The 2025 Tour de France has just finished. The riders covered 3338 kilometers and climbed more than 52 kilometers. Not only did the riders cover this distance and elevation gain during 21 stages; they did this while pushing themselves to the limit. The winner—Tadej Pogačar—finished the Tour in 76 hours, and the other riders were just a few minutes behind. The suffering of these riders must have been prolonged and intense.
The sport psychologist Jim Taylor describes the suffering of professional cyclists in his video Why the Tour de France is exclusively for insane people. He describes the way these athletes deal with pain, and pain is the topic of this newsletter. I want to be clear that this applies to pain that we have control over, what follows does not apply to pain that we don’t choose; the physical pain caused by an incurable illness or the emotional pain by the loss of a loved one.
You might wonder why we might choose pain? In endurance sports, pain is an integral part of the activity. We may jokingly say “no pain no gain”, but there is truth in this saying in the sense that training and racing often is painful when we push ourselves. But, perhaps surprisingly, we may also choose pain on an emotional level. For example, we may engage in negative self-talk that lowers our self-esteem and that sabotages our actions. And we can fuel that negative internal dialogue by hanging out with others that affirm a bleak outlook on ourselves and our situation.
In his video, Jim Taylor describes three ways to deal with pain: avoidance, denial, and listening to the pain. Below I describe these three ways to deal with pain, and what that could mean on a mental level.
Avoidance means making sure we don’t experience pain or discomfort. This obviously does not work for athletes; to become faster or stronger we need to work our muscles, which often is painful. On a personal level we may also avoid discomfort, for example by avoiding the discomfort of a difficult conversation that is needed to resolve a festering interpersonal situation. Here is another example, for decades I avoided being on the dance floor because I was embarrassed of being uncoordinated and inelegant. Growth often happens outside our comfort zone, which naturally feels uncomfortable. Avoidance usually cuts us off from growth.
Denial means that we pretend the pain is not there or that we can make it go away. In sports this is not a great strategy because the pain that we deny can grow into an injury. A few years ago, I visited a friend while having back pain. I wanted to “shake off the pain” by going for a run. My friend, who is wiser than I am, shook his head as he saw me hobble away. To my genuine surprise the pain was worse after the run than it was before. On a mental level we do this too. We show behavior, such as procrastination or argumentative conversations, that doesn’t serve us, but we don’t do anything to change that behavior. Denial leads to stagnation and often makes a problem worse.
Listening to pain means using pain as feedback. For an athlete pain contains information. The pain an athlete feels may express tired muscles, but it may also express the protest of a joint or ligament to over-use. Pain that is listened to can tell us how we are doing, and it can be a pointer to improvement. Here is an example on a mental level. Suppose we feel uncomfortable because we don’t trust people we are dealing with. That may point to an inherent lack of our trust which may be due to a past hurt or betrayal, it may point a lack of openness and honesty in our conversations, it may be due to a lack of trustworthiness of others, or we may not live in integrity ourselves. Unraveling these different possible causes may help us deal with our lack of trust.
Effectively dealing with pain and discomfort may also help being effective at work. Suppose, for example, we have recurring conflicts at work. When choosing avoidance, we might steer clear from controversial issues with the result that we shut down and don’t tackle problems that need tackling. When opting for denial we might blunder into conflict after conflict and sour the work environment. Listening to the pain of our conflicts might give us clarity of what is happening. Perhaps we take criticism overly personal and react defensively. We may not know how to have a difficult conversation that helps clear the air. We may be stressed, overwhelmed or overworked, and as a result have a short fuse. Or perhaps we just work in an environment with difficult and unreasonable people, and it is time to look for a new job. Listening to the pain of our conflicts may help unravel the root-cause of our conflicts and correct the situation.
I help organizations and their employees work in harmonious ways by offering workshops and trainings on topics such as activity management, managing emotions, having difficult conversations, or effective negotiation strategies. I also help individuals through life coaching or career coaching. If we are in pain, we’d better use that pain as an avenue for growth and renewal!