Don’t play me out of this grand final.
“There is pain, there is one who witnesses pain, and there is the one who acts.”
After years of coaching high-achievers through burnout, anxiety, and overwhelm, I’ve realised that the ability to bounce back isn’t a rare super-power reserved for a lucky few—it’s an ordinary, deeply human capacity we all carry inside us.
Most of us act as if we like a fragile china cup when in fact we are more like an unbreakable diamond.
When we run into psychological pain, we tend to identify with it, we are stressed, we are overwhelmed, and we are burned out. Unknowingly, we create an identity. Mindfulness teaches us that we aren’t our thoughts, our feelings or our pain. The key to Anti-fragility is realising there is one who witnesses pain, and there is the one who acts. If we identify with the pain, the ego moves to protect itself, and we become fragile, but if we step into witness of the pain, we can learn from it and even use it.
During a session at the Pathfinders retreat, a client shared the story below. I wanted to share this with you because it's an example of how one can tap into their capacity not only to endure pain, but also to use it to drive us forward.
Within the opening minutes of the 1970 grand final at the SCG, before 53,241 roaring fans, South Sydney captain John Sattler hit Manly hard-man John Bucknall on the ear; a routine “softener” of the era. Bucknall’s reply was savage: a short, unseen right hand “like a hammer inside a mailbox,” as one teammate described it. The blow fractured Sattler’s jaw in three places.
A fracture like that will tear and pinch branches of the trigeminal nerve, the face’s main sensory highway. Every tiny movement—talking, breathing, trying to swallow—tugs on those raw fibres and fires a white-hot signal straight to the brain, which is why patients describe a broken jaw as 10 out 10 pain.
Sattler is reported to have said, “I have never felt pain like this in my life.” Yet despite this, he refused to leave the field. When his teammate told him he had to leave the field, he commanded, “Don’t play me out of this grand final.“
I’ll confess I’m no rugby tactician, but I do know this: league is controlled violence. Bodies become battering-rams, and head-high contact is shrugged off as part of the job. Yet despite the off-the-scale pain, Sattler played his part on the team, running into tackle after tackle.
Ultimately, Sattler led his team to victory, and his story is one of the greatest examples of an athlete playing through unimaginable pain. More importantly, it shows us that it’s possible.
Most people will believe that Sattler is some mutant and has a higher pain threshold. And that enduring pain like that is impossible for those of us without his mutant genes
But science tells us that our pain thresholds aren’t set by genetics but by how we choose to represent pain.
Studies by neuroscientist Lorimer Moseley and others show that attention, emotion, and meaning can dial pain signals up or down. Placebo research confirms the same: change the story you tell yourself and the brain releases its own analgesics, raising or lowering your threshold far beyond any fixed genetics. In short, what we believe about pain often hurts—or heals—more than the injury itself.
As funders, we have to stay on the field, too. Our fractures are silent: cash-flow squeezes, stalled growth, knives on social that cut deeper than ribs.
But how do we turn pain into performance? How do we not only stay on the field but still perform at our best?
Turn Pain into Performance
1 Name the wound
Sattler felt bone grind and tasted blood; he knew exactly what was broken.
→ List your break: cash-flow, brand hit, lonely nights. Clarity creates courage.Frame it bigger
The year before, the Rabbitos had lost the grand final. This was Sattler's chance of redemption.
→ Anchor your hurt to the mission; in that context pain shrinks.Stay present
“Don’t play me out,” he told his team—then hit every tackle with full focus.
→ Your calm sets the market price for panic; lead from that still point.
Treat each founder-fracture the same—see it, name it, and choose the story that carries you through the full 80 minutes.
Most of us have played ourselves out of the game without even realising it. So we refuse to tackle the projects that cause us pain, and we avoid them. Pain is feedback, and when we can choose to act on it rather than choose to avoid it, we can become unstoppable.
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