3 Steps to Solve Your Problems

May not be easy, but it’s worth it!

It’s hard to get out of your own way. The way you speak to yourself, view situations and handle hurdles, you tend to view them with a foggy perspective. You do this because it’s easier to make up excuses than accept the truth of what is happening. You can’t lose weight — it’s because you can’t afford a gym membership, right? You’re miserable with your job but you can’t seem to find a new one — it’s because you’re not qualified for the jobs you want, right?

The short answer is — you’re wrong!

How do you overcome this terrible habit?

Let’s be honest, you weren’t born telling yourself you can’t do things. When you were younger and fell, you got right back up trying again regardless of whether it was a dangerous or risky decision. And you didn’t care what others thought.

As you got older, it was a different story. You and/or society told you “no” and it changed your actions and decision-making. This trend continued and you’re now having to retrain your mind.

Retraining

There’s a three-step process before you tell yourself you can’t do something:

1. View your problem from a different perspective.

Think about it—if your best friend came to you with a problem of losing weight or wanting to become debt-free, but they said “I can’t,” how would you respond? As a friend, you would come with multiple things they can change, design a plan of attack, and come up with actionable items to start now so they can succeed in no time.

You can do this because there tend to be no biases. You don’t know the struggles they’ve endured, what they’ve tried and “failed” with, or all the times they convinced themselves they couldn’t do it. You’re viewing their problem from a different perspective. But, when you give up on yourself before you even start it’s because you know all the reasons for not starting in the first place.

However, you’re not an outlier! You can achieve what you want as well but you need to view your problem from a different perspective. Be your own best friend.

For example

If you wanted to become debt-free but claim you have no money to start the process then look at your bank statement. Don’t just view it and give up, look at it like a friend or stranger would. What do you spend money on? Why do you spend $100 or more on cable when all you do is watch Netflix or play video games. Are there some subscriptions you can pause for a few months? As a friend, you would be brutally honest and ask “why would you spend money every month on something you don’t use?” Ask those same questions to yourself.

When you’re able to look at the problem with fresh and unbias eyes, you tend to see clearly.

2. Reverse engineer your problem

Once you view it from a different point of view and discover all the things that can be done to solve the problem, you can now reverse engineer and decide how to implement those actionable items.

For example

You own a business and only cold call to generate leads. With cold calling, you close four sales per month and happen to get one sale closed through the website. You cold call 50 contacts per month. Your goal is to close 10 sales. If you double the cold call volume, to obtain the extra five sales, you may be unable to follow up on hot leads because you’re taking valuable time cold calling. You decide this may not be the best way to get more sales. How about attracting more people to the site?

Break it down

Your goal of 10 sales means you need two to three sales per week. Therefore, one of those sales per week could be through online means. Your idea is to increase social media engagement to potentially automate and generate some engagement on your online outlets making them warm leads or ready to buy when they call or you follow up with them.

The one sale per month you receive is from those that happen to search for your product or service. However, you haven’t updated your site in two years and only post once every few months when you remember to do so. Therefore, what actions do you need to take to generate more engagement to turn into warm leads, to then turn into sales? You can do campaigns, ads, email marketing, and the list goes on.

Sound overwhelming? Simplify

Start with one thing such as Facebook, set a goal of once a week to sit down and create posts to drive engagement. With a few posts created or in mind, you can then utilize apps to help automate them to post for you. These actions could bring you more leads. You then wouldn’t be calling cold leads hoping for interest. These potentials are warming up to your product or service based on what they saw and liked on your social media engagement.

Let’s try another example

If you don’t own a business then let’s use becoming debt-free again, in particular paying off your credit card. Using step one, you recognize you pay for unnecessary subscriptions and memberships. In addition, you spend upwards to $100 per week on your lunches. In the past you would justify as to why you would need these subscriptions or why you spend that much money on lunch per week, but now that you can see it from a different point of view you’re able to acknowledge that the money isn’t being spent wisely.

Once you recognize those numbers, simply reverse engineer and narrow it down to what actionable tasks per day will make it less daunting. By cutting out the extra subscriptions, it saves you $50 per month and you realize you can cut your lunch allowance to $50 per week as well. Meaning, you now have an extra $250 to spend towards your credit card payment.

Now, take that newfound number of $250 and calculate it to discover how long it will take you to pay off that credit card.

When you’re able to narrow your focus, all a sudden that mountain became a molehill.

3. Execute

This may be obvious but let’s be honest, we can plan and plan but we need execution to see results. Enough said!

Takeaways

Remember to view your problems (whether new or existing) with a fresh pair of eyes and an open mind.

Reverse engineer so the problem doesn’t seem bigger than it is.

Execute your plans.