Problem Solving

How to Best Help People Solve Their Issues

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How do you listen to people open up about their issues without trying to solve them? How do you just comfort people?”

One of the first things a first referral counsellor learns is that you cannot solve other people’s problems for them. Even more so, you don’t want to solve their problems because what you might see as a solution for yourself is likely not a solution for them.

What you end up doing is creating a dependency relationship with someone who now has a scapegoat to blame when your solutions backfire on them.

You end up giving them permission to take the easy route of blaming you for their problems instead of learning how to solve their problems for themselves.

You don’t want that kind of monkey on your back because it could haunt you for life.

Most people want to be heard without judgment. The act of actively listening to them while validating their emotions and the struggles they are experiencing is often the only thing they want or need.

Being able to openly express oneself without fear of being misjudged for their struggles or how they deal with them is all the healing most people need most of the time. That opportunity often gives them enough space to hear themselves through your perspective and devise solutions for themselves by being able to speak freely about their problems.

If you sincerely want to help people solve their problems, you must understand that the best way to accomplish both your goal and theirs is to listen and acknowledge their struggles while validating their feelings and who they are as people.

You almost cannot help someone more thoroughly than by letting them know they matter. Most people only want to know that someone hears them and sees them as a living, breathing, independent human being with a core of reality all their own, just like how you think of yourself. People often only need assurance that they can achieve their goals if they apply themselves.

At most, you can offer ideas for where assistance is available, identify resources they may not be aware of, or repeat their statements to them in your own words. Often, simply saying something they said in different words is enough for them to see their problem with different eyes and in ways they can more easily identify solutions.

It may feel especially tough if you can spot what appears like a simple solution to you, that you would rather hand it to them so that you can continue with other matters, but it’s more important to realize how this is a learning process for both of you. Both of you can learn more about yourselves by allowing the process to evolve naturally and without trying to push it to a conclusion you see as the most optimal outcome.

A solution may appear simple to you, but you can’t know all the underlying variables, and many of which they often don’t recognize themselves. No matter how simple the solution may appear, they must find it themselves before it can succeed.

The challenge this creates for you, which you use to your benefit, is that it takes the focus off your desire to fix their problem for them quickly and puts you in a position of thinking about a strategy for helping them to see their problem from different perspectives, including how you imagine is a solution. As long as they can feel that they have identified their solution on their own and without being given instructions to follow by rote, they will be more able to apply their creativity when implementing their solution without holding you accountable for their failures.

I hope this helps you in helping others.

Cheerz

How did great inventors get ideas for their inventions?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How did great inventors manage to come up with the ideas of their inventions? Currently, even people who are smarter than the average are hardly able to do the same.”

Think about the last time you had an idea you thought was an excellent solution to a problem you were dealing with. Do you remember feeling frustrated with that problem and fixated on that problem while hoping a solution would present itself so that you didn’t have to deal with that problem again?

My guess is that almost no one goes through life without this experience. It may be true that you haven’t, but the odds are excellent that you will at some point in your life.

”Great inventors” are no different in this regard. They ponder issues, identify problems, and think about ways to devise solutions to those problems. The only difference is the kind of problems they solve.

Suppose you can solve one of the numerous problems facing the development of nuclear fusion as an energy source. In that case, you can be considered a genius for accomplishing that relatively small contribution to a more significant problem. If you can solve all the “little problems” that comprise the more substantial problem of nuclear fusion energy generation, you will become known throughout history as a “Great inventor.”

The only difference between the two is one’s problem-solving capacity. Some people are undeniably much better at solving certain classes of problems than others, but that doesn’t negate the value of the contributions of those who solve only one or a few aspects of a more significant problem because their solutions can contribute to the development of ideas that solve many problems at a time — including the much more substantial problem.

People of all levels of intelligence, from under-average to average to above-average to geniuses, contribute toward solving the massive problem of human evolution. All contributions are valuable, while people like Einstein are rare and always will be.

What we should be focusing on in society is to learn how to recognize budding geniuses and support them in their development so that they can maximize their contributions to society by achieving their potential.

Sadly, we live in a world which penalizes the gifted while wallowing in our crab psychology by the wilfully ignorant among us who drag down those whose gifts they envy. That’s a much bigger problem for society to resolve, and it will require all eight billion of us to recognize how severe that problem is.

In reality, Einstein-level geniuses may be rare, but they exist among the population at rates as high as one in every thousand humans. In a world of eight billion people, that means we have eight million Einsteins living among us whose genius is being pissed away because we don’t know how to create systems that encourage them to achieve their potential.

Our system is so corrupted by toxic forms of competition that we see in our politics how people forego their critical thinking skills or any form of objective analysis to select the most competent leaders to lead us into a brighter future. We choose monsters who would destroy us all and fill their pockets with money that will be useless to them if they succeed.

If we sincerely wish to live in a world that encourages great inventions by inventors, we must stop rewarding maliciously self-serving and destructive ignorance.