When we have a complex problem to solve we need to work out the process that will allow us to complete the overall task. A plan can show a possible way forward but all too often the plan fails and we respond by spending more time planning. After a while, we can easily spend more time thinking about what to do than doing the necessary actions themselves. Planning can become a prop to support procrastination.

Planning can easily become a trap because of the following points that bring us emotional relief:

1. A plan shows a possible way forward - Humans crave certainty. We love to know what’s going to happen next and a plan gives us the wonderful illusion that we can predict the future.
2. Creating a plan feels like taking action - When we think through the steps needed it feels like we are working on a solution. We create an imaginary set of results and it’s possible to generate positive emotions when we do this.
3. A plan makes us feel like things are possible - We imagine delivering the necessary results whilst making a plan and it makes us feel as if we are capable of getting things done.

Thus, if things don’t go well right now creating another plan brings immediate relief by making us feel in control and it can create good feelings by imagining the fulfilled desires to come. Overall, we feel good as a result of planning. Unfortunately, planning can easily become addictive because of the fantasy element involved. It’s addictive because we can always find ways to justify not following through on a plan (someone or something else failed to come through for us) and in order to feel good again we can just create another plan. After a while though the plans just become empty and vacuous. They offer the promise of good results but they generally don’t reflect the reality of what has passed. Instead they support idle fantasizing and prop up our personal delusions about what we actually capable of. Most plans fail to map our real limitations accurately. A plan brings relief but ultimately it must support the taking of action- that is categorically the only way to deliver desired results.

Some level of planning is essential but too much is self-defeating. A poorly constructed plan can easily set up too many desires and expectations that combined together give a low likelihood of fulfillment. This designs problems into the process. As soon as one thing goes wrong (and most people are very poor at estimating how long it takes to do something that they have never done before) then the rest of the plan tends to fall into disorder.

The key benefit of planning is not in prediction (even though this illusion makes us feel good) but in taking a solution and converting it into a process for getting it done. The plan should focus on what tasks are needed to fulfill a solution, the appropriate order to carry them out in and the efficient integration of those tasks together. Processes are time based and so when we plan it is natural to focus on the time taken to get something done but here lies great uncertainty because unless we have done something repeatedly (where we know accurately the time taken to do each part, where we have solved all the problems necessary to get the end result and where we know how to prepare to carry out the productive work with a high-certainty of experiencing no hold-ups) then we will have an incredibly high likelihood of being wrong on almost every part of our time planning.

For this reason most plans fail and we become discouraged because we did not meet our desires. For too many people the plan becomes the default position instead of reality and that sets up false expectations. It’s the same idea as the concept that “the map is not the territory.” The map is a guide and it creates a model of reality using symbols but it is not the territory itself. The map filters out a lot of detail about the real lie of the land. The map is an approximation. If you use a map and then find out that is wrong, or doesn’t give sufficient detail you don’t expect the territory to change to suit the map. That’s a ridiculous approach. It’s annoying that the map is wrong but you end up accepting that and then find a way forward by adapting to reality.

A plan creates a map of the future but it will never predict the real future exactly. It’s an approximation. When reality doesn’t meet our plan then reality is not at fault; our expectations are at fault and we must change them to adapt to our actual reality. The problem is that this is less clear than the problem of an inaccurate map. In that case we can physically see and experience the territory and know that the map is wrong. With a plan things become a lot more abstract. We experience a reality that doesn’t meet the plan but then that moment in time is gone. We don’t have a three dimensional physical effect to deal with that we can see, hear or feel and humans are not very good at dealing with abstraction.

For example, we can create a three dimensional sculpture and we can examine it slowly and then refine its shape using sensory feedback to determine if it pleases us and has reached the final level of desired result or not. That’s the great advantage of doing things in physical reality. Consider instead, music, which is time based and occurs from energy that oscillates air particles in certain ways to produce sound. Those energies dissipate into nothingness very quickly. We cannot grasp them and mould them as we can with a sculpture. Instead we have to repeat the music and refine it with each repetition. A time based plan is similar to music in that time dissipates very quickly. We cannot go back and refine the past. We must learn from what occurred on the first enactment and use it to refine the next playing. Unfortunately, with most plans, we do not repeat them and so we rarely refine things to perfection as we can do with music.

Planning a complex series of processes that you have never done before or never combined in that particular way before and expecting to be accurate is farcical. You will never do it. As with goal-setting, you can only guarantee delivery of things that you already have the excess of capability to deliver. You can plan out small activities that you have done time and time again with great accuracy but you can’t do that for a long series of items, many of which you have never done before. In this case forget planning to forecast an accurate endpoint and instead focus on planning to design an appropriate process for getting things done. Next focus on the real problem-solving: identifying and then getting beyond the barriers to progress.

If you ever stop to analyze why a previous plan failed then it is usually due to the fact that it didn’t take into account the barriers to progress that actually occurred. Unexpected and unforeseen accidents can throw any plan out of the window but outside of that most plans go wrong for the following reasons:

• The original problem was not specified accurately enough and hence inappropriate solutions were pursued.
• The design of the final result was not defined sufficiently well before commencing and required changes along the way, or sometimes completion becomes impossible due to having no real solution.
• The preparation needed to carry out the work was not accounted for properly.
• The resources needed were not available or else the lack was not accounted for.

It’s annoying not to meet a plan but creating a new plan only offers the illusion of a solution and progress. Creating a new plan feels like problem-solving and it feels like action. It brings emotional relief because it creates a belief that things will now be fine. It creates a belief that we can do something and that we can have what we want. It makes us feel as if we have achieved certainty.

It’s solving the problems along the way that truly matters. A better approach is to create a process design that will create the exact result that you want, as far as it is possible to guarantee. Refine the design to make sure that it addresses the real problem and that a full solution is possible. Determine what factors will prove difficult to solve and attempt to resolve those issues in advance. Determine what resources will be needed and ensure that they can be provided for when necessary.

If the overall solution is good, then a good process design can be created. These are the things that make the job possible in reality. Forget the fantasy element of planning and instead put your faith into your solutions and accept that the quickest way to get something done (the real desired result) is to implement the design and remove barriers to progress as efficiently and effectively as you can. Delusional predictions just set up desires that cannot be fulfilled and that will cause stress and unhappiness and make you feel inadequate. You don’t need to burden yourself with that kind of trouble just for the quick fix of another fantasy plan.

Related Articles:

The ‘How To Do’ List

The Journey

The Common Mistake with Getting Things Done: Lack of Preparation
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[Photo by Patti]

One of the most difficult types of thing to learn is a new skill that requires the development of body and mind, for example, learning an instrument, learning to draw or paint, learning a ball game, learning to dance, learning to speak a new language, learning to sing and so on.

One of the principal difficulties is that these are analog activities. They require the development of subtle nuances in capability in order to achieve refined levels of performance. Very often, absolute and perfect results don’t exist. Results are generally judged relative to previous performance or relative to the performance of other people or things. When starting to learn a new skill a person’s initial abilities are often very low and very crude because they have developed no refinement and little ability to discern good and bad results. It is very hard for a beginner to quickly achieve a refined ability. When you start out you are like a child learning to write. You hold the pencil in your fist and you create crude and scratchy writing because you have no refinement. Over time you can hold the pencil more gently and you can write with increasing accuracy and consistency. You have to go through this process each time that you learn a new ‘motor’ skill.

A good way to get through this initial stage more easily is to exaggerate actions and results deliberately. Through exaggeration you can quickly build up experience of operating at the extremes of either your own personal capabilities or of the extreme physical limits possible for an activity. This sets up an endpoint marker and then crude distinctions between minimal effort, movement or result and the extremes can be more readily perceived, which helps to develop refinement of skills much quicker.

When we start off learning a new skill we often quickly come up against personal limits that lead to frustration because we can’t achieve what we desire. Development can become constrained by only working within existing low level abilities because we don’t want to feel bad by continuously running up against personal limits and hence feeling inadequate. This can make progress very slow because we don’t want to take risks, we don’t want to fail and we don’t want to end up humiliated. By accepting exaggeration as a way of quickly testing and experiencing limits we step outside of the comfort zone and experiment and discover what’s possible. Ludicrous imitation, exaggeration and mimicry can teach us a lot. It’s a form of play that reveals new things in a fun way. It allows us to break free of constraints by accepting that we’re just going to mess about and explore.

Here are some examples of how I have used exaggeration to develop enhanced abilities very quickly:

Playing guitar - When I practice I tend to play very loudly and very hard. This doesn’t always sound pretty but it demands the development of more power plucking and strumming as well as more accurate fingering in order to play loudly. This excess of capacity allows me to perform in public at a lower level, which now sounds pretty but which is much stronger than I would have played if I hadn’t exaggerated the piece previously.

I also exaggerate to very slow extremes sometimes when learning something new that is difficult to put together. This gives me the time to consciously think through the movements of the left and right hand just before doing them whilst ensuring that the rhythm is correct and consistent albeit slow. This allows me to build ‘finger memory’ (unconscious competence) much quicker because I program my abilities correctly from the start.

Drawing portraits - I used to do a lot of drawing and painting of portraits. It’s quite a tricky skill to create an accurate representation of a person’s face on paper. My abilities stepped up a gear when I learned how to draw caricatures. When you create caricatures you must search out the unusual features and the variations from the norm and exaggerate them for comic effect. This focus on extreme possibilities allowed me to refine my abilities with drawing normal portraits because it enhanced by ability to discern what specific things to look out for that define a person’s face and their relative positioning.

Hip-Hop Dancing - I was a bit uptight when I began to learn hip-hop dancing. I learned the moves but I had nothing like the panache of my teacher. I felt uncomfortable about ‘going for it’ and so in order to develop my style I decided to exaggerate my moves. I felt ludicrous and in the beginning I looked ludicrous (I practiced at home in front of a mirror) but I got a good idea of the possibilities and of the effect upon the outward appearance of my dancing. It then became easier to step things down a notch to a more comfortable level but which gave an overall enhancement.

Speaking Languages - I learned French at school and I didn’t put much effort into speaking it with a proper accent. Then one day many, many years ago, I saw a TV program where a French politician or diplomat was interviewed and he spoke English with an impeccable and posh English accent. It really took me aback because I had never experienced this before. I was deeply impressed with the man because he seemed so English. The lack of accent stripped away my normal judgement and (at that time) prejudices. I felt enormous empathy with the guy because he clearly had taken a lot of effort to speak so well and I developed the conception that he must love the English in order to make such an effort (I had no proof of that but that’s what I felt). Consequently, I wanted to speak French and sound like a Frenchman.

I don’t know how it is in the States but in England pretty much everyone can speak English with a ridiculous French accent if they’re in the mood. We therefore know how to pronounce vowel sounds and consonant sounds in the French way but we tend to speak according to the English interpretation of how the French words should sound when written and not in the French way. I guess that most nationalities do this, hence the dreadful accents that we hear. When I chose to improve my French accent I simply decided to speak French with a ridiculous French accent. It felt ludicrous and I felt like I was making fun but French people commented on how good my accent was! By throwing in a few appropriately timed gallic shrugs I could pass myself off as a native (only kidding)

Problem-Solving and Decision-Making - We can also use exaggeration to gain an understanding of difficult concepts or concepts where the difference between on condition and another seems to small to discern any effect. I learned this from my first job as a fifteen year old helping out at a auto restoration workshop. I used to ask my boss, Nick Topliss, about things that I observed on cars and he would explain the engineering principles behind them. One time I asked him why it was that racing cars of the nineteen twenties era had such enormous wheels and yet modern cars had much smaller wheels. He told me that bigger wheels give a smoother ride but it didn’t make any sense to me; “A wheel is a wheel,” I thought, “They are all smooth.” Nick explained that in order to understand engineering concepts that it is often beneficial to exaggerate things to extremes in order to see the relative difference more clearly.

In this case he told me to imagine a piece of very rough ground to travel across full of bumps and holes. Next he told me to imagine a very small wheel going across that terrain. It would go up and down affected by almost every undulation. It would give a very bumpy ride. He then told me to imagine a huge wheel as tall as a house, or even bigger. Next I had to imagine it passing over the same bumpy terrain. This time the huge size of the wheel would mean that it wouldn’t be affected by every bump and hole. It would ‘bridge over’ holes and consequently the overall undulations of the axle would be a lot less than for the small wheel. A smoother ride would be the result. By scaling back to more normal sizes the general principle that a large wheel gives an advantage over a small wheel for creating a smoother ride still holds true.

I still use this principle of exaggeration for making-decisions on courses of action where upfront the differences seem minor but, when exaggerated and perhaps projected into the future, the results and impact of those differences become much clearer.

In summary, the process of exaggeration forces you to build an ‘excess’ of capability or an enhanced understanding of a concept. Since you can only do what is possible for you to do then building an excess of capability makes you more resourceful and it makes you more competent. When you have a lot of competence you get the natural side-effect of confidence and when you perform well within your capabilities then you can have high-confidence in your abilities and in your ability to recover from minor problems.

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We grow up conditioned to obey. The willingness to obey is possibly an evolved trait as human babies are so relatively helpless and require far more education, training and development than other mammals. The children that obey adult guidance, designed to avoid risk and disaster, have a higher likelihood of survival. Unfortunately, the need to get quick and instantaneous results when children are at risk often involves a lot of negative motivation through shouting and scolding. Because it works so well it often becomes the normal method of control when control is immediately wanted. This is a real case where what’s easy in the beginning becomes difficult and what’s difficult in the beginning becomes easy. Through overtly controlling children we can get instantaneous relief from difficulties on a daily basis but we tend not to encourage children to develop the ability to take responsibility for making their own decisions and especially for accepting and dealing with the consequences when things don’t turn out as desired. The result is that most people end up very dependent and needy.

The majority of us are raised to be dependent. We just follow the crowd with a herd mentality and it can work in terms of ‘getting by’ and not ending up in desperate straights but it doesn’t create a satisfying way of living. We end up feeling controlled and we end up with little understanding or capability in what it takes to exercise personal control. In wealthy and advanced nations it has become easier and easier to fulfill basic survival needs and so we become more and more interested in fulfilling our higher level aspirations. We will never do that by remaining needy and dependent. To achieve full maturity as an adult one must be capable of taking full responsibility for personal decisions and actions. In the beginning that’s very hard because it’s risky, it’s uncertain, it’s unknown and it can prove unpopular with the people you are close to.

Independence requires setting your own course, choosing your own parameters for what’s right or wrong, what’s good or bad, what’s sensible or foolish. That means ’stepping out of line’ initially. It means taking risks and it especially means taking personal responsibility for decisions, actions and for dealing with the consequences of those actions.

If thinking and acting with independent thought is something new for you then I recommend taking a gentle and experimental approach to it. Your purpose is to find better ways of thinking and acting in order to solve problems better. It’s not necessary, or favorable, to lunge into huge changes. Reflect upon what you are not getting and what you want to have and what changes in thinking or action would be necessary to get what you want and experiment with that. If it works you’ll feel encouraged to do more.

For example: As I grew up I was barked at a lot by the people around me. It was all designed to get me to behave as desired by whoever was barking at me. The shouting got an immediate reaction from me and the fears of being put down in no uncertain terms if I didn’t behave as desired meant that I did as I was told. I ended up with a very reactive mindset. I was almost unable to make decisions by myself because I had no training in it. I just followed instructions. I also had the extra problem that the demands and rules of the people around me often conflicted. On one day for one person I might have to behave in a certain way and then the next day (sometimes the next moment) I had to behave in a different way for someone else, sometimes the completely opposite way. The rules seemed random and indecipherable and I spent a lot of time feeling perplexed and confused. I had no good understanding of how to behave and very little confidence. I became a sucker for seeking approval from other people at almost all times and consequently I was easily manipulated by those willing to exercise control over me.

This caused me a lot of bother and I really didn’t feel good about myself. It became clear that adapting myself to fit in with and to get the approval of whoever I was dealing with was corrupting me. It prevented me from behaving consistently and it prevented me from behaving with personal integrity, i.e. I was not true to myself. My need for approval became a monster that created continuous turmoil in my life.

After reading Stephen Covey’s book, “The 7-Habits of Successful People” I came across the idea that if you allow other people to be responsible for making things work for you and for making you happy then you will usually feel nervous and unhappy because you have no control over the outcome. I don’t recall if he expressed it as neediness but, in effect, that was the mechanism at the heart of what he was referring to.

I saw the logic of his point and so from that point on I realized that I had to take responsibility for setting up my own rules and guiding principles in life. I started off quite simply and said to myself, “I never act in ways that are deliberately designed to upset other people and so if someone I deal with is already upset then it’s not through anything that I did. Consequently, if that person feels bad then that’s not because of me. I don’t have to respond and accommodate them just to make them feel better. If disapproval occurs because I’m not willing to make things right for that person then I now accept that. I haven’t done anything wrong so I don’t have to take responsibility for fixing things.”

This was a far superior interpretation of events and a much better attitude to adopt but it was a departure from my previous thinking and behavior where I accepted that I was the problem and that I was responsible for making the other person feel better (a fast ticket to becoming a victim of the whims of everyone around me). I didn’t make any declarations to anyone that I was changing my ways. I just quietly introduced this new approach when someone tried to palm off some bad feeling onto me and a desire for me to instantly provide some form of relief. I wasn’t negative or aggressive, instead I was just ducking the punches - something that I had never done before. The people who used to give me trouble now found it difficult to land a blow on me and so they gave up or found someone else to use as a punchbag.

It took a while to implement this approach and I initially did it for situations where the intensity of emotions created was not very high. It would not have worked for a highly emotionally charged situation right from the outset. I was too conditioned to respond instantly to outbursts. By working on the lower level stuff and showing that I was no longer easily manipulated I started to condition other people to the fact that outbursts would have less impact on me. Some people didn’t like that and in a few last ditch efforts would really come down on me but by this time I was already sufficiently experienced not to give in easily and revert back to my old reactions. I was getting better results and I felt good about myself because I was no longer a victim. I had broken the back of my need for approval.

I didn’t refuse to help people and I still cared about how they felt but I refused to take responsibility for how they felt and for solving problems that I didn’t initiate and that I didn’t want end up answerable for. The important thing was not to be a willing recipient of the emotional ‘poison’ that others tried to pass on to me and not to keep accepting responsibility for solving other people’s problems (more problems for me and also the additional risk of disappointing others if I failed to come through, which just cranked up my overall stress levels even further).

It’s quite a thing to experience such a change and it wasn’t so difficult in the end. It feels great to ‘be your own person’ and decide for yourself what’s right or wrong, good or bad, sensible or foolish. What is more is that other people begin to respect you more. Instead of acting feebly and irresolutely you can act with courage and with confidence. You accept that you can’t please all of the people all of the time and that to attempt to do so is foolish. It is far better to cast yourself in your own mold rather than to try to fit into the molds of other people.

It takes courage to give up being needy. It’s so much easier to let other people be responsible because then we can blame them when things don’t work out for us. We don’t get what we want but as a relief we can say, “It wasn’t my fault” and for a lot of people this becomes a default condition. You can live life that way but you end up living a very reactive life and a very unfulfilling life because you don’t take action nor attempt to control efforts to get what you want.

The courage necessary becomes easier to implement once you understand the mechanism of neediness (making someone else responsible for fulfilling your desires) and the negative effect that it has on your emotional well-being and your ability to achieve fulfillment. Taking responsibility for fulfilling your own desires is easy in principle but in practice it can prove difficult in the beginning because you have to experiment and learn. That means making mistakes and sometimes taking losses. Most of us don’t want to do that but that is a necessary requirement to move from immature, dependent and needy thought and action to mature, independent and self-controlled thought and action. It’s well worth the effort because you will receive long-lasting contentment and fulfillment that you will never find by remaining dependent and needy.

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Love is a mysterious thing mostly because few people ever make the effort to properly define what love means, what it encompasses and how it can be fulfilled. For those few people willing to make that effort they generally find that not a single person on the planet has the same interpretation and definition of love and all of its nuances. When you don’t, or can’t define what you desire properly then the chances of fulfilling those desires are significantly reduced. Add into the mix the fact that many people have ‘a need to be loved’ which means that only through another person’s actions can they feel fulfilled in love, then the odds of finding and sustaining the happy, cheerful, trusting and supportive love that most of us desire drop off close to zero.

With such vagueness and obscurity built into the whole process plus the choice that ‘to feel loved’ depends upon the actions of other people it is no wonder that so many people feel unloved.

To turn this around you have to reclaim control. You need to sit down and think about what love really means to you and why it’s important and what makes up love. This is difficult because love can be an action, a feeling, and a description. We also have different kinds of love; the love for parents is different to that for friends or a lover or siblings. It is a complicated issue made worse by using a very vague concept to describe a whole set of intricate desires and processes.

On top of this you next have to consider whether your concepts and desires for love are actually possible and likely. There’s a great deal of idealization involved in romantic love that creates not only high expectations but that can often cause us to expect the impossible (or highly unfeasible) to happen. The fantasies created in poems, songs, plays, books, and films can generate wonderful and touching emotions but, and somewhat sadly, it is important to retain a realistic perspective on things. As much as I would like those things to come true, reality and fantasy are very different beasts and the reality is that if you set your heart’s desire upon achieving the impossible or near impossible then you will end up feeling disappointed and possibly miserable for a lot of the time.

How Neediness Kills the Passion

If you are a needy person in a relationship then that probably occurs because you transfer responsibility for feeling good to your partner. If they come through for you then you feel good and if they don’t then you feel bad. When you feel bad you then start to look for ways to get the other person to fulfill your desires for you. Whatever you do is a form of manipulation. It might be done in a negative way with disapproval, anger, resentment, bitterness or it might be done in a helpless way by getting sad, depressed and desperate.

The great problem with this kind of behavior is that it never solves the real problem, which is that you have created a need that can only be satisfied by someone else. Instead it creates a lot obligation for the other person and when you create an obligation for someone else you end up creating a need for that person by return. In this case the other person now has a need to ‘keep you happy’ which creates a desire for which the outcome is controlled by you. Even strong and independent persons can be dragged down into dependency and neurotic and immobilizing behavior if they have a partner who is needy and hence imposes obligations (and often impossible expectations) upon the other person. In the end the open, free and happy love that you started off with is killed by needs and obligations. It’s happened repeatedly in my love life and I see it often in the love lives of good friends.

As always, the people with fewest rules are happiest. The more rules you apply for what is acceptable behavior and what is not then the more constraints you apply. If you do too much of this then you bind the other person so that they no longer have freedom to move. You cage and stunt that person. That person might care about you very much but the impossibility of fulfilling all needs and all rules all of the time creates a lot of negative emotion and this kills that cheerful loving that we all want and that we all start out with but that often peters away.

Reclaiming Love in Your Life

When you feel disappointed that someone didn’t do something for you in the way that you would have liked then stop and think about that. Here are the questions that you need to consider in order to analyze the problem and then come up with alternative approaches.

1. What desire did I have that I wanted the other person to fulfill and that didn’t happen?
2. Why is that desire important to me? What fulfillment do I get from it?
3. Is that desire possible to fulfill?
4. Can I achieve that fulfillment in other ways that I can control by my own actions?
5. What specifically would I need to do to create that fulfillment by myself?
6. What process would I have to go through to create that fulfillment?
7. What are the most difficult things that I have to do to create that fulfillment?
8. Am I willing to do those things? (If the answer is no then give up the desire or accept that fulfillment will only come on rare occasions when someone else is willing to do that for you)
9. What is my new desire?

Admittedly, this is a somewhat tedious process to go through each and every time that you feel disappointed or somehow unloved but it is definitely worth doing for a few times because of the following reasons:
A. You will probably surprise yourself about your desires and that awareness can really make you sit up and think, “My word, I really have some nonsensical desires.”
B. You will probably find that a lot of your desires are impossible or almost impossible for someone else to fulfill. This will make you more realistic about your expectations and make you a lot more sympathetic towards those who you seek love from.
C. You can start to understand what kind of fulfillment you are really seeking rather than the instant gratification of a quick fix loving action from someone else.
D. You will begin to care less about how other people behave towards you and will instead think much more about how you behave towards other people.

The final point is one of the principle benefits of taking a while to stop and think about issues of love and neediness. Instead of attempting to slowly unravel and resolve the whole tricky problem it soon becomes apparent that a much easier, better and robust approach is to junk the whole complicated mess and instead simplify your rules for love and reduce as much as possible the dependency upon other people to fulfill them.

This turns things around. It puts you in control, it makes love possible, it makes love realistic. Idealized love is a beautiful concept but on a regular basis it doesn’t stand up to the rigors of pragmatic living.

An Alternative Approach to Loving

Once you think in-depth about love and what it means for you and what is possible then you will probably find yourself feeling a certain measure of relief. The reason for this is that it’s really not much fun waiting for other people to fulfill your desires for love in your life. Although it’s nice to feel loved it’s also nice to give love and to do loving things for other people. This is something that you can control and if you do it right then you can feel good just from doing loving things for other people. The best way to carry this out is to do it because it pleases you to do it and not because you want something in return. If you want something in return then you introduce obligation and you will end up feeling disappointed and later resentful.

When you remove the fog of love and when you remove the dependency and neediness that afflicts so many of us in our love relationships then after a while you will receive many benefits. You will give and help generously to other people simply because it fulfills you do so regardless of the reaction from other people. Not everyone is capable of receiving loving actions and support often because they think that it demands reciprocation that they don’t want to give and obligation that they don’t want to fulfill. On the reverse, some people will simply take, take and take (please read this related article). So you do need to exercise some discretion over who you are generous with in order not to end up obligated into giving, which subsequently kills free love. After a while though you will come across people who are on the same wavelength as you and who tend to reciprocate kind and loving actions back to you without obligation. Those are the people to hang out with.

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Two of the biggest problems that stops people from getting what they want are that they don’t properly define what they want and nor do they properly define what the problems are that prevent them from getting what they want. Instead, driven by desires and a need for instant gratification they start out with half-baked ideas on how to get the result that they want only to find that their method for doing so is woefully inadequate or that the result that they create is not the result that gives them what they wanted in the first place.

Consequently, if we want to get excellent results in life we must design excellent solutions. Again, this is difficult for many people to accept in the beginning because instead of rushing into action we must curtail our impulses in order to make sure that we don’t waste effort and end up worse off than we were before.

Problem Solving

The root cause of most personal problems lies in a desire. We create either an objective desire, an expectation, a need or a belief that we wish to fulfill. Our inability to fulfill the desire creates negative emotions and we respond to those negative emotions with a broad spectrum of behaviors. Often we don’t like those behaviors because they so rarely solve the root cause and instead the merely defer resolution often indefinitely. Attempting to manage the behavior will almost always result in failure because the symptom still exists and continues to stimulate some form of response. By giving up on the desire we can eliminate the root cause and immediately the symptom stops and no need for a response is necessary.

Sometimes we cannot realistically eliminate the cause of a problem for example, if I consider feeding myself as a problem then the only way to eliminate the cause of that need (the energy requirements of my body) is to cease my life. That’s a little too drastic for me so the next thing to do is to manage the cause and the desires surrounding it effectively and then to develop solutions and systems of implementation. In this case, setting my desires to eat only what I need for good health and not to develop very expensive tastes that require a lot of time and money to satisfy. Implementation comes down to creating a diet and menu that satisfies my basic needs and my higher needs in a way that balances the sacrifice of time, effort and money against levels of satisfaction.

Identifying the Problem

The most important thing about problem solving is to make sure that the real problem is identified and resolved. This requires some thought because many people identify and work upon the wrong cause of a problem and consequently never resolve things properly. We very often become aware of a problem because we need to respond to something. For example, imagine you are sat at a desk on a hot day with a lot of loose-leaf papers lying around. It’s hot and so you open the window. Suddenly, the weather changes and a wind blows into the room. All of the papers get disturbed and start blowing around. This is a problem for you and so you respond by rushing around collecting the papers and stacking them on the desk - where they proceed to get blown away again. After a few minutes of this you realize that things aren’t getting any better and so you shut the window. The wind disappears, the papers settle and you can put things back to normal.

In that example the problem seemed to be ‘papers blowing around’ but it was not the true problem. The wind was the root cause of the problem and ‘papers blowing around’ was a symptom of that problem. The response was to dash about gathering up papers but this proved a never-ending task because the root cause of the problem - the blowing wind - was not stopped. Only by stopping the root cause at its source (by shutting the window) was the symptom (papers blowing around) eliminated and that resulted in no further response once the papers were collected again.

In the case of common problem difficulties it is usually a lack of ability that is the root cause of the problem. For example, if you set an objective desire such as “I want to own a home” and you cannot deliver that desire immediately then your response is to feel bad due to the symptom, a lack of money. The cause of the symptom is actually your current inability to earn and to keep sufficient money to buy a home. The only way that you can deliver the desire is to increase your ability to earn and to keep money.

Specifying the Solution

Once the root cause of the problem has been clearly identified solutions often become apparent. Sometimes the desire is recognized as being either impossible to fulfill, in which case it should be thrown away as to keep wanting the impossible will only lead to depression and despair, or else the desire is recognized as no longer appropriate. Sometimes we think that obtaining something will lead to fulfillment but then find out that this probably won’t happen so although it might be possible to fulfill the desire it is deemed as not worth pursuing, in which case it can be thrown away.

For those desires that we still want to pursue but cannot yet deliver the result the solution usually lies in developing greater capabilities. Although we often desire objects and other end results in truth we actually desire the inherent competency that allows us to deliver almost any result that we care to imagine. Consequently, developing competency and creating high levels of control over the self and over circumstances is what lies at the heart of what drives us. Personal growth leads to the deepest levels of satisfaction because we build our resourcefulness and the power to control our outcomes.

We can start coming up with a solution by asking the question, “What process will most likely lead to the fulfillment of this desire?” The crucial part of that question is the word ‘process’ as this is the part that most people overlook. It is a focus on processes and not results that makes the path to getting what we want so much easier. Results come as by-product of processes; the better the process and the better its execution, the better the result. Focusing on results causes us to focus on what we don’t have right now and that in turn generates negative emotions and attitudinal resistance to getting things done. Focusing on processes causes us to focus on what we can do right now and leads to resourceful action that creates positive emotions and leads to getting things done.

Side note

A lot of goal-setting advice tells you to specify the result that you want in incredible detail so that you can visualize it very, very clearly and the advice often tells you to specify exactly when you will have the end result. I disagree with this method very strongly. I’m not saying that it doesn’t work but I have found it to be highly ineffective to the point of being counterproductive. Such a method focuses too much upon the result and it sets up very high expectations. If the desired result is a long way away from being capable of delivery immediately or in the very near future then this sets up a whole host of impossible to have desires and expectations. This designs difficulty into the whole process. Set-points are created that will only generate negative emotions because the difference between desire and reality is so great. I personally have never fulfilled a goal set in such a method. I usually ended up feeling miserable, blocked and in great conflict with myself. I usually ended up quitting in order to avoid facing up to my own personal inadequacies.

I now take the opposite approach. I focus on developing capabilities at things that I am interested in. I take incremental steps forward and build ability. From this ability I can deliver results. I accept the results that I end up with because realistically I can expect nothing more from myself than what is possible for me to deliver at that given moment. Because I focus on developing my capabilities and upon performing processes better and better the net effect is that my results get better and better. It is incredibly difficult (almost to the point of impossibility) to specify an exact result and to deliver it on time unless you already have the excess of capability to deliver it. I suggest that you don’t burden yourself with such a load as it will only deter you.

Related articles:

Pinnacle Goal Setting Doesn’t Work

Why ‘Why’ Often Doesn’t Help

Formulating a Better Question

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[Photo by mushanga]