what you will not do. What you will allow and what you will not.

It’s not “I want”. It’s not “I wish”.

It’s “I will”.

Once you truly decide, the change can occur in an instant. Influencing all your future actions from that point forward.

To make your pain a catalyst:

• Acknowledge what the pain is. Ask yourself questions about why it’s there and how it got there.

• Have compassion for yourself whether it stems from an outside source or if you’ve created it on your own.

• Find a supportive person in your life that you can share this information with and allow them to nudge you back on track when you need it (and there’s a high probability that you will need it).

• Ask yourself what actions or thought patterns need to change for this pain to be addressed.

• Decide to do those things.

Re-decide to do those things every day if you need to.

The body will always be slow, but the decisions to create change will not.

The shifting of our mental patterns can be met with heavy resistance and it won’t be perfect (because perfection doesn’t exist), but the decision to change will always happen in a single moment.

The concept of simply deciding is not a new one. It’s spoken about by everyone from the ancient Stoics to Tony Robbins.

All the more reason to acknowledge how powerful the concept is and to deploy it ASAP.

It works.

So, take a moment today and locate any nagging pains you might have living in the wheelhouse of your own control.

If you could remove them, why wouldn’t you?