When the SAME Problem Keeps Coming Up
Today we're going to talk about what to do when the same problem keeps coming up again and again.
It might be something that makes you stressed or upset. And intellectually, you're like, “Come on. This shouldn't upset me so much.”
But it's not translating to your feelings, and you still end up getting stressed or upset every time it.
Let me give you an example.
In my corporate job, I had a project that I was spearheading, and I would run a weekly working group meeting with five or eight people to move the project forward.
And every single week, without fail, I got so stressed about that meeting.
And I couldn't figure it out! No one was going to fire me. I was doing well. Everything was fine.
And yet, every time, a couple hours before this meeting, I wanted to jump out of a window because of how stressed I was.
So what was causing my stress? Remember, circumstances do not cause feelings.
So the cause of my stress was NOT the fact that the meeting existed. Or how much time I had to prepare beforehand. Or who was in the meeting.
All of those things are neutral circumstances that were NOT causing my stress.
My stress was coming from my thought about the meeting.
And my primary thought was, “I'm not prepared.” Which really stressed me out!
And I knew about coaching at this point. I knew that I'd found the thought that was causing my stress, and I tried to address it.
I tried to tell myself, “No, you are prepared. It's fine. You don't need to be that prepared. It's going to be okay.”
I tried so hard to address the “I'm not prepared” thought.
And it didn't work.
No matter what, I could not convince myself that it was going to be okay.
So here's what you need to do when you're trying to address that first level thought, and your brain is not having it.
Here's the secret: This thought did not come out of nowhere.
None of your thoughts are random. This thought was the end point of a whole chain of logic that my automatic brain had made up.
And since addressing the end point of that chain wasn't helping, I needed to back it up.
I needed to figure out what the previous steps in this logic chain were and address one of those previous assumptions.
Because if I can change an assumption a couple of steps beforehand, just like in an Excel model, I can change that input and it will flow all the way through.
And I'll have a totally different thought in the moment.
So how do you uncover the assumptions your brain is made without even telling you?
You have to treat it like a conversation with your automatic brain.
Here are three questions that I love to use to make my brain explain its assumptions to me:
What does that mean? Define your terms. Define your standards. Clear up all ambiguity.
Why is that a problem? So what? What’s the big deal?
Is that true? Are you sure about that?
So let's see what happened when I asked myself these three questions about the thought, “I'm not prepared for my weekly meeting.”
What does that mean? What does it mean to be prepared for this meeting?
And my brain told me, "If I was prepared, I would have a 30 page deck with new information. And I would spend the meeting presenting my findings. And I don't have that deck, or any new information. So I'm definitely not prepared."
(Clearly, this definition was a holdover from my management consulting days.)
Okay. We don’t have a deck or a speech for this meeting. Why is that a problem?
And my brain said, “It's a problem because my job is to make people happy and impress them.”
(A BIG holdover from my consulting days.)
Okay. Is that true? Is that still my job HERE?
And I really thought about this question. This wasn’t an instant process. I spent time looking at examples and really considering why I was here.
And I decided my job is not to make people happy or impress them.
My job is to advance an agenda. My job is to make something happen that I think NEEDS to happen but is not currently happening.
And once I changed that definition in my mind, and I put that lens on my work, that assumption flowed all the way through.
And immediately I had a different perspective on the meeting.
My automatic brain did the rest of the work for me:
I don't need to be presenting. In fact, I probably shouldn't just talk the whole time. We need to be working TOGETHER. We need to figure out what we need to do, and I need to ask questions and hold people accountable.
And in fact, if they're NOT happy with me, that's probably a good sign. Because if they had no resistance, I’m probably not advancing that strong of an agenda. A little bit of resistance and discomfort…is a GOOD sign.
As soon as I went upstream and addressed an earlier assumption that my brain had made and changed it… It flowed through, and the issue fixed itself.
And so if you find yourself having the same thing come up again and again…
And you're trying to address it at the “first thought” level and you're not having a lot of success…
You need to have a conversation with yourself and uncover some of the earlier assumptions that your brain has made
And if you want my help to do this work—
To uncover the assumptions quickly and effectively
And brainstorm new thoughts that you actually believe
And then, most importantly, practice and apply the new thought in the moment, so you actually seal in the new results.
Then come talk to me and let’s get started.
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