You Have to Have Pain to be Beautiful
As a child I had long, brown hair. My Mum used to brush it with a little round plastic brush with black bristles. A 70’s kind of plastic brush and then she would plait it into tight plaits one down each side of my head tightly wound with a bobble. I hated it and when I would complain she would always say the same thing.
“you have to have pain to be beautiful”
Drove me mad, that saying. What did it even mean anyway. You have to have pain to be beautiful.
I think about it now sometimes as I reflect on life, love, work, relationships and growth. You have to have pain to be beautiful meaning that you have to have the pain in order to grow.
I have just completed a session with a coach, the second session of 6 and this one focused on something called a Me Scan, developed by a Dutch company called The True Talent Team, which is another one of those personality, behaviour, strengths type assessments, the latest in a line of them which I have completed and even trained to deliver myself over the years. This one is different though, not just in its underpinnings which are based on Jungian psychology, or its process which is based on words and images, but different because it taps into your subconscious motivational drivers and was so blisteringly and annoying accurate that it took my breath away.
The Me Scan looks at things like purpose, talents, strengths, blockers and how you interact with the world around you. Your shadow sides, the things that you fall into when under stress but are not your best self. The old patterns, those familiar OLD patterns, where they come from and what influences them. Discussion of the results included acceptance, acknowledgement, frustration, tears, excitement, pain, resolution, anticipation, and change. All in the space of an hour listening to someone talk though an assessment which not only highlights what you consider to be your greatest assets, your known knowns but then leads into your internal knowns but external unknowns as in you know these things but hope that no one else notices them, the stuff you battle with, your deepest fears, stuff you might not like or accept about yourself then moves seamlessly onto the things that you may only have a faint sense of knowing, a remembering of a wisp of something you once knew to be true about yourself but lost a long time ago. The icing on the cake is the stuff that you don’t know at all really, but compliments the things you know now to be true and is therefore as useful, if not more, as the confirmation of the stuff you did know already.
You have to have the pain of knowing and then not knowing what to do next with the knowing and working through that to get to the beauty of the plan and goals and targets that will take you where you need and want to be.
My own coaching reminds me of my coaching practice and the people I work with, that initial session where you have that chat, that chemistry conversation about what you want from coaching, what brings you to coaching now and what success would look like. That first session discussion of what success will look like with the nervous, glorious anticipation of finding the answer and the thing that will unlock you, your talent, potential, help you get that next role, move away from a relationship or start a business or whatever the situation that you arrive in coaching with is.
The unlocking and opening of the passenger door so that someone can climb in next to you to see what you see, through your lens, drive alongside you and help you explore new routes, quicker routes, different routes to help you get to your destination. That can look in the rear view mirror to glance at the past to help you make sense of highlights that might be relevant to now but is resolutely, firmly fixed on the future. What do you want, how are you going to get there and when and who could you ask to help you.
It’s a humbling, magnificent beautifulness being a coach but I never forget how hard it can be sometimes to start that journey as a coachee and the pain that can involve. That journey of not knowing and sometimes not knowing what you don’t know but inviting someone else in to sit with the not knowing and help you find your way through and outside of it.
From pain. To knowing. To growth. To beauty.
