When life isn’t going well, people may look towards outside factors that may provide answers. Or, others become quick to blame themselves when things get out of control and solutions are not readily available.
How does one find the happy medium? How do you understand your own problems in connection with what you want out of life?
That’s the $64, 000 dollar question, or rather, in 2008 inflation dollars – let’s up it to $1 million.
What’s a Problem, Anyway?
Certain problems can be fixed and even anticipated before they happen. Others require the help and input of people to come to a viable solution. While, in some cases, there are situations that are just too big, too massive and way beyond just one person or a group of people.
They require a mental shift, action and, perhaps, even creating laws.
But in the meantime, for the sake of YOU the individual, how do you grapple with the ambiguity of life’s choices and understanding your own power for change?
This question is especially impenetrable for those of you who are the self-admitted professionally clueless. You are constantly questioning your own power and ability to be a catalyst for movement.
Problems involve commitment to a desire. Whether the desire is a change of career, getting married, having children, going to graduate school – whatever the case, if you have such dilemmas, you’ve inevitably committed yourself to the pursuit of change.
The only real “problem” is implementing the action that creates the change - not the problem itself.
Problem Solving: The Difficult Made Simple?
Decisions can be simple – but they cannot always be quick, fast or easy. Putting perspectives in black and white helps remove some of the cloudy gray that permeates some of life’s more puzzling scenarios.
One way to make your problems simpler is to create a question that forces you to choose: What is good? What is bad? What is right? What is wrong? Is the answer yes or is the answer no?
The tricky part of understanding problems is that they are not one-size-fits-all. Everyone solves their own problems differently and this can be especially hard when you are faced with a multitude of solutions.
But, the real trick resides in being readily in tune with your own unique values and goals. Only then can you can decide if the solution is good or right and if the answer is really yes.
In the end, it’s what you want that determines the outcome.
If you are still deciding what values and goals truly define you, however, then you don’t have any problems to solve (now).
In reality, you are struggling with the idea of YOU. If you don’t know what that is (yet), then abandon those burning questions in the meantime and work on getting to know yourself a bit better.
The Actual Decision: Do, Don’t or Die:
If you rather not do it – then don’t. If you prefer to pursue it – then do so. And, if you want to die instead, well you’ve gotten yourself in more trouble than this post can reasonably handle.
While some problems are not as easy to simplify as others, obviously, they all take time.
Our generation has grown a lot more impatient with decision making (in some ways good, in some ways bad). We’ve sometimes let impatience impede a (better) decision. When this happens, the disappointment can be overwhelming.
There’s nothing wrong with waiting for better opportunities to appear or making sure you are sure about what to do.
Other times, we second-guess everything we potentially do, further immobilizing ourselves into inaction. How do you find the balance?
When something is right for us, we usually make things available for it to eventually happen.
Depending, nevertheless, on some enigmatic force to tell you what steps to take is thinly disguised indecisiveness.
Seize all 24 hours of the day and do something.