Tag Archives: problem-solving

Creativity’s Guide to Problem-Solving

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Creativity's Guide to Problem-Solving

Hi Everyone! This post is going to be a little something different. So, part of my experience in working through things, as I’ve talked about in many places on the site, has been different aspects of my inner life experience being embodied by characters, whose appearance mirrors what their nature is like on the level of their feel, energy, approach to life, etc. One such character is one I call Creativity. She seems to specialize in solving any and all kinds of problems, utilizing things like creativity, lateral thinking, consideration, and playful experimentation. As a character, I’d say she’s generally good-natured and fun to be around, too.

I came up with the idea of having some characters “speak” out guides to things they are strong in, and the first one that came to mind was Creativity and problem-solving. How did I write this? Well, like any storyteller or actor might – I have a sense of Creativity, of her energy, and of how she might go about approaching giving a guide to this topic. So, without further ado, here is Creativity’s Guide to Problem-Solving: Continue reading →

Find your Curiosity and Move Past Failure

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Finding your way past Failure

On any journey, the way you imagined might not be the one you need to take. Curiosity can get you looking for the right way again.

When you’re trying to accomplish a goal, oftentimes, your own frustration with not having accomplished a goal can get in your way. We can be so desperate to get to our goal that we want to have the quickest way forward.

Here’s the problem with that: we imagine our strategy for getting to our goal. If imagining a goal was enough to get there, then life would be super easy, right? But achieving anything is not that simple. Our imagined approach is not enough to achieve the results we want.

Remember this quote from Thomas Edison?:

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

If imagining his light-bulb were enough, he would have created it immediately. The same for any of the goals you strive for. Continue reading →

Respect Your Moodiness

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Moodiness

Sometimes, you just want to be in a crappy mood. Is that so bad?

If you’re like me, sometimes you get grumpy, moody, frustrated, annoyed, depressed, worried, or any other number of emotions that can seem “bad”. You might feel the impulse to treat your mood like a problem, and jump to solve it immediately with something. But sometimes you just can’t find any way to solve it, and on top of that you’re sick of trying to solve it! At times like these, it’s a good idea to just let yourself be moody.

Continue reading →

Frustration with Myself

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So I was feeling some frustration after watching some stuff from Tony Robbins, since he’s very capable in many areas of life that I also am working on, like being able to work people through long standing insidious life issues within a couple minutes. Given the time I’m taking to solve my own things methodically, one at a time, I got frustrated. How could he do it with other people so easily? Was my approach wrong? This frustrated me even more, since I didn’t want to feel anything that resembled envy. Then I was frustrated more because I didn’t want to have to be repressing or denying any emotion. Shame got mixed in there too. Anyway I was a bit of a mess until a few minutes ago, when I went in my head to my gruff side, who had some solutions for me that I thought I’d share:

  1. There are no easy solutions. What a guy like Tony Robbins does looks easy, but really, all he does is look for source of conflict inside other people, and by exposing it, can easily point out a new direction for that person to take. He’s been through this process many many times and knows what works and what doesn’t. It’s not as if he has a magic solution. As I’ve seen in myself, once I lay out all the pieces of an inner puzzle, and delve into something, it’s easy to see where the fear or injustice is and face it to move forward. The seeds of change are in the depths of the conflict itself, always.
  2. Yeah I might have a lot of stuff going on with me right now that I’d rather not, but that’s me, and I need to just handle where I’m at and what I’ve got. To learn how to handle all these things I may want to handle better some day (so many vague ideas), I need to work with it within myself. What I’ve been doing has worked for me, and that’s enough
  3. I don’t need to push myself so damn hard! If I set out so many vague goals for myself and am willing to punish myself if I don’t immediately get results, I will just end up with a bunch of chaos and confusion.
  4. I could say “this mode of thinking is wrong” for anything, but that doesn’t get me anywhere, it just creates a bunch of anger and frustration. So – deep breath, and carry on in the ways that I know work for me. Even if something’s wrong, saying that it is doesn’t give me the solution that works for me.

A Note about “Visions”

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The other day I said I had a “vision” – I wanted to clarify what I meant. I do not mean I had some kind of hallucination, and fell down randomly and maybe frothed at the mouth a little. No, the kind of “vision” I had is a completely ordinary thing that everybody does all the time. If I were to ask you how you were feeling right now, and, instead of telling me “fine”, told me “I feel like I’m standing on a beach on a bright, calm day”, you just told me your vision of how you’re feeling. Whatever you envision yourself to feel like is a vision, at least according to me.

So why do I pursue visions of things? Sometimes, to really get at the root of things, you need to sit down, close your eyes, and let the image emerge: the subtle details of it, and the changes over time. And this simple process is key to getting to the heart of emotional issues, especially those bothering you that moment. Because once you see what things are really like, you can start to question it and change it around.

Overcoming Self-Deceit, continued

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So, I said I was going to talk about overcoming self-deceit, but rather than go through the whole story, I’m going to boil it down. What did I learn at the end of this, exactly?

  1. If you desire to escape your problems, you become prone to easy solutions – anything you can grasp on to to get out of it. Instead, you must ask questions, and be part of the solution of those problems, especially those involving your own happiness.
  2. It is extremely dangerous to your spirit to be dishonest if that dishonesty is for the purpose of changing your life situation to be more comfortable. The reason for this is that you place the solution to your problems in the hands of other people (or perhaps the weather) – you are running away from your own power and ability to solve problems.
  3. Not only CAN you face the truth of your own difficulties, but it is the only way to solve them. If you feel bad, rather than distracting yourself with games or food, try to turn your awareness to the nature of the issue. No matter how many dark things lurk inside you, you CAN stand strong in front of them. You are more than a match for what life throws at you.
  4. When you are feeling down, or distressed, treat yourself like a flower who needs water, rather than a nasty bug who needs to change and solve its problems asap so you can go back to feeling “good”. However you feel is how you feel! It’s an expression of your needs.
  5. If you merely act like you care about yourself, you will end up killing your happiness. The reason is because you may see caring about yourself as part of a solution to a problem that bothers you. But caring isn’t a goal-oriented task, it’s something very spontaneous and natural. Given this, you may want to care about yourself only enough so that you can persist towards a comfortable life you want, a future you think will be without a lot of pesky problems. Perhaps a comfortable job, a family so you don’t look too out of place, and such other plans. But what makes you happy is so much more grand than all of that! Yeah, you need courage to bring true happiness into your life, but the alternative is to let a demon who’s only interested in maintaining a small miserable bubble of a life have control over you. Happiness, to it, seems like such a bother – and it will tell you all sorts of reasons why it’s out of reach. This is more manipulation. That brings me to:
  6. To truly break free from the self-deceit – from the lies you tell yourself, from the misery that you invite because of it – you must see the effect it has on you. You must lay your intentions bare before you, and see that if you continue down this road, you will be ruled by a force that treats you like a pawn in its game of finding an escape from difficulty. In other words, you must face the truth. The truth of how you treat yourself – only then will you care enough to break free from this, and you will see how valuable conflict can be, and that your problems are there to point you towards a brighter future.
  7. After all this is done, you may find yourself less distressed at the problems you have, or at least willing to ask questions towards a real solution. You might start asking a lot more questions in general! Because you no longer wish for something you already have in mind – what you want is the truth, when the truth is yet unknown. Only in that vast unknown do the answers to our problems truly lie.

And this was supposed to be “boiled down”? Hot damn. Well, I hope, for those of you who took the time to read it, you took something away. Bye for now : )

Never Eat to Solve Unhappiness

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Yo, found out some new stuff about eating for comfort today.

Long story short: when you eat to cover over the unhappiness you have while not eating, instead of searching for the root cause of the unhappiness, it’s self-abusive. The same is true for any consumption.

I went back to this issue because I still hadn’t resolved it, rather just figured that being happy and eating was more important than being self-abusive because of that eating, and thus, unhappy. I went back after a discussion I had with my independent study professor about Hansel and Gretel – I thought the story might hold a key to stopping eating for comfort in the addiction-level sense.

The trick I used was to, rather than force my “sweets-eater” to stop eating unhealthy foods, I just brought her to an imaginary land where there was an infinite number of sweets and no one there to stop her or criticize her. As soon as she got there she started digging tunnels with her teeth through imaginary cakes the size of cottages, completely blissful.

But something else was lurking there. A nasty little critter started to sweet-talk my sweets-eater, sympathizing with her plight and former persecution by those who wanted to force her to eat right. I wanted sweets-eater to just leave with me now that she had her fill, but instead she got caught up with this other creature, bandwagoning with such phrases as “Why CAN’T I eat indefinitely” (the creature, agreeing, said “yes, such limited thinking….”)

As soon as it seemed that sweets-eater was on its side, the nasty critter started to pour food down sweets-eater’s gullet. “Eat everything for me! EAT IT ALL!!” But sweets-eater could see this was unfair… she was already full. It turned out this critter valued the experience of eating food over any other possible experience, and sweets-eater could, by eating more, keep that experience coming as much as possible.

In the end, sweets-eater responded to this injustice by:
1) Arguing that it’s important to get to the root causes of unhappiness instead of this madness of covering up, and
2) Eating the critter. (While shouting “MY APPETITE IS BIGGER THAN YOURS!”)

This was quite a fun exercise, but it displays a powerful point about any addiction – that, while the experience may be pleasurable, the part of you that keeps it as self-abuse is relying on sensory experience to solve emotional issues. But this will never work, and never can. Emotional issues can only be resolved by bringing those emotions to the surface, letting them talk, and letting them come to some kind of resolution. So, what do you guys think? Happy eating first, then non-problem covering – does that solve all over-eating? It seems it is the giant’s leap back to healthy, but there may be more to it. Especially given how strong a force that deep unhappiness can be in any one of us.