What if pain isn’t enough?

I’m a runner. I don’t know what it is about running, but it just takes ahold of some people and won’t let us go. At some point, there’s a leap where it transforms from being painful to being one of the most relaxing activities on earth. The better you get as a runner, the more likely you are to experience that bliss on a given run… but you never actually know.

Something to know about runners: we get hurt a lot. When it’s time to recover? No one wants to get healthy and back to running faster… and that’s when the problems start.

For years, sales has obsessed over motivation. There are shelves of best-selling books preoccupied with the question of how to create enough urgency to motivate the purchase of a product or service. We’ve gravitated over time to the word in the headline: pain. Pain is the panacea for sales, except that’s when the problems start.

For one thing, the shape of pain isn’t the shape of demand. Pain can keep me from running, but it won’t guide me to rehab. Pain is a great communicator of exactly one thing: I can’t go on like this. Ask pain to elaborate, and it says I CAN’T GO ON LIKE THIS. So, many of us live indefinitely with pain.

Demand is different. Demand seeks to alleviate pain with a specific action. It’s the faint scent of a solution somewhere in the air. Demand says something like “there has to be a physical therapist who can help with this.” Demand is the holy grail for a sales organization. There’s nothing better than a motivated person who believes you can solve their problem. That is… as long as you can solve their problem.

Healing is something very different from pain and demand. Healing is precise and comprehensive. It starts with a theory about pain and diagnoses what pain can’t communicate. Then, it verifies the hypothesis of demand: that they can solve something like this. That’s the beginning of the real work. Going to physical therapy doesn’t always mean experiencing healing (trust me). Feeling pain doesn’t mean experiencing healing.

Healing only starts with thoughtful and expert treatment. The best healers know the journey you are on. They identify with the pain and the process. Wanting to get up and running again isn’t the same as knowing how… which isn’t the same as being able to do it. Our buyers follow a transformation from pain to demand to healing, and if you stop anywhere before delivering true results, then pain will take them away from you as fast as it brought them to you.

You can’t heal if you can’t find pain and demand, but you’ll have to “move on to the next town” if your tonics don’t work. Go beyond pain and empathetically know the journey to healing.