The Key to instantly improve your problem solving skills
The Key to instantly improve your problem solving skills
Every successful person is highly skilled at problem solving. Your problem solving ability catapults you into a new dimension of success. At work or in life, you are most remembered for the problems you solve than anything else you do. Think; Apple, Google, or Facebook and the problems they solved that secured their fame in human history forever.
So then, problem solving is a skill which when becomes a habit will begin to transform you individually and socially. Depending on how big the challenges are and the level of your problem solving expertise, there is always a certain amount of panic that kicks in. Now, panic leads to a closed mind and a body withdrawal from the challenge at hand. On the other hand, an open mind is critical to problem solving.
Since problem solving is a skill that when repeated over and over can become a habit and second nature to you, it can be improved. The first step on the road to improvement is to change your approach to solving problems. Forget about how you did it in the past and embrace this shift in thinking about solving problems. Because by doing the same old thing the same old way you’ll get nowhere, but will get the same old results.
Bringing down an impregnable fortress by using brute force never brought the expected victory whereas attacking it from all sides with all resources at hand will with time has always yielded results.
The new paradigm then is to stop looking for the right answers and start looking at the right questions. This will instantly change the results you get.
Now, don’t ask a close ended question which obviously answers yes/no and will not lead to a strong outcome. You uncover strong outcomes by asking questions which spark off multiple answers related or lateral.
For instance a question such as why is this happening to me? Will get you nowhere in your problem solving but questions such as what can I gain from this? Or, how can this be advantageous to me will open avenues sending you down pathways that’ll amaze you.
In a nutshell, it boils down to the art of asking right questions from multiple perspectives to create solutions you wouldn’t have thought of even if you sit on a mountain and ruminate for a 1000 years.
And the best thing about this is you don’t have to ask difficult or complex questions, on the contrary the simpler the better. Again, if the question is not simple or you can’t make it simpler then it is not the right question to ask. And immediately you know whether you are on the right track or off track.
Remember to ask a question that forces you to look at the problem from a different perspective and instead of looking hard for the right answer, focus on the right questions. It is true, but sad we often spend time looking for right answers for wrong questions and conclude that we lack problem solving skills when in reality we haven’t yet started on the problem solving journey.