Old Jewish joke: Old man on a train, repeatedly complaining, “Oy, am I thirsty. Oy, am I thirsty.” Over and over. The other passengers are getting agitated.
Finally, a kind woman goes to the dining car, buys a bottle of water and gives it to the man. He drinks it all up and sits in silence. The passengers breathe out sighs of relief.
Then: “Oy, was I thirsty. Oy, was I thirsty.”
Ba dum bum.
The point is, we can get so fixated on our problems, they start appearing more interesting than any solutions.
The mind is a problem solving machine, after all, and gets antsy when there are no problems to solve. Just try meditating for 20 minutes if you doubt this — your mind will start swinging from branch to branch like a coked-out squirrel monkey.
The Neurology of Problem-Focus
According to our minds, problems are threats to be dealt with. And when you perceive threat, your neurology shifts into fight-or-flight mode.
In this state, it’s impossible to be creative, expansive, strategic, forward-thinking, or generous.
So when a person or a team is mired in problem-based thinking, your most powerful leverage is to shift them out of problem-focus.
Don’t Jump to the Solution
One mistake that people make is to hurry this process, and go directly into what seems like the opposite of focusing on a problem: focusing on the solution.
Coaches are prone to this error. “Oh, that’s your problem? Let’s talk about how to solve it.”
The trouble with this approach is it almost always leads to a suboptimal solution. Often, we’re trying to solve the wrong problem, or the wrong framing of the problem.
And jumping to looking for a solution assumes that the best we can do is get back to a state of “no more problem,” when a much higher bar might be “use the problem to achieve a better state of overall functioning.”
A better approach, the one my co-author Peter Bregman and I teach in You Can Change Other People (man, I wish we had titled it Bringing Out the Best in Others, but that’s water under the bridge; breathe, Howie, and release), is to shift from the problem to the Energizing Outcome.
That is, what would be such a cool future state that the person could look back and say, “I’m so glad I had this problem, because it led me to take action that transformed my life.”
Empathy and Context
But even that shift needs a little bit of foreplay.
If someone says, “My team is toxic and we’re playing politics rather than getting anything done, and it’s horrible,” don’t jump in with “And how would you like it to be instead?”
People need to know that you care, that you are witnessing their struggles, and that you understand them.
So before you started helping, start learning.
Ask your conversation partner to talk about the problem a bit. Ask for context. A little history. An example.
Keep this part of the conversation short — your goal isn’t to reinforce their problem-focus, but to earn the right to ask, “So, in a perfect world, what would you like instead?”
To get there, your partner has to feel understood and cared for.
Change Verb Tenses
One thing to avoid: empathizing so much that you reinforce how horrible and intractable the problem is.
One way to do this by subtly changing verb tenses, to create a break between the past and the future:
Them: “We’re barely civil to each other in meetings.”
You: “So you’ve been struggling to get along.”
Notice that their description is in the present tense, which implies that it will continue indefinitely.
And you’ve shifted to the present perfect continuous. (Thanks, Warriner’s Grammar in 9th grade English.)
You haven’t gone straight to the past:
You: “So you struggled to get along.”
That’s a disconnect, and you’re likely to get a response like: “No, you’re not listening — it’s still happening.”
Whereas shifting to “you’ve been struggling” triggers no such objection, but still allows for the possibility that it could cease.
Once you’ve built that bridge from problem to outcome, you can then guide your partner to imagine and get excited about that energizing outcome. We’ll see how to do this in upcoming editions of the Mindset Mastery Memo.
Want your team to hum, get things done, and have fun? Me too! Let's talk.