How to Learn More from Problems in Your Life, Part 1
Dig deep into what’s already happened to find hidden gems
I will never forget a remark that one of my professors in graduate school once made. “In over 30 years of being a therapist,” he said, “I have not once encountered a client who did not expect me to wave a magic wand and make the world automatically rearrange itself so that their problem would go away.”
His statement, exaggerated for comic effect (or was it?), dramatizes a fundamental human desire: We want our lives to be better, and we want it to happen without any effort on our part.
But there’s only one problem with this: In my 60+ years on this planet, I have found the universe to be remarkably uncooperative in this respect. There is no magic wand. Improving your life takes effort.
Why learn from negative experiences?
Given that we must expend effort somewhere to make our lives better and also that we really, really don’t like having to do so, it makes sense to me that we would want to be very careful about where to place our effort.
I propose that mistakes and problems (which I will refer to, more generally, as negative experiences) are a good place to invest our effort. Here are some reasons why:
- Negative experiences naturally present themselves in our lives. They save us the work of having to decide where to spend our energy.
- Negative experiences almost always indicate that, somewhere, our knowledge (or self-knowledge) is faulty or incomplete. Even when we are in no way responsible for something bad that has happened (for example, the death of a loved one), there is something to be learned — often, something powerful or very important.
- Whatever we learn from negative experiences improves our future decision-making. When such experiences recur and we do better the next time, the benefit is obvious. Even if the same situation never occurs again, the learning still benefits us because we have improved something in our mental model of how the world works — and that improvement will contribute to better decisions in a variety of situations.
A technique for learning more from negative experiences
The sections that follow describe a technique that I use to learn—and not just to learn, but to learn more—from negative experiences.
Before beginning, two caveats are in order.
First, it is difficult to write about such a broad topic as “how to learn from negative experiences.” I invite you to use common sense and creativity to adapt this technique to fit your particular situation.
Whatever we learn from negative experiences
improves our future decision-making
Second, it is very important that you choose a “small” negative experience the first time you try this technique. Avoid problems that evoke strong emotions, as well as those that involve serious issues or have large consequences.
Instead, start with a small problem that you feel you can be objective about, preferably one that does not involve anyone but you. This will allow you to concentrate on learning the technique and discovering how to make it work for you. Continue using the technique on small problems until you feel you know it well. Then you will be ready to use it on more significant problems.
Step 1: Pay attention to the situation
I wish someone had told me this when I was much younger.
If you’re like me, you’d like for this technique to consist of three simple steps that you can apply almost without paying attention — boom, boom, and boom, problem solved.
Life doesn’t work that way. It just doesn’t.
We learn when neurons in the brain make new connections. This process is regulated by a neurotransmitter (a chemical produced by the brain to make nerve signals happen) called acetylcholine. In childhood, the part of the brain that makes this chemical (the nucleus basalis) is “switched on” all the time, which is why children naturally learn quickly and all the time.
This “easy learning” period ends just before children become teenagers. Research beginning in the 1990s on how adults recover from strokes revealed startling new information. The nucleus basalis does turn on in adulthood, but only in certain situations.
In adulthood, learning
requires sustained focus
on the subject being learned
One such situation is being surprised. And guess what? We are hard-wired to be surprised when we make a mistake. You could say that mistakes are Nature’s built-in teaching mechanism.
Surprise alone may be enough to teach us certain lessons — for example, to be careful with boiling water — but in many situations it’s not enough. Fortunately, the nucleus basalis also turns on (making it possible for learning to occur) when you direct sustained focus on a situation.
This is a biological fact: In adulthood, for most situations, learning requires sustained focus on the subject being learned.
So here is the actual work of step 1: Wake yourself up to the reality that learning will involve time, mental effort, and sustained focus.
Why is it important to consciously acknowledge this? Because we humans have an overpoweringly strong urge to avoid this kind of hard work.
Here’s a good way to start. Spend at least 15 seconds telling yourself the following:
“If I am going to learn from this experience, I must consciously focus on it. That means I must give it my undivided attention, and I must devote significant time and significant mental effort to this process.”
As I have said elsewhere, people do better when they understand why. You now know why it’s important to tell yourself this. Keeping this information in mind throughout this technique will increase the amount you learn from a negative experience.
Step 2: Objectively reconstruct the situation leading up to the negative experience
Negative experiences often trigger powerful emotions (anger, sadness, etc.) that cloud your thinking. For this reason, it’s important to begin this step by asking, “How am I feeling right now? Am I feeling any strong emotions that would prevent me from seeing things objectively?” If the answer is yes, consider waiting a while before proceeding.
Take a moment to read this step carefully. Notice that it is not asking you to remember the situation; It is asking you to objectively reconstruct it. This differs from simple remembering in two ways:
Being objective. This means to describe something in a neutral way, excluding emotions, judgmental statements, and statements of why somebody did something. (It’s very hard to do this, but any improvement you can make on this greatly improves the process.)
Notice that this step is asking you
to objectively reconstruct the situation
Here’s a technique you can try to make this easier: Imagine that the situation is actually a scene from a movie that is being filmed and that a police officer is watching. Now imagine the officer describing the events as sworn testimony in a courtroom, limiting herself to impersonal reports of all that she saw and heard.
Reconstructing the situation. Reconstructing differs from remembering in that it involves judgment and selection.
Here are some questions that you will probably ask yourself. Do I include this or not? Why? How far back in time do I go? And finally, Does this sequence of events make sense? and Do I have a reasonably clear picture of what happened?
(Too much theory — let’s have an example!)
Imagine the following situation:
I’m in an unfamiliar city, in a rental car, going to a location I had been to the day before. I’m making a right-hand turn (on my way to an Interstate on-ramp) when I look up and see that there’s a much closer on-ramp…straight through this intersection! I’m in a turn-only lane, traffic is heavy, and I’m forced to make the right-hand turn.
So I make the right-hand turn toward my destination, but I’m irritated at my mistake. I find myself thinking about it several times later that day. I just can’t believe I missed that on-ramp — it was right in front of me! (I’m so caught up in the mistake I’ve just made. Obviously, if I try to reconstruct the situation right now, I’ll have a hard time thinking about it clearly.)
The next morning at breakfast turns out to be a good time to think about what happened. After a good night’s sleep, the events seem so much more ordinary.
So, I ask myself, what did happen at that intersection? Here are the things I remember:
- I was driving toward a known destination.
- I was in the right-hand turn-only lane.
- Traffic was heavy.
- By the time I saw the sign, I couldn’t safely get to that on-ramp.
Here’s an important fact: Human beings usually make their decisions based on whatever information that easily comes to mind—and nothing else.
So far, that’s what I’ve done here. I’ve simply remembered what easily comes to mind about the situation. If I were to go on to the next step now, what I would learn from this situation would be little different from what I would learn without applying this technique.
Human beings usually make their decisions
based on whatever information that
easily comes to mind — and nothing else
For this technique to make a difference, I need to dig deeper. I need to make the effort to uncover new information that might be relevant to the situation. So I ask myself, “What else can I notice about this particular moment? Also, what happened before this that might be of interest?”
Here’s what I come up with about the moment itself:
- I was daydreaming while waiting to turn right. (I’m surprised to realize this.)
- Although I knew where I was going, I had only been there once before.
- There were actually two lanes turning right, and I was in the one on the extreme right.
Now it’s time for me to examine the earlier parts of the day. Moving backward in time, I realize that:
- Earlier in traffic, it’s already obvious that traffic is heavy.
- At the hotel, I missed something the checkout clerk said to me because I was thinking about the day ahead.
- At breakfast, I noticed that I was feeling tired.
- The night before, I was late getting to bed because I stayed late at a business dinner.
- The day before, I arrived at my destination without problem because I got my directions from my smartphone driving app.
What do all these observations mean? I don’t know yet. What I do know at this point is that they are extra information that I previously would not have had. Therefore, they likely hold the key to learning something new.
People make things more complicated: some guidelines
As you can see from the above example, the process of objectively reconstructing a situation is not straightforward. That’s true even when there’s only one person involved—you.
Things get even more complicated when people other are involved. For one thing, people’s emotions get involved (after all I’ve done, how dare he…!), and that can cloud your thinking. Also, the human brain has an almost overwhelming desire to turn an observable fact (that stranger didn’t answer when I asked him a question) into a story that is often inaccurate (I could tell that he thought he was too good to talk to the likes of me).
Question your assumptions,
because one visible behavior
can have many underlying causes
Here are some things to keep in mind as you attempt to describe the details of a situation objectively:
- Approach this analysis of the situation with an attitude of detached curiosity. As I described earlier, imagining the events as a movie scene being filmed and yourself as a police officer observing the action can help you do this.
- Question any assumptions you make, especially those about why someone else did something, and try to use as few of them as possible. This is because people are complicated, and one visible behavior can have many underlying causes. (For example, I know a man who complains loudly when he sees his partner doing something he thinks is dangerous. He’s not criticizing—he’s frightened because he’s imagining his partner being injured, and he’s so upset that he doesn’t remember to control the loudness of his voice.)
- Work extra hard to be honest about how and how much you contributed to the overall situation. It’s human nature to see ourselves as being right and other people as being wrong, but denying our legitimate contribution to a problem removes valuable information that could make this technique work better.
- Also, keep in mind that in some cases, “contributing to the situation” has nothing to do with being in the wrong. For example, a woman who stays in an abusive relationship may contribute to the situation by being unassertive—that’s valuable information to record—but it doesn’t make her responsible in any way for being abused.
What’s ahead
The process of learning more from your mistakes, as you have learned, takes effort. Here are the steps so far:
Step 1: Recognize that to get a better outcome, you will need to devote time, mental effort, and sustained focus throughout this technique.
Step 2: Build a detailed, objective view of all the factors that contributed to the resulting negative experience.
As a result, you’ve developed a more objective, more detailed picture of the factors that contributed to this negative experience.
In part 2 of this article, you will see how to use the work you’ve done in part 1:
- You’ll take a look at each of the factors that contributed to the resulting negative experience, search for alternative behaviors, and evaluate how each alternative might affect the final result.
- Once you’ve found something that you would like to do differently in the future, you’ll learn a little life hack that will greatly increase the probability that you will remember to perform this new behavior at the right time.
You’ve already done a lot of work—congratulations! However, there’s more to do, so you might want to pat yourself on the back and have a bit of a rest.
When you’re ready, part 2 of this article is waiting for you.
As always, thanks for listening.
Disclaimer
This post contains information, not advice. It’s up to you to decide whether or not trying the technique described here is a good idea for you. If you feel “stuck” or your problems feel serious, consider seeking counseling (see “What Is Therapy? FAQ”).
Handwriting font courtesy of Coert A. Wigbels, http://coert.com/. Thanks to Jann Alexander for her feedback.
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