Joel’s newsletter, June 17, 2009

An ezine about Creative thinking, Coaching, and Making a difference.

Problems and ways of responding

The world is full of problems. Just look at the news. There are financial crises, wars, violence, disagreements, shortages, diseases, etc. (Of course the news focuses on the problems; things aren’t always that bad all around.) But we certainly hear about world problems all the time. The question is - how do you react to them?

There are many ways to react or respond to a problem that’s happening in the world (as opposed to a personal problem). You could:

• Live in fear of what could happen; perhaps it’s a disease that might hit you.
• Take steps to protect yourself from any consequences of the situation.
• Just ignore the problem, thinking that it doesn’t affect you. And it’s true that many times it doesn’t.
• Be aware of it but don’t put attention on it.
• Talk about it in social conversations.
• Follow the news stories and really get absorbed in what’s going on.
• Study the facts, the background, and become more knowledgeable about it.
• Empathize with those that are suffering or affected.
• Donate to a cause that helps the victims, out of concern for them.
• Become an activist or join an organization and really get involved.
• Look for what can be learned from the situation, and take that lesson to heart.
• See the problem as an opportunity in disguise.
• Come up with a solution that could actually help solve the problem, and implement it or suggest it to those who could.

I’m not saying that any of the above are better than the others. It’s just that there are many ways to respond to a problem. And we do have a choice about what we do.

Now let’s look at problems in our own personal lives. These are more immediate than what we hear about on the news. We might have problems at work, at home, in our relationships, or even in ourselves. While world events may or may not affect us directly, personal problems have an immediate impact. Again, we usually have habitual ways of dealing with them. And we also have a choice.

Here are some common ways of dealing with problems that come up in our lives. You could:

• Run away from it.
• Just live with it.
• Try to work around it.
• Get someone else to take care of it.
• Study it and research it.
• Gather together as many resources as you can.
• Find out how other people handle it and do the same.
• Discuss it and perhaps work together as a team.
• Take it as a challenge and attack it head on.
• Learn new skills so you can more easily handle the problem.
• Look at the bigger picture; maybe it doesn’t matter that much in the long run.
• Leave it for now and wait until a solution occurs to you.
• Put on your creative thinking cap and come up with some original ideas.

As before, there are no right or wrong ways in dealing with problems or challenges. It’s useful to be aware of our habitual ways of handling them, though, because then we can see that there are other choices.

In Creative Thinking we realize that there are many ways to approach a problem, as well as possibly many ways to resolve it. We’ll explore this further in later issues. In the meantime, why not look at how you normally face challenges and see what other choices may be possible.

Quote of the week

“Life is 10% of what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it.” – John Maxwell

What this means to me is that much of what we experience depends on our own state of mind and who we are. Two people could be in the same place at the same time and have very different experiences. So the way I understand it is that to get the most from life, we could put focus more on developing ourselves rather than changing outside circumstances.

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This newsletter is written by Joel Remde, joel@joelremde.com . I welcome your comments and feedback; that will help me learn more about what you’re interested in and help me to improve the newsletter.

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