My Strategy For Dealing With Problems Made Me Stronger

One person who was really worth listening to when he spoke was Albert Einstein. Fortunately, he left us great teachings, such as his wise phrase “We cannot solve problems with the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Following his reasoning, we can ask ourselves: what strategy to use to deal with problems?

Within a large number of possibilities, there are some rather useful strategies or at least they are considered as such by most of the people who use them. On the one hand we will talk about the famous strategic problem solving; on the other, the paradox of the street lamp.

What strategy to use to deal with the problems?

Dealing with problems successfully allows you to grow. It is always said that failure is a good school, but so is doing things right. If we solve a problem, in addition to the success of solving the problem itself, we certainly receive very important lessons along the way.

How to deal with problems with strategic problem solving

Strategic Problem Solving is a model that can be applied in any field and with different levels of difficulty. To put it into practice, we need to know the three basic steps: the definition, the goal and the strategy of the problem itself.

Definition

The first stage is the definition. Before looking for solutions, we need to know exactly what the problem is. To do this, it is good to understand its nature.

An adequate way to define a problem is to ask what it consists of, where it is, when it appears, who can be the culprits, how and why it happens… that is, it is good to take the time to identify every detail.

Once the problem is defined, you need to know your goals. Instead of stagnating in permanent lament and not finding a way out, we need to ask ourselves what result we want to achieve.

For example, if we have a job interview in six months and we know that they will ask us for a certain level of a foreign language, our goal will be to obtain that level. Maybe we will also like the foreign language in question and would like to learn it even better, but this is the initial goal.

Change your view of problems and view them as challenges and not as threats. In this way, an obstacle will be a source of motivation that will produce much less stress and more satisfaction.

Addressing the strategy of the problem

When you are fully aware of the problem you are having, it is time to establish a strategy to solve it. We know our goals and the magnitude of the obstacle. We have to think about the method.

You will come to a point where you will have to see which strategy is best for achieving your goals and overcoming the problem. Below we list several techniques proposed by this method:

• Take the problem to the limit. Sometimes, for something to get better, it has to get worse first. They say that after the storm, calm comes. Maybe reaching the limit and hitting the bottom can be a solution to get the necessary impetus. For example, when there is a fire many times it is not worth saving anything because the price we could pay is too high. We will have to wait patiently for the firefighters to extinguish the fire and then, perhaps, throw everything away to rebuild from scratch.

• Backward Planning. Another strategy proposed is to go through the problem solving process in reverse. Imagine that everything is already solved: you have to analyze how you got to this point, then to the previous one and to the previous one and so on. As if you rewind the tape of a cassette that facilitates the identification of the strategy to follow. For example, mathematicians use this strategy a lot to make proofs: they start from what they want to prove to see if they can arrive at what is already proven.

• Be far-sighted. You can go beyond the problem. To do this, you must visualize your ideal life and project your mind on this image. In this way, you will find the strength and motivation to overcome uncertainty and locate the freedom to better see the solution.

The paradox of the lamppost

This problem-solving technique is presented in a book called “The Art of Embittering Your Life”. In it, Paul Watzlawick, with a lot of ingenuity and humor, tells us about some mistakes that we all commit sooner or later.

In the paradox of the lamppost, the author tells the story of a drunk who searches for his keys next to a lamppost. A policeman sees him and helps him search. At one point the agent asks the man if he is really sure he lost the keys at that point. The latter replies no, that he has lost them further back, but that it is too dark there.

Sometimes when analyzing a problem, we need to know if we are looking for solutions in the right place. There are not a few times in which we let ourselves be obscured by a “street lamp”. Maybe once it was useful and served us, but that doesn’t mean it’s always valid.

However, our brains naturally work that way. In the archive he owns, he looks for the mental resources that have already been useful to him in the past. For this reason, it is important to try to go beyond simple problems, analyze them in the right way and find the best solutions that we do not always have to know or have available, no matter how much experience we may have.