Our brains love to answer questions, love to solve for the unknown.
Sometimes when I am doing something new or challenging, I find myself asking “why is this so hard?” or “how come I’m not getting this?”.
If I pay attention, I notice thoughts like these start coming to me:
I’ve never been good at this.
It’s just so complicated.
I’m too old to learn new things.
These directions don’t make any sense!
I think a crazy person wrote this.
This stuff drives me nuts, always has, always will.
Thank you, brain… umm, sorta! I see that it has diligently gone to work on the questions I asked it, but I don’t like the answers and they certainly don’t make my work any easier.
Now what if, facing the same challenging or unfamiliar work, I caught myself and asked questions like these instead:
What do I already know that could help me understand this problem?
What are some others ways of looking at this?
How could I make this work interesting or fun?
What do I need to learn or understand to have this make sense to me?
If I knew the answer, what would it be?
What if I asked these questions, and then just got out of the way while answers started lighting up in my brain? It’s possible that life would be be a lot easier and a lot more fun.
I think I might be willing to try it.
Heck, what’s the worst that can happen? Oh wait, stop! Let me rephrase that question…