How painful life experiences can shape our passion and purpose
In this episode, Daron delves into the transformative journey of navigating life’s pain to uncover passion and purpose. He explores the challenging process of addressing past struggles by choosing the pain of discipline over regret. Discussing frameworks like the Enneagram and personal stories, Daron emphasizes the power of acknowledging buried pain and transforming it into a source of motivation. He highlights the importance of perseverance and the pursuit of a purposeful and passionate life. Listen for insights on rising above personal challenges to inspire future generations.
Key Takeaways:
⚡️Pain and discipline are pathways to freedom and growth. They shape us and offer lessons that lead to a fulfilling life.
⚡️Addressing and processing past pains can uncover deep-seated passions, allowing individuals to serve with genuine purpose.
⚡️Discipline involves immediate sacrifices but leads to long-term blessings, while regretting past choices can have prolonged negative impacts.
⚡️The journey to living a passionate life involves transforming suffering into perseverance, character, and hope.
⚡️Understanding personal motivations and unique strengths is essential in realizing one’s purpose and making an impactful difference in the world.
Notable Quotes:
⚡️”Pain and discomfort are the environment for growth.”
⚡️”If you don’t like the price of discipline, you’re going to hate the bill of regret.”
⚡️”Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”
⚡️”You’re not going to get out of painful things in life…what you do choose is which kind of pain you’re going to experience.”
⚡️”Who were you before someone told you who you weren’t?”
Episode Resources:
Connect with Daron on Social Media:
Links to the Daron Earlewine Podcast
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TRANSCRIPT
So we have to choose day in and day out. What am I going to choose? A pain of discipline? Pain or regret? And the reality about going back and actually addressing some of the struggles and pains and disappointments of our life in our past is we have to choose the pain of discipline to do that. Created on purpose and for purpose.
Hey, welcome back to the Daron Earlewine Podcast. Daron Earlewine, your host. And we’re bringing the train into the station answering the final fourth and final question of the four core questions. And it is this. Where, where has my life prepared me, shaped me, molded me, maybe even broken me to actually put a place a where a place of passion to serve and to make a difference. Welcome back to the podcast and once again excited you’re here and I want to thank you guys so much. For those that subscribe to the YouTube channel or Spotify or Apple podcasts, wherever you listen, I want to thank you for that.
If you’ve liked this series and you think you know what, thank my cousin, my brother, my coworker, my mom, think she would really enjoy this, feel free to share the episodes. Let us bless other people and awaken them to become what they are born to be. And obviously anybody that adds a subscription to jumps on and subscribes to one of the channels helps it grow and helps it get out to more people. So I want to thank you so much for doing that. I also want to take a minute and thank all of our monthly partners and donors that help make the Dinner line podcast and everything that Blackbird mission does, all of our resources and everything we make happen a reality. I want to thank you so much for your generosity each and every month. For those of you that have just done some one time donations, it makes a huge difference. And if that’s something you might want to do, if the podcast and our resources through books and podcasts and courses and things have added value to your life, you can go over to blackbirdmission.com give and make a one time or a monthly donation and join us in that fashion. It would mean the world to us and I thank you in advance for that.
Okay, so we’re talking about the journey to uncover where to serve with passion in your life. And let’s do a quick recap the four questions we’re answering here. The first one was who am I? We talked about your identity, we talked about your vocation, not your occupation, your vocation. And what is that? That divinely given vocation, right? And the four, the five voices that we unpacked there were pioneers Creatives, connectors, nurturers and guardian. Then we asked the second question is why do I do what I do? Most of the time people are very unconscious and unaware or I think sometimes purposely ignorant of their motivations. They don’t want to know what’s going on in their heart.
They don’t want to know why they are doing what they are doing. Because sometimes it can be scary and a lot of times it means that we have to grow. But we use the Enneagram tool for that. Then we answer the question what. What do I do better than millions of other people? We talked about becoming indispensable to our world. We talked about not settering for mediocre or average, but to become indispensable and exceptional as we steward the gifts of the strengths and abilities we’ve been given. And we use a strength finders assessment for that tool. And now we’re talking about what we call the sessions called Passion and Pain. And I think this session and this question is maybe one of the most difficult, potentially one of the most ignored because. Because who wants to talk about pain? Right? As a type 7 on the Enneagram, I can tell you I don’t want to. I don’t want to talk about pain. I don’t like to look back all that often.
I’m a. I’m a visionary forward thinker. I move through life going forward, looking, you know, to the horizon or above and to come back and be like oh yeah, well that in my childhood that thing I was. That. That sucked. That was really painful. And then yeah, that went into high school. And then those mistakes like, you know, what, what do we gain? What do we gain by. By going and just making ourselves sad.
And here’s what I think we gain. I think we gain healing and we gain freedom. There’s an amazing and what may feel like counterintuitive connection that I feel like I’ve lived in my life that I’ve seen for thousands of other people. And I feel like it’s very well outlined in the scriptures but that healing, freedom and passion actually find their foundations. Pain. I heard a leader say this week he was quoting one of his mentors basically saying that pain and discomfort are the environment for growth.
And that’s an unfortunate truth. I don’t much like that, but I think it’s true. And here’s what I know about you. I know that you are created for freedom. We talk about that a little bit in the transcendent threads that run through the. The operating system of the rogue way. Here at Rogue Collective. And you as a human being, were created for freedom. You were created to be free. And what happens so often in our lives is we experience pain, we experience heartache, we experience disappointment.
And most often what we do with that pain is with that shame, with those disappointments is we bury them. We bury them deeply because we’re afraid and we’re somewhat controlled by shame. That if anyone knows about this pain, if I deal with this pain, I’m going to be rejected. I’m going to be seen as unlovable. These are deficits in my life, not something that could actually be leveraged to find where I actually want to make the biggest impact in my life. But here’s what I want to know about you is it’s only through walking through the valley of the shadow of death that you can actually find your way up on the mountaintop of promise and of freedom. And that’s where you were created to live.
And so we’ve got to dig and ask this question, where? Right where was where? Where’s the pain in my life? And have I done what is necessary to find healing and redemption for that? And are there seeds of understanding, maybe even embers of fire burning under the surface there that I need to revisit and allow them to be stoked to find a place of passion in my life? And the thing about passion, and I share this often, is the Latin word for passion, passeo. It literally means suffering, which doesn’t seem to make sense. Like, when someone says, man, I want to find something that I’m really passionate about. I think what we on the surface think is I want to find something that I have a lot of fun doing.
Which, when you find something you’re passionate about, you do have fun doing it. But if you stop and really look at, like, what is the word saying? What I’m actually saying is, I really would love to find something that I’m willing to suffer for. Does that make sense? And it’s true. I’ve seen this with my oldest son. He’s playing college football up at Ball State University, Had a dream to be a D1 football player. He’s accomplished it, he’s doing it.
And, you know, it has been a absolute constant since he went to college to play college football. Suffering. Their workouts, I wouldn’t want to do them on my best or worst day. Suffering. He had to have two shoulder surgeries to repair torn labrums in his shoulder. Had to be in a sling for six weeks on both of them. On the second one, it was his right arm. So he was, he’s right handed. So for six weeks he was left handed in the middle of the winter, couldn’t wear his backpack and had to pull, you know, a little pole behind backpack as he walked around college campus.
I couldn’t write, couldn’t type like suffering. And why, why is he willing to suffer for that? Because he’s passionate about playing football. And I don’t know, there’s, there’s not, there is no other, there is no other path to finding a life of great fulfillment. If you’re looking for easy, if you’re looking for convenient, if you’re looking for the no pain journey, you’re looking to live a life that is really mediocre.
That’s not a life that you want to write about. That’s not a life that’s going to inspire you as you look in the rearview mirror of your life. And that’s not a life that’s going to set up your kids and your kids kids to say, I want to live a life like grandpa. I want to live a life like grandma. Every person, every story that you’ve read that inspires you, that brings you to tears, that makes you laugh, that says, man, that’s what I want to be about. Guess what the story is. The, the story is someone who had something, they wanted to go after, something bad happened, they had to suffer through it, so they were willing to suffer for it.
And that’s the journey that I want to invite you into. Because most often, right, the place that we find the greatest passion in our life is often associated with a place of great pain. And so we have to find the courage, the resolve to go back and grab that. And the reality about this, I see it happens very early on in our life because as kids we all had dreams. I want you to think about it for a minute. Like, what was your first dream like? Man, when I grow up, I want to be this.
Think about it for a minute. I’ll give you a second. You probably have to think long because you probably thought, oh my gosh, I remember when I was in third grade, all I wanted to be was an astronaut or whatever it was. Here’s the question, are you currently doing that? Most people’s answer is no, okay? And there’s always a story there. And I was watching, I was watching Landman. If you’ve seen that show recently, it’s about the oil industry in Texas and Billy Bob Thornton’s the lead actor in that. And there’s a scene where he’s talking to his son. His son’s trying to figure out what he wants to do.
He’s getting a job with. With the. With the oil company. And actually, I’m going to screw this story up because I can’t remember now that I’m telling the story because it’s not in my notes. I just thought about it. He’s talking to his son or his daughter. He’s having a parental conversation, and he’s talking about people that come out and chase dreams. And he said, here’s the deal. I think he’s talking to his son. Doesn’t matter. He’s talking to his kid and he says, here’s the deal with life. He says, the first dream is always a failure.
It’s what you do after that that really matters. And, man, I push pause as I was watching it, and I wrote that down, and I was like, man, have I freaking lived that reality. If you see, if you see over my shoulder, I’ve got a couple copies of my book, right? The Death of a Dream, Resurrecting Purpose When Life Doesn’t Go As Planned. And that is my life. And my guess is, if we sat down one on one, and maybe you go to roguecollectivecoaching.com and you sign up to get into.
Get into a band with us and get into a coaching group is you have a story, too, and you’re going to say, you know what? The first dream was a failure. And then the conversation will be is, well, what have you done since that? Because there is great hope and momentum. And I find so often that it is the death of the dream that actually leads us into the season, to become the kind of person that is capable of actually accomplishing the real dream that we were put on earth to do.
But we all have dreams as kids. I think it was interesting. I was doing a study on this, and this story is a part of the spiritual DNA content. Sometimes I tell it when we’re doing stuff with Rogue or our work with schools. But some researchers went in and they talked to these kindergarteners. They came into these kindergartners. They asked the kindergarten, hey, how many of you are artists? And 100% of the kindergartners raise their hand. Yeah, I’m an artist, 100%, right?
And if you have little kids, you just go look at your, you know, probably your refrigerator, you have some of their art up, and it warms your heart. But my guess is it’s not selling for much, right? But they were all artists. They went in, in third grade. They Asked the same group of kids, how many of your artists by third grade? 50% of them. Only 50% of them are artists. Now, they went into sixth grade and they asked these same students, how many of you artists in one or two kids raised their hand and the rest didn’t.
And what I think is interesting is that is like, well, what happened between kindergarten and sixth grade? Say, well, Daron, some kids just figured out they don’t know how to draw right? But they didn’t ask the kids in kindergarten, how many of you guys are good at drawing? Well, Daron, probably the art budgets are down and so the school probably doesn’t have a part of pottery wheel where they can throw pottery. Well, when they were in kindergarten, they didn’t ask them how many guys are potters.
They asked me how many are artists. And here’s what I think happens is as we go through life, life beats us down, right? We have failures, we have pain, and we start to lose our capacity and our courage to dream into risk and to be vulnerable in a way that artists have to be. And that doesn’t have to be the case, but so often it is. I just wonder, what kind of beautiful art could be created? What kind of beautiful life could you create if you were to go back and say, you know what, God, I want to heal from the pain of my life so that I can have the courage to dream again, the courage to risk again.
Could you help me find actual purpose in meaning in the things that I’ve suffered through and then help me find a place where I can actually take that passion and be willing to suffer with and suffer for a great cause? And sometimes this is going to be within your career. Doesn’t have to be. Oftentimes it’s going to be outside of it. We talked about, this is not about you finding the best perfect occupation that you love. This is about you finding a place to fulfill your uniquely divine given vocation that you can live with great passion.
You have to get paid for your passion, for it to count. You just have to be living a passionate life. I remember my friend Heather Semple. She’s a great leader, great communicator. She was on the podcast years ago and she quoted, I don’t know if it was original with her or somebody else, maybe ask her the question, but they said this. Who were you before someone told you who you weren’t? And, man, that just landed with me so intensely. Who were you before someone told you who you weren’t? She has this amazing story of this childhood pain trauma right where she’s. She said she had these. I think they were plaid pants or something. She was so proud of them. She felt like she looked. She was looking great, you know, third grade or whatever.
And during recess, she’d climbed up on top of this slide, and with her awesome plaid pants, she’s up, I think, like, teaching and singing. And like, in her imagination, she’s dreaming of all these people that she’s leading and inspiring. And she comes down from the slide and one of the class bullies tells her how stupid her pants look and tells her that girls could never do that and just begins to completely deconstruct this dream she had. And she goes back to this painful moment as a kid on a slide with plaid pants as this moment of man, who was I before that kid told me who I wasn’t, and why in the world did I believe him?
But I believe now she’s in a phenomenal leader, amazing communicator. She is a dynamite human being. And I believe that her soul knew what she was put on Earth to do when she was in third grade. And I think so often what happens in us is those dreams we originally had. There are pieces, there are ingredients within that that are signposts trying to call us into the future that is prepared in advance for us to do.
And what happens is the enemy of our souls, the enemy of our dreams comes in and begins to try to attack and deconstruct and deform our perception of our ability to do that or the worthiness of that dream. And I think that’s where we have to actually get into it and allow that pain to be transformed, to be reformed, and so that it can actually step into the future with us and make it happen. Because here’s the deal with life. It’s painful. We’re not going to get out of painful things in life.
The longer you live, you’re going to realize that you’re not going to get out of pain. But here’s the choice we get to make. We get the choice every single day what kind of pain we’re going to experience more and more. And I remember the first time Pastor Kevin Myers told me this. I don’t know where he got it from. Maybe it’s original with him, I don’t know. But he said there’s two kinds of pain in this life.
There’s the pain of discipline and the pain of regret. Pain is not an option for life, but we do get to decide which one we experience most often, right? Pain of discipline. That’s immediate Pain that’s right now I’m going to choose it right now. It’s immediate, but it’s momentary. I’m going to choose the pain of discipline. It does hurt now, but the good news is this is there’s always blessings on the other side of it, right? We have to embrace that delayed gratification. Says, man, I want to do this or I don’t want to do this, but I’m going to do it anyway because I’m choosing the pain of discipline right now.
Somebody said to me yesterday, I was talking to somebody and they were quoting someone else and they said, man, I heard this quote the other day that they said, oh gosh, I think he said, if you don’t like the price of discipline, you’re going to hate the bill of regret. And I thought, oh, that’s good, right? If you don’t like the price of the pain of discipline, you’re really going to hate the bill that shows up for the pain of regret. Because pain of regret is really long lasting because it’s in the past and it’s tough to go back there.
And it’s much more difficult to go address that pain. It hurts later and it hurts longer and there’s usually a curse on the other side of that. But here’s the thing that we usually choose with the pain of regret is that there’s immediate gratification. It’s eating the entire sleeve of Oreos, right? It’s not getting up and going down and getting on your peloton or going for that walk or taking care of your body because you know what, it feels so good to stay under the covers. Especially in the winter in the Midwest where I live, right? When this morning it was like two or something like that, right? I didn’t want to get up this morning and go to the early morning prayer thing at my church.
It’s actually not my church, it’s another church. But anyway, I don’t want to go there at 6am I don’t want to wake up at 5:40. Right then I didn’t really want to come back and immediately go into my basement and begin working out like all of these. Would have felt way better for me to say, nah, I don’t want to. But guess what I’d experience right now? I’d be experiencing the pain of regret and I wouldn’t be as prepared as I am today to step passionately into the life that I’ve been given to live.
So we have to choose day in and day out, what am I going to Choose a pain of discipline, pain of regret. And the reality about going back and actually addressing some of the struggles and pains and disappointments of our life in our past is we have to choose the pain of discipline to do that. There’s no choice. Well, there is a choice, but not making a choice is a choice in this situation. No, I don’t want to go back and deal with that. Okay, well then what you’re signing up for is the pain of regret for the rest of your life.
What I want to tell you is there is an opportunity to actually step into that pain and have it move from regret to actually motivation. Believe me, I’ve lived it. I’ve lived it. I’ve seen it lived. And it is basically the story arc of the entire scriptures. Father Richard Rohr says this. I remember reading this quote and it stuck with me. And so I added it here to the content. He says this. If you do not transform your pain, you will always transmit it.
Always someone else has to suffer because I don’t know how to suffer. That is what it comes down to. And that is painfully true. I have to learn to transform the pain of my life or else I am going to transmit it to the next generation. I’m going to transmit it to my wife. I’m going to transmit it to my kids. Kids. I’m going to transmit it to my friends. But if I can get to the place of actually trusting that God is forming out against me, he’s near me, not far away, and then he’s created me on purpose and for purpose, I can actually accept his invitation to go back and visit that, to suffer through that.
And when I do, I learn how to suffer, meaning I learned how to live passionately. That’s what I want for you. Okay? And in this process, I want to hit you with this. And we’ll close up the tool that you go through. So when we do this with rogue collective coaching, we do a concept called the Flow Console, where you do a life mapping exercise where you basically just go from birth to day and you above the line, right? You’re drawing great, awesome wins in your life. And underneath it, you’re, you’re, you’re, you know, documenting the pain, the struggles, the setbacks, the disappointments, and just taking a look at the signposts of your life. Parker Palmer says it like this. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I have to listen to my life, tell me who I am.
And that’s that process of going back and looking back, revisiting those so they can be healed, so you can move forward. And then in one of the other portions of the rogue collective coaching, we talk about the pain continuum. And we have a wheel that kind of represents this. And here’s the process. I want to take you through that. I think that you need to go on to see this happen. And it starts when pain enters our life. And the first thing we do when pain enters our life is we bury it.
And my guess is there’s pain in your life. And I don’t know how far it’s buried. Is it buried 6ft deep? Is it buried 60ft deep? Is it buried 6,000ft deep? But we usually bury it. And the first step to actually finding freedom and passion in our life is for us to begin to profess the pain. The scriptures talk about that when we bring things into the light, we actually can find freedom from them. When they’re buried in darkness, they’re secrets, they’re in the shadows. And maybe you’ve heard the famous quote, like, we’re only as sick as our secrets. And what happens is we’ve got to come to the place where we begin to profess that this was here, that this is real.
Sometimes you’re going to need the help of a professional counselor to do that, which is not a shameful thing. It’s a wonderful thing. I love my counselor. Okay? But the first step is we begin to profess it. We own it. Right? Second step in this is we begin to process it. Meaning I’m going to actually begin to dig into it. I’m going to actually begin to be compassionately curious into it. I’m going to wrestle with this pain and to not allow it to be in control of my life.
I process it. The next step is my pain can move from something that I’ve buried, that I hide from that I find shame from where I profess it. I brought it into the light. Right? I’ve looked at it from my perspective, from God’s perspective, from trusted sources. I processed it. And then the amazing thing happens is that the pain that you once buried can actually become a presentation to you, meaning a gift.
And right now you may say, Daron, that’s impossible. You don’t know what’s going on in my life. There’s no way I’m going to look at this and go, well, this is such a gift. I bet you can. Because I’ve seen people go through unimaginable things that none of us would order off the menu of life. And they’ve gone through this Process. And now the thing that caused them great pain is now one of the greatest gifts of their life, because now it has become a present that has moved into a place of passion, right?
Somebody who’s. Who’s dealt with the loss of a child, all of a sudden, now they understand, you know what? There’s nobody better equipped to actually walk with people that have lost children than me. I suffered through that. So I can actually go and be passionate to suffer with someone else and bring. And serve and bring life change. I’ve told you stories about my friend Matt, right, whose daughter suffered through leukemia. She’s in remission now, thank God.
But he suffered through that, and he buried it, and it was wreaking havoc in his life. And what happened was he got through the process of that, and it became a present where he realized, you know what? I’m actually now passionate about helping other dads that have gone through it. We talked about and had him on the podcast, Davy Blackburn, whose wife was murdered in a home invasion. And I don’t know, how do you process.
How do you not bury that pain and just curl up on your couch for the rest of your life? But Davey didn’t. He professed it. He processed it. God brought healing in his life, and now he sees that as a present, because now he has started a ministry called Nothing is Wasted. And he actually is passionate about helping people that have lost loved ones who have gone through all kinds of pain and trauma find healing from that.
And I’d like to think that God’s plan for all of us is just, you know, sunshine and rainbows all day long, cotton candy. It’s just, everything’s wonderful. But if I’m honest, and if you’re honest, I learned very little from the successes in my life. I wish I did. Every great thing I’ve ever learned in my life has been from a growth season that came from pain. And so we can’t hide from it. We got to know we’re not alone in it. Because here’s the beauty of it, is if we can embrace it, if we can profess it, if we can process it, we can become a present that becomes a place of passion where we can serve in our life and actually create the future that brings hope. And how do I know this great wisdom from? The scripture says it this way, that suffering produces perseverance.
I want to be a person who can persevere. Well, how do I. How do I learn how to persevere? I suffer. But when I persevere, what happens? It produces character. In my life, I want to be a person of character. So that means I’ve got to persevere. Because when I become a person of character, it produces hope in my life. And hope always lives in your future. Your future can be full of hope. Your future can be full of passion.
How are you going to get there? You’re going to choose the pain of discipline. You’re going to suffer through the process. You’re going to persevere through it. When you persevere through it, you’re going to become a person who has character that is forged, right, strong, purified. And that character is going to move you forward to create hope in your life and the world around you. And I tell you what, that’s the kind of life I want to live. How about you?
I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’d love to hear what you’re going through. If you want to process this, I need an easy step to kind of, kind of put my toe in the water. Daron, go get my book. Okay. Go to Amazon. Search my name. Death of a Dream. You. You can get it on audio. You can get it paperback. You can get it as a Kindle book. We have a small group study where you get together with four or five friends or however many friends you have, and you can go through and do the small group study or you could get into some coaching with us. You get a counselor. You just reach out. I’ll get you the resources at the best of my ability.
But this journey is worth it and you can do it. And the passionate future of your life is worth it. All right, friends, appreciate you, love you. Thanks for going on this journey with you. With me. If you want to reach out once again. Daron@daronearlewine.com or if you want some coach you want to get in a group, reach out. Roguecollectivecoaching.com appreciate you until we talk again.
Remember, God’s for you, not against you. He’s near you, not far. And he’s created you on purpose and for purpose.