The elite don’t tolerate pain best, they do this.

The people who go furthest—in sport, business, or life—aren’t the ones who tolerate pain best. They’re the ones who understand it.

Here’s something I’ve learned the hard way: you can’t master what you refuse to study.

And pain is everywhere. Not just in elite sport. Not just in leadership. It shows up in nearly everyone’s life, most days. Subtle or overwhelming. Physical or emotional. Stress. Loneliness. Self-doubt. Rejection. Fatigue. These are all forms of pain.

And yet we rarely study it—despite the fact that it shapes how we think, act, and decide.

High performers—the people who rise consistently—aren’t just students of their craft. They’re students of pain. They understand it as deeply as they understand strategy, systems, and skill. Because they’ve realized something most people haven’t: Pain isn’t something to ignore. It’s something to listen to. When you learn how to listen to your pain and make decisions based on what it tells you, you get better.

That shift in thinking ultimately changed the way I approached my sport and business career, my body, and my decisions.

The first time I really studied pain wasn’t during Olympic training. Back then, I understood pain the way a ten-year-old understands gravity—it was just something that was there. Pain was inevitable, and I had to deal with it. Simple as that.

In the early days of building Classroom Champions, I started thinking more about pain and the role it plays in our lives. As I sat alone at a desk, sending unanswered emails, watching my bank account dip, and trying to build something from scratch, it started to dawn on me: If you want to do something meaningful—build an organization, a career, a legacy—you have to become a student of pain.

Not because pain is noble. But because pain is data.

In 2003, neuroscientist A.D. Craig reframed pain as a "homeostatic emotion"—not just a warning system, but an evolved biological tool designed to help the body self-regulate. Pain is built into our source code. From an evolutionary standpoint, that makes sense: pain wasn’t just meant to stop us from repeating injury and keep us safe. It evolved to trigger behavior that restores balance. It’s not just about avoiding harm. It’s about guiding action—which is why it shows up not only when something’s wrong, but when something important is changing.

Yet not all pain is truly dangerous. Often, it’s necessary. If we want to grow—to lead, to push into unknowns—that wiring can become a barrier instead of an asset. 

So what is pain, actually?

Pain is a signal. It’s your system’s way of saying something’s off, something’s unfamiliar, or something might need your attention. And that signal—whether it comes through a pulled muscle, a failed pitch, or a conversation that didn’t land—is interpreted the same way by your brain.

When pain shows up, your body reacts fast: muscles tighten, cortisol spikes, working memory shrinks, and your mind starts scanning past experiences to try to predict what happens next.

Pain narrows us.

Its wiring tells us: Focus. Be careful. Pull back.

The research backs this up. In 1999, psychologists Eccleston & Crombez introduced what they called the “interruptive function of pain.” Their study showed that pain hijacks attention. It forces you to drop long-term goals and focus on whatever the system believes is most urgent.

And that urgency isn’t just physical. In 2003, Naomi Eisenberger and colleagues published a study in Science showing that social rejection—being left out—activates the same regions of the brain as physical injury. 

And before some of you think I’ve gone fully “woke” (you know who you are!)—social rejection interpreted as pain goes back thousands of years. If we were banished by our tribe and left to face the ancient world alone, our chances of survival were slim. This was fully bred into us.

Pain is pain. Your body doesn’t care whether it came from a sprained ankle or a hard conversation. It reacts the same way.

This is why people avoid discomfort. Not because they’re soft, but because their systems are working exactly as designed.

But here’s the key: if you don’t understand how pain works, it controls your decisions. 

On the other hand, if you understand it, you can start to shape your response. 

You can gain control and start to move the levers of your own algorithm instead of allowing the external world to drive your engagement. You can learn to see pain for what it is. You can train to interpret it, instead of being ruled by it.

That’s where the idea of becoming a student comes back in.

In the early 2000s, researchers James Gross and Oliver John defined the emotional process of positive reappraisal, off the earlier research on cognitive appraisal by Lazarus & Folkman in the 1980s on stress and coping. Positive reappraisal is about the ability to reinterpret pain and discomfort—in the moment—to generate a better outcome.

Their studies found that people who consistently use reappraisal are more emotionally resilient, better at relationships, and more effective under stress. They’re not immune to pain—they’re fluent in it. 

Now, when I look back on my life and all the big things I accomplished, I see a common thread: the moment I stopped seeing Pain as a red flag and started seeing it as a feedback loop, things changed.

Things changed in bobsled when I realized a tight muscle wasn’t always a threat—but a signal to adjust my warm-up, my breathing, or my mechanics.

Things changed in leadership when I realized that the stress I felt before board meetings wasn’t a sign I was failing, but a cue to revisit the goal and prepare with more clarity.

Things changed in therapy when I realized that emotional pain wasn’t a detour from the work—it was the work.

But here’s the nuance. Studying pain doesn’t mean pushing through everything.

Sometimes, the pain IS the stop sign. 

Sometimes, it’s information telling you to yield. To rest. To adjust. To walk away.

The key is knowing when to listen to pain, and when to listen through it.

And you only learn that by paying attention. By practicing. By studying. And then by recording your results like any good researcher—a researcher of your personal pains.

The leaders, athletes, and entrepreneurs I coach who learn to treat pain as a moment of inquiry rather than avoidance? They make better decisions. They recover faster. They build more sustainable systems for themselves and their teams.

You don’t need to be perfect. You don’t need to be pain-free. You need to be precise.

Because growth isn’t clean. It’s messy. And pain is part of the terrain.

But if you learn to understand it—really understand it—you don’t just get through it. You get better because of it.

And that’s the part most people never study.

Keep going, 

Steve

PS - shoutout to Eliud Kipchoge’s epic video talking about pain on Instagram and his approach to it that inspired this piece.

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I just watched the Arthur Brooks clip, now bring me back where I left off, Steve!