How to Learn More from Problems in Your Life, Part 2
Brainstorming and experimentation will lead you to discover better ways to live your life
Everybody knows how to learn from mistakes, problems in their lives, and other negative experiences. But I’ve found that there’s almost always a way to learn more.
This article describes a technique that encourages you to think more clearly about a negative experience you’ve had and to discover and implement improvements that will make your life better in the future.
We’re now at the halfway point. If you haven’t already, you’ll need to read part 1 of this article before you proceed.
By carrying out steps 1 and 2 of this technique (which were covered in part 1), you’ve already gained several advantages over where you normally would be:
- Your attention is more focused and your thinking is clearer.
- You’ve described the negative experience you’re working on more objectively.
- You’ve uncovered more information than you would have in the past.
- You have a clearer picture of all the factors that contributed to the final outcome of this negative experience.
Now that you’ve carried out these steps from part 1, it’s time to get creative!
Step 3: Brainstorm alternate behaviors to find one or more changes that would result in better outcomes
If any step requires time, mental effort, and sustained focus (necessary characteristics I talked about in step 1 of this technique), it’s this one — but it is also the most interesting and rewarding step.
Imagine that you are a chef who is critiquing a dish that a student of yours has made. Maybe it doesn’t taste bad, but it doesn’t taste good either. So you go to the kitchen and lay out all the ingredients that your student used. And you say to yourself, “Where did this dish go wrong? What could I change that would make it better?”
This is a good analogy for where you are, here at the beginning of step 3. All the information and observations you have about your overall situation are your ingredients. Now it’s time to be curious about the role each one plays and what would happen if you removed it, changed it somehow, or substituted something different in its place.
Take a factor that contributed to the problem.
How would the outcome change if you removed it?
Substituted something different?
It’s important to set your expectations appropriately for this step. In the world of complex human problems (as in the world of improving an existing recipe), you may not be able to eliminate the problem. However, there’s almost always at least one way to improve the overall situation. Often, the best solution is a combination of small improvements.
One perfectly obvious way to proceed is to ask yourself the question, “If I had it all to do over again, what would I change?” I invite you to resist the temptation to do this because it falls into the “shallow thinking” trap of using only the information that easily comes to mind.
A better course of action is to be gently curious about the overall situation and to examine your newly-found information for opportunities to make improvements.
Often, the best solution is
a combination of small improvements
Returning to the analogy of a chef engaging in the creative act of improving a recipe:
What leaves a bad taste in your mouth? Look at the overall situation to uncover the final outcomes that were unpleasant for you (there may be more than one). If possible, subdivide each outcome into smaller components; you may find that you can solve one aspect of a problem even when you can’t solve the problem itself.
What could have caused that taste? In cooking, the final result is affected by both ingredients and cooking techniques. Here, you’re moving backward in time, starting at the unpleasant outcome and examining all the things that contributed to it eventually happening — both events (ingredients) and actions (cooking techniques). Both are candidates for “changing the recipe.”
To do a good job of learning from an unpleasant experience, you will examine and work with a number of candidate events and actions — the more, the better.
What ingredients do you have at hand? How might you combine them differently? Here, finally, is the very heart of this technique. You’re looking at a specific event or action that led to an unpleasant outcome. Now it’s time to look for alternatives. Here’s this event, you say to yourself. How could I have influenced this? And you say, Here’s this action that I took. What could I have done instead?
For each event and action you work with, examine as many alternatives as you can. Be curious about the situation, consider crazy ideas, and take your time. Not all solutions are obvious. If they were, there’d be nothing left to learn — and there’s always something left to learn.
If you change the recipe this way, what will the dish taste like? If a chef is considering substituting vinegar for sugar in a recipe, you can bet that she will also be asking herself, “How will this improve the dish? How will it make it worse? Overall, is this a good idea?”
Be curious about the situation,
consider crazy ideas,
and take your time
For each alternative you are considering to an event or action, you will be doing the same kind of evaluations. Some alternatives will make no difference or may even make things worse. Others will have both good and bad effects. Still others will result in an improvement. Sometimes you will find an alternative that is a true solution to the problem you’re having.
Resist the temptation to stop looking as soon as you find an alternative that is good enough. You may be depriving yourself of an even better alternative that you have not yet found.
(Enough with the theory! Show me how this works!)
Back to the “missed on-ramp” example from step 2 in part 1 of this article. (You might want to review the new information that was generated from carrying out this step — it’s okay, I’ll wait.)
I begin by looking for things that leave a bad taste in my mouth — in other words, things that contributed to me having a bad experience. This is a simple situation with only one such bad taste: missing the on-ramp. When you try this on your own, you may find that your situation has more than one “bad taste.”
The next step is to speculate on what could have caused the bad taste:
I realize that this is an odd assignment I’ve given myself. What does it mean for something to “cause a bad taste” in this context? To me it means that I’m looking for something that sets off alarm bells in my mind, something that says, “I don’t like this — this kind of thing can lead to trouble.”
In the context of this example, I’m looking for factors that contributed to me not being able to see the on-ramp early enough and take it.
Here are the items I notice (and I write them down on paper so I can think about them more easily):
- I was daydreaming.
- Traffic was heavy (which would have made getting to the on-ramp more difficult).
- I was in the extreme right lane (ditto).
- I had gotten to bed late the night before.
- Though my destination was known, I had only been there once before, and I was unfamiliar with the city itself.
- I was feeling tired that morning.
- Because of the overall situation, I had no options while driving (which is why I was forced to turn right).
Taking each of the above “bad tastes” in turn, I now look for ingredients I could substitute:
- Daydreaming: I wasn’t paying attention in a situation where doing so is a good idea.
- Heavy traffic: Leaving earlier could have made the situation better. Also, a different route to my destination might have had less traffic.
- Extreme right lane: Again, if I had been paying attention, I might have realized that the lane to my immediate left was equally good and would have left me with more flexibility in my driving.
- Late to bed: Not attending a business dinner in the first place or deciding not to linger afterwards would have prevented this.
- Unfamiliarity with city/destination: I could have asked for directions at the hotel or checked the route I was planning on driving, from beginning to end.
- Feeling tired: I’ve already covered the issue of getting to bed late; more sleep would’ve helped. It’s possible that eating healthier or exercising could also have helped me feel less tired.
- Having no options while driving: Again, paying attention could have helped. More important, if I had checked my route before driving, I would’ve known that the on-ramp was there.
Finally I imagine substituting each ingredient, one by one, in the recipe (i.e., doing something different in the situation) and asking whether this would make dish taste better (i.e., evaluating whether the change would eliminate the problem or make the overall experience less unpleasant).
It’s important to invest time and energy
in evaluating each alternative
Some alternatives are more likely than others to be successful. For example, I doubt that eating healthier or exercising, by themselves, would have been enough to have changed the overall outcome. (To simplify the discussion, I am deliberately overlooking the possibility that multiple small changes, when combined, might make a worthwhile difference.)
It’s important to invest time and energy in evaluating each alternative. The idea of getting up earlier at first seems attractive, but on further reflection I’m less sure of its usefulness. I would have to get up very early indeed to encounter light traffic, and even then I might still not be able to change lanes successfully. Also, doing this would mean less sleep, which would definitely make the rest of the day worse for me.
In the end, three alternative behaviors (listed in order of decreasing effectiveness) look like good bets:
- checking the route I’m going to take, from beginning to end, before driving it
- getting to bed earlier
- paying more attention while driving
In fact, checking the route I’m going to take is almost guaranteed to alert me to the exit I missed. Problem solved!
If you go back in step 2 in part 1 of this article, you’ll see that the things I merely remembered (before I took the time and effort to reconstruct the experience) were:
- 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.
Now, if you had been paying attention to these four things, would you have thought of any of the three alternative behaviors above? (Maybe #3, but the others?) Would you have thought of checking the route first?
Step 4: Ensure that you’ll use what you’ve learned by making “implementation intentions”
“What?!” you cry, “We’re not done?”
I sympathize — by the end of the previous step, you’ve done a lot of work, you have a solution, and you just feel like you’re done. But what good is all this work if you don’t remember to use what you’ve learned?
“But,” you say, “it’s simple — I’ll just remember to check the route I’m going to take first!”
No, actually, scientific research says that you probably won’t.
Fortunately, research also says there’s something that will work—it’s called an implementation decision.
What good is all this work if you don’t
remember to use what you’ve learned?
An implementation intention is a statement you tell yourself about your commitment to take a specific action when a specific set of conditions occur. Such a statement takes the form “If a specific set of conditions occur, then I will perform a specific action.”
Going back to the “missed on-ramp” example, I might come up with an implementation intention that looks like this:
- If I am driving the next day to an unfamiliar location and I have just returned to my hotel room after dinner… (these are the specific conditions)
- …then I will immediately open my smartphone driving app and study the roads between my location and my destination for five minutes (these are the specific actions).
Compare this statement with the simpler “I’ll just remember to check the route I’m going to take before I drive it.” Which do you think will be more effective?
There’s a lot more to be said about how to create and use implementation intentions effectively. Check out “How to Remember to Do What You Intended” when you have a chance.
Final words
Reduced to its essentials, this technique can be summarized as follows:
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.
Step 3: Mentally explore alternative behaviors and choose the one that solves the problem or improves the situation. (You may get better results by combining several small behavior changes.)
Step 4: Hardwire your brain to remember to perform each alternative behavior by using reminders of the form “If a specific set of conditions occur, then I will perform a specific action.”
Just as a chef who practices improving her recipes becomes a better chef, the more you practice this technique, the better you will become at seeing your life clearly and making positive changes in it. No one improvement will change your life, but the effect is cumulative.
More important, you will be learning important lessons: that you know how to change, that there’s always something to be learned, and that learning to live more skillfully is always worth the effort.
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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