Over time, I have found that the answers to life’s most vexing problems come when I practice problem solving from within. The answers to the biggest challenges don’t exist on Ask.com, YouTube or Wikipedia, but reside within us.
Tap Your Inner Resource For Problem Solving
In the last post I talked about your Inner Resource. Your inner resource is when you tap your inner wisdom. In today’s world we are prone to simply study the wisdom of others. When we do, we can get lazy because we are not practicing thinking for ourselves. Good problem solving is about building your thought muscles.
Problem Solving Is About Identifying Clothes
As a personal business coach I have the privilege of collaborating with and supporting individuals, entrepreneurs, solo professionals and self-employed business owners. Like me, they all have developed various degrees of problem solving skills.
What is interesting is that most problems at the core are the same. Problem solving may involve relationships, developing new disciplines, new ways of thinking, new habits and new processes in order to get the desired result.
The difficulty is that although most problems are common they come dressed in different clothes. For example, very often a relationship problem that is hindering small business growth or small business success has to do with a poor process.
When you strip the problem of its clothes, you see that a bad relationship was caused by a poor process. Too often, in problem solving, the focus will erroneously be on the relationship. The result is that two or more people get torn apart or broken down. At this point your problem solving has taken on two dimensions.
Now you have created a relationship problem that really wasn’t the problem. And, in order to solve the core problem, the poor process, you must now invest time in rebuilding the relationship.
Problem Solving—Get Into Yourself
When I am grappling with a problem and need to come up with an idea or answer I get by myself. I get in touch with my inner resource. I may write questions to myself. Then I may shift gears and answer it.
My goal is to achieve clarity as to what the problem truly is. Great problem solving is about identifying the core of a problem. Too often we focus on the symptoms and the problem keeps reoccurring.
Interestingly, when I take this approach to problem solving I discover that by changing my thinking, which can be difficult, that I find a solution more readily.
Sometimes I find that in changing my thinking that my thinking is the problem. The problem solving solution in this case is for me to get out of my own way.
Sometimes, I have to laugh at myself for not seeing what has become so clear when I get in touch with my inner resource. The goal for all of us is to find a method or way where problem solving identifies the problems and truly solves them.
Get into yourself. Get into your inner resource. When you do, you will have more energy, more time and more life because you have a good process for problem solving.
