A Systematic Way To Approach Our Problems
Life is like a cycling journey on sloped hills. There will be times when you are freely cycling downhill, no effort required with the soft breeze caressing your face, and there will also be times when you have to put in all your energy to cycle uphill, sweating heavily while straining your muscles.
Regardless of who we are, we will always face problems that require time and energy to solve. New challenges in all shapes and sizes will come to us like how bees are attracted to honey. Whoever you are, wherever you live. This is just an unavoidable part of our lives.
If problems could speak, it would probably sound like Liam Neeson in Taken when his daughter was kidnapped by human traffickers.
“I will use all the skills at my disposal to hunt you down… and when I find you… I will be a challenge for you to overcome. I will trouble you.”
And if you saw the movie, you know what happened.
So, hypothetically, if you know that someone like Liam Neeson’s character — basically a dangerous guy— is hunting you down, wouldn’t you want to be prepared when it happens?
The same goes for problems and challenges in life.
While the problems you face are never the same and would need different solutions, I believe that having a systematic way of approaching would be helpful.
I speak this from experience too.
Ever since I started university, living away from my family in a foreign country with a vast difference in language and culture, there are always problems abound. Thankfully, this method has helped me overcome them.
So, this is the way I approach my problems. It is brief, simple, and it can be acronym-ed, so it is easy to remember!
1.
Destigmatise Your Problems
2.
Neutralise Your Feelings
3.
Rewrite Your Reality
1. Destigmatise Your Problems
One of the early ways to ‘disarm’ your problems from affecting you is to quickly destigmatise it. What do I mean by this?
Imagine if someone you know, who is of the same build and strength as you, same fighting skills, and he managed to ward off someone like The Rock in a fight. Would your perception towards facing The Rock change? Maybe just slightly, right? You probably would think, ‘Hey, if he can do it, then maybe I can.’
Sometimes, that small ray of optimism is exactly what you need to overcome your problems.
By reminding yourself that some people before you have faced a similar problem as you are now and they have overcame it, it gives you a little bit of optimism and strength that you too will overcome your own problems.
A ray of hope is what we need first to overcome our difficulties.
2. Neutralise Your Feelings
Our human mind naturally focuses on the negatives aspects of things. It is part of our survival instincts, hardwired into our DNA. And while it was useful for when our ancestors were hunters and lived in the wild, you need to realise that most of the time, we humans just love to blow things out of proportion.
The negative feelings that we experience when facing a problem is something natural. It is impossible to stop it. If a madman is hurtling towards you with a sledgehammer, of course the first thing you would feel is fear!
And these negative feelings can either be a good thing or a bad thing.
For example, there are two types of fear:
1) Fear that cripples
2) Fear that motivates
While the second fear spurs you into action, such as fear of failing your exams makes you study, the first fear is something that you need to neutralise as it only makes thing worse, not better.
So, once we feel those negative emotions upon us, we need to tell ourselves that overwhelming negativity cripples us and is counter-productive.
Neutralising those negative feelings like how you would use water to neutralise a fire.
3. Rewrite Your Reality
Now that you have destigmatised your problems and neutralised your feelings, the final step before trying to solve your problem itself is to rewrite your reality.
This doesn’t mean that I want you to be in delusion, to think that you don’t have a problem at all. Delusional people don’t get anything done. But what I mean is that to tweak your mind into looking at your problem from a different and positive perspective.
How?
I try to not see my problems as problems.
What I do is I try to see my problems as supplements that strengthen my immune system. They imbue me with vitamins that would help me with my future problems, meaning that my current problems would turn me into a person that is better prepared to face future challenges. I also think of how my problems now will allow me to help others who would be in similar situation.
To be of benefit to others has always been wish.
One thing I realised is that once we think about the benefits problems would give us, our mentality and attitude towards them change radically.
So, adopt P.P. Sunglasses (Positive Perspective Sunglasses) that block away negativity and wear them until your problem is done.
To summarise, while our problems can only be solved physically (they cannot be just solved in our minds!) I personally think that it has to start from our minds first.
Just like everything in life, you need to have the correct mentality in approaching something that you need to do. Just like how a football team has lost if they already think they are beneath their opponents before they even step onto the pitch, we always need to be strong mentally in approaching our problems.
Here’s to having a strong-minded approach in solving our problems in life!
While these are my methods to approach my problems, I am interested in knowing what are your own methods? Share them with me in the comment section!
