"To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of
being
wrong."---Joseph Chilton Pierce
The mind is an amazing piece of machinery. It sees
a situation, takes all of the experience we have, and
tries to fit our experience to that situation. This is a
good thing - most of the time. When you are trying
to solve problems, your mind will zero in on answers
that you have already experienced and apply them to
the existing problem.
Sometimes, however, this "experience model" is not
an optimum way to view life. It gets us into trouble
when we start to stereotype people because of one
incident. It also can block creativity and our ability
to generate new ideas. That can be a real problem if
the present situation cannot be resolved by tried and
true solutions.
Breaking our minds out of this "experience model"
requires some work and time. In this fast-paced,
stress-filled world, my guess is that it is not usually
the effort that keeps us from looking for more
creative solutions, it's the time involved. It is so
much easier to use the first solution your mind
settles on, even if that is not the optimum idea. The
irony here is that the second or third solution you
come up with is very often the better solution and
may be one that will save you time in the long-term.
The next time you have a problem, try this. First,
ask yourself what the underlying problem is. Ask
yourself what logical assumptions you can make
about the causes of the problem. Then ask yourself
what else could have caused the problem. Allowing
yourself some time to come up with additional causes
can bring about solutions that actually have some
impact.
Recently I was asked to do some customer service
training. When I asked a few more questions about
what was happening at this business, it became
apparent that the underlying problem was not that
the staff needed to be trained on customer service
as much as they needed to learn how to deal with
changes that were affecting morale. If I hadn't
asked, I would have provided training that would not
resolve anything.
After you have a handle on the causes of the
problem, spend some time coming up with a number
of solutions. Give yourself a target of at
least ten solutions. I'll predict that the first
two will be easy. The third and fourth will be very
difficult, but once you get to five, it gets easier.
You start to reach for silly ideas. Don't censor
yourself. Remember that the best solution usually
comes right after the silly one.
I've discussed convergent vs. divergent thinking
before. You have to give yourself permission to
come up with some really dumb ideas to get to the
golden ones. As anyone who knows me will attest, I
come up with dumb ideas all the time. Sometime I
have to have friends reel me back in, but most of the
time I'm able to do it myself. But the trick is to
suspend reality for just a few moments while you
allow your brain to make some new pathways.
Remember, though, that getting away from
that "experience model" requires practice. Keep it up
and you'll be pleasantly surprised at how much easier
it gets. Let me know what happens.
Last month's puzzle was: Can you find a
five letter word, which, when typed in upper-case,
reads the same upside down? The answer was
SWIMS. A gift certificate is on its way to Jayme
Hopkins.
This month, here's another one for you math-
capable people: Divide the number 100 into four
parts (call them A, B, C, and D) so that adding 4 to
A, subtracting 4 from B, dividing C by 4, and
multiplying D by 4 gives the same result. Email your
answer to me. I'll draw one winner from the correct
responses for a gift certificate at one of my favorite
restaurants.
