Our pet problems
People on YouTube will teach you exactly how to solve a Rubik’s Cube. Is that cheating? (Image by Nick Stafford)
It is embarrassing to go back and listen to recordings of mastermind sessions I’ve been part of.
In a mastermind, a group of entrepreneurs takes turns being coached by each other. When it’s my turn to be coached, my current self cringes as I hear my past self blather on about my business and deflect useful ideas and feedback. It is so hard to believe that I couldn’t see in the moment that I was doing this.
I do have compassion for my need, in those past masterminds, to lay out all of the elements of a problem. It’s certainly a key step to finding a solution, and it goes better in a collaborative setting. I’ve seen many people do this for both professional challenges and personal ones.
The problem arises when we’ve described the problem so often that we become attached to our existing understanding of it. The pieces and parts ossify into something like a sliding block puzzle, able only to move back and forth in a two-dimensional space.
Why do we do this? So many of us do. We might find a weird satisfaction in constructing a game that’s impossible to win, and validation in the confirmation that no one else can fix our situation, either.
We may have spent a lot of money and time to arrive at our current circumstances, and we don’t want to believe that we might have been wrong.
Our self-worth might be riding on our ability to find a solution without changing or challenging any of the assumptions or decisions we’ve made.
As a result, we double down on our problem, treating it like a pet. It’s our trusted companion, our stalwart. Only when we are willing to let it go can we move forward. Until then, we won’t be able to hear the advice of others, much less act on it.
In my life and career, I’ve gotten stuck on lots of these pet problems, fully believing the story I was telling myself and others. For example, I was way too busy running my music school, but I couldn’t afford to hire anyone. I also couldn’t raise prices or change programming in order to increase profits. Even if I did hire someone, I wouldn’t have time to train them. Poor me!
Now on the other side of this problem, I can easily pop the pieces right out of the sliding puzzle to fix the seemingly hopeless situation. I can see that I was too busy because I hadn’t hired anyone. I could have made all kinds of changes to make it possible to make a hire. I could also have altered processes to make them less time-consuming, making me less busy. Alternatively, I could have shut down the entire business and started over. I’d made my own bed, but I didn’t have to lie in it.
I see this now because there are no longer any emotions attached to the situation. Back then, however, I was afraid. I was worried about making a mistake. I had never hired and trained anyone before, so I didn’t know how to do it. Instead of acknowledging this and getting help, I just kept doing what I was doing, even though it wasn’t working.
It was only when I was ready to seek and accept support and guidance that things began to improve. The pain of staying the way I was began to outweigh the fear of the unknown, and I summoned the humility to grow and learn. It was okay that I wasn’t an expert already. It was okay that I hadn’t gotten it all right on the first try. I had time and space to try again.
I still have pet problems that I’m not sure how to escape from. I’ve created success criteria that are probably impossible to satisfy in this lifetime. To the extent that I can tolerate renegotiating these, I will find freedom. Otherwise, I’ll stubbornly hang onto all the reasons why your generous suggestions won’t work.
A change in perspective requires flexibility, but a change in perspective is also how we acquire that flexibility. It’s a Catch-22. How do we fix it? There are always other ways. We’ve got to open up to not just options A and B, but options C, D, E, and F. If we can’t come up with these other options ourselves, collaboration will yield them. Then, we can move past our pet problems if we truly want to.
Have you ever hung onto a problem that began to feel so familiar that you couldn’t imagine life without it? How did you resolve it?
