What are you focusing on - The Problem Or The Solution

One of my client’s was very unhappy because she wasn’t able to spend time with her toddler...

When we dwelled deeper into the situation she said, “I want to teach her poems, but for that I need to learn it first. And that takes a lot of time. I am spending all the time learning the poems and hence don’t have the time to teach her”. She was learning them from her phone (videos) and she didn’t want her baby to have screen time. So, her options (according to her) were either give up on teaching poems or give the baby screen time.

In case 1, she was not happy because she believed that teaching her daughter those poems was a huge value add. And not taking the time to learn them would fill her up with guilt.

In case 2, giving screen time meant going against her ethics. Hence, she didn’t want to do that.

She ended up feeling low and guilty because of this.

I started the conversation by asking her – ‘What if there was a third option? What if we can fix it?’ She shook her head in response.

Less than 3 mins later she was pumped up with energy! “Ofcourse! I can download the audio version!! Why didn’t I think of that!?”, she cried with joy.

My client is a smart woman with all the right intentions! She is willing to do whatever it takes to spend quality time with her child. But, why is it that she couldn’t think of this?

For most of us, our brain’s default setting is to stay in the ‘problem mode’. And hence, we accept defeat too quickly. It takes consistent practice to tune our minds to be solution oriented and move forward.

Most of the problems can be solved when we think of the solution and not the problem. In other words, solution to many problems is to have a ‘SOLUTION MINDSET’!

And how do we do this? By shifting our focus. Rather than getting anxious about the situation in hand, we need to be forward looking. One way to do this is by asking ourselves the right questions:

🤔 What do I really want?

🤔How can I do it faster/ easier/ better?

🤔Who else has this problem and how did they solve it?

🤔 Can I reach out to someone?

Comment below if you ever caught yourself in this maze! How did you come out of the problem?