Here’s Your REAL Problem !

The above quote from the ubiquitous, every man’s man, Captain Jack Sparrow, reminds me of a few items I’ve read recently.

Here they are:

As discussed in Tribe of Mentors, when Tim Ferriss is stumped, when he’s faced with a seemingly insurmountable challenge, his one go-to question to himself is:

“What would this look like if it were easy?”

He explains:

“‘What would this look like if it were easy?’ is such a lovely and deceptively leveraged question.

It’s easy to convince yourself that things need to be hard, that if you’re not redlining, you’re not trying hard enough.

“This leads us to look for paths of most resistance, often creating unnecessary hardship in the process.

But what happens if we frame things in terms of elegance instead of strain?”

Add in what John Kim says about the ongoing perceptions of a “problem,” and me thinks you truly have a one-two punch recipe for either A) knowing how to NOT turn molehills into mountains and/or B) reminding yourself why often it is indeed YOUR thinking (yes, yours) that makes things more complicated than they really are.

Okay, now… The Angry Therapist (aka John Kim) has the mic:

“Problems will never go away. They will keep coming at us like crashing waves, into our heads. Until we drown in them.

“It’s not the problem itself but rather how we see the problem that will allow us to ride the waves instead of drowning in them.

“Problems come in all forms, from friction in relationships to not knowing what to do with our lives.

“Most problems are magnified due to our thinking and attitude about the problem.

“If we feel powerless, a loss of control, we instantly dip into panic which creates anxiety. And the problem grows.

“What is your current problem?

“What would it look like to detach from this problem? Mentally and emotionally?

“I’m not saying not care about it or don’t do anything about it but rather not grab, hold on, live in the problem.

“Instead, what if you saw the problem as it’s own thing, detached from you? As if it’s in a snow globe.

“Observe it as something that is happening outside of you.

“Why do you think problem showed up in your life? What can you learn from this problem?

“Notice your resistance and where it’s coming from. Now what can you control and not control? Of what you can control, what action steps need to be taken to adjust to this problem?

“Or even solve it?

“Focus more on how you need to think instead of what you need to do for the problem to no longer have power over you.

“When you start to see the problem from a new non-attached perspective, it shrinks. And your attitude about the problem changes.

“Once your attitude changes, the problem may no longer be a problem.”

I highly recommend you follow The Angry Therapist. His shit is that good!