(Extracted from Principles by Ray Dalio)
When you experience pain, remember to reflect. You can convert the “pain” of seeing your mistakes and weaknesses into pleasure. If there is only one piece of advice I can get you to remember it is this one. Calm yourself down and think about what is causing your psychological pain. Ask other objective, believable parties for their help to figure it out. Find out what is true. Don’t let ego barriers stand in your way. Remember that pains that come from seeing mistakes and weaknesses are “growing pains” that you learn from. Don’t rush through them. Stay in them and explore them because that will help build the foundation for improvement. It is widely recognized that 1) changing your deep-seated, harmful behavior is very difficult yet necessary for improvement and 2) doing this generally requires a deeply felt recognition of the connection between your harmful behavior and the pain it causes. Psychologists call this “hitting bottom.”