Problems

This talk explores a fresh way of relating to life's problems by looking beyond quick fixes and discovering what your challenges may be pointing toward. Through insights from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), mindfulness, and values-based living, you'll learn how to uncover the deeper needs beneath recurring frustrations, shift your perspective, and respond with greater flexibility. Filled with relatable examples and practical reflection, this session helps you transform everyday problems into opportunities for growth, wisdom, and meaningful action.

Transcript

I want the word this week to be problems, Because such is the existence of being human, Problems. Everything goes back to my garden. I planted in May. I figured out how to solve the problem of the ground squirrels that eat my sunflowers every year. And basically, You just put a little plastic container around them so they get tall enough so the squirrels can't eat them. And they're like five feet tall, And my garden's right outside of my new bedroom window. This bedroom, We planned it so the bedroom window looks on the garden. And so I wake up in the morning to look at these incredible sunflowers. I have a whole bed of them. And right in front of the sunflower patch is the porta potty. That the construction work so I wake up in the morning and inevitably there's some electrician coming out zipping up his fly and I'm like. You know, So you have that in your life, Like you have the sunflower, The thing that you want, You can't wait for, It's going to happen, The doors are going to come, Aaron. This is going to solve all of Aaron's problems. Took so long, You're so excited, And then there's going to be something wrong. Right? And I remember overhearing my son when he was in kindergarten, And someone asked him, What do your parents do? And it's kind of interesting to hear what a kindergartner says. And my son said, Well, My dad's a teacher, And my mom, She listens to people's problems. And I was like, That's kind of what I do. Like, I don't solve problems. I'm not a, You know, Electrician or a firefighter or construction worker. But I do listen to people's problems. And I've had a lot of experience of a lot of years of hearing problems, My own problems, Hearing my own problems come back over and over again, Hearing other people's problems, The themes around human problems, The problems that we struggle with. And then a lot of experience looking at sort of the science of problems. You What do we do as humans? So I love this quote from Pema Chodron. I really try and now just get quotes from the books because AI hallucinates quotes and will tell you that somebody else quoted something. So I'm giving you quotes because I read the book and it comes from the book. But Pema Chodron in When Things Fall Apart says, Years and years of going to the left or right, Going to yes or no, Going to right or wrong, Never really changed anything. And usually we think that what we need to do is solve the problem, And sometimes we do need to solve the problem. I remember when Kelly Wilson, Who was one of my sort of mentors in ACT, He's one of the co-founders of ACT, Called it the stone in a shoe. And if you have a client that comes in, They're complaining about something, Usually the best thing to do is take the stone out of the shoe. Like if your foot hurts, Is there a way to get the stone out? But most of the problems, By the time they come to my office, Or by the time they come to you because your partner's complaining about it, Or your friend is complaining about it, You they've already tried to take the stone out. And so giving solutions to problems may actually not be the real solution. So I listen for something else, Which is beneath every problem is a value. And this is actually an exercise called the values rant or problems rant that I'll do sometimes in workshops with, Um, Like if I'm working with teams and if you think about something that you are complaining about and maybe you let yourself complain about it for a minute, Could complain about it in your head, A problem that you have, You could complain about it to somebody else. You could write down for a minute all of your complaints. And these could be complaints like people who are on speakerphone having a conversation in a public space. It's kind of annoying, Right? Or it could be a complaint about somebody in your life that's driving you nuts or someone complaining about their husband who doesn't exercise anymore. So if you do a ranting, For a minute. But then you listened for not the solution to the complaint. Like, Oh, Well, Have you tried to get him to exercise with you? Or, Oh, Have you tried to use good communication skills in suggesting that they turn off their phone or whatever? You actually listen to the value that's underneath the complaint. You will uncover something. About your problem, What's important to you, And then you have something to work on. Think about a problem for yourself and what's the value underneath that. The next thing with our problems is that oftentimes we keep problems around and they keep coming back because they serve us. It serves us in some way. The way that we're responding to the problem is keeping it around because it serves us. And there's all sorts of psychological terms for this. One psychological term back in the days, We used to call it secondary gain. So something like a weird psychological problem like Munchausen syndrome, Which is the syndrome where mothers make their children sick. Like, Why would a mother ever do that? There's secondary gain to that for them. They'll get attention, You know. So there may be some kind of secondary gain, Something they call vicious cycles or strange loops, That's happening for you in the way that you're responding to your problem. You're getting something out of it. You're picking a fight, The same fight over and over and over again. Because maybe picking that fight is easier than feeling the disappointment or the sadness. Maybe there's a secondary gain in worrying about money. This is mine. You worry about money. Why does that keep on coming back for you? Because it's actually easier to worry about money than actually to go into the shame hole of how you're spending your money and all the stuff that you are a mess around finances with, Right? So you may be getting something out of it. Nedra Twab, Who's one of my favorite therapists, Talks about things like guilt. Guilt, You get secondary gain. If you feel guilty, Then you actually don't have to feel the underlying emotion that's there. There. And then your problems may keep coming back because you actually are focusing on the wrong thing. You need to adjust your focus. So are you focusing on the port-a-potty? Are you focusing on the garden? Or could you zoom out and focus on something even bigger? Like if you were to look at a problem in your life, And you were to zoom way out, And you were to look at it from the perspective of like an astronaut looking at your life, What would that astronaut think about your problem? Or if you were to zoom way in on it, Is there a way that you could think differently or shift your perspective to shift your relationship with your problem, Even if the problem never changed? There is a, I don't know if I talked about this this week, A book I'm reading called Thinking Sideways by Jen Shahadeh. She's a chess player. Well, She's a boxer and a chess player, And she does this competitive sport called chess boxing. They have chess competitions and then they have boxing competitions right after. And anyways, But she has this whole book on chess and what she talks about in it is basically how we think that chess players think a million moves ahead. But really the best chess players think the three best moves right now. And the three best sideways moves? Because if you think a million moves ahead, Then what if your opponent does something sideways on you? You're screwed. You're so far ahead. So thinking sideways, How could you think differently in this problem? And then the last reason why our problem keeps coming back is that our mind loves to create problems. And we know this from meditation practice. If you sit long enough with your own mind, You'll see that it'll just find lots of problems to focus on. And Aaron Westgate, Who did the classic study of when you put people in a room with nothing to do for 15 minutes but a machine where they could shock themselves, 67% of people shock themselves. It's like the mind wants stimulation. It is creating problems. It wants problems. It can find a problem in anything. And so noticing that's the tendency of your human mind. And so the suggestions I have this week or what I work on when I'm working with clients on this is, Yes, Take the rock out of the shoe. If you can solve the problem, Solve it. But that's usually our first go-to. Then we go to, Actually, What is the value that's underneath your problem? How is the problem working for you or the way in which you're approaching it? You're keeping it around. Can you see it differently? And then what we'll practice today in our practice is, Can you make room for it so that maybe something else could bubble up in your experience of turning left and right, Taking the middle path?