How to Change Your Attitude and Become a Positive Problem Solver
It doesn’t matter who you are or what you do, if you are the problem-solver, you never run out of demand. You could be in healthcare or information technology, a business entity or perhaps in law, problem-solving is a personality trait that comes in handy and shapes your personal and professional success. A simple search on Google will face you with an overwhelming number of guides with each of them claiming to be your best bet if you are looking forward to transforming your personality into a problem-solver. What’s unfortunate, however, is that the majority of such guides talk about the complicated aspects of problem-solving and fail to highlight a single common factor that puts you on the right track to be a problem-solver; your “Attitude”.
Yes, it is absolutely true that having the flexibility to view a given problem from various perspectives and find the easiest to follow and the implementable solution is a matter of your attitude, more than anything else. You could be highly trained, have a broad skill set, be well-accustomed to the line of work with years of experience, and may take pride in all the professional degrees and certifications that you have received over the years, and yet you would not be able to fix things and think of a solution if you don’t have the right attitude.
It’s noteworthy that your attitude is not only the root of problem-solving for the professional matters, but it is just as effective in delivering the same outcome for the matters concerning your personal life as well. This, we believe, is more than sufficient in making you realize the importance of attitude when it comes to problem-solving. Taking this into consideration, we have taken the liberty of highlighting the top 5 strategies which can help you change your attitude and make yourself a problem-solver.
It’s An Opportunity
You must have come across a lot of people who [restrict] are easily frustrated as soon as things start to go south. It could be that middle-aged man living right across the street or one of your colleagues who just joined the other day. What’s common for such people is to find it extremely hard to find a solution to any inconvenience that they are confronted with. What do you think is the reason? It’s primarily because their entire focus and energy are being wasted on expressing frustration rather than summoning the creative and critical thinking of the mind to look for a solution.
A simple change of attitude, therefore, can go a long way in making you a problem-solver. Instead of being frustrated about a situation, you should always take it as a challenge, perhaps even an opportunity since nothing great ever grows out of a comfort zone. Whenever you are faced with a problem in your personal and professional life, you can rest assured that it will lend you a hand for personal development. The moment you change your attitude and learn to welcome a problem as an opportunity to grow, it starts to get relatively easier for you to find an impeccable solution for it.
Being Spontaneous Isn’t Always Good
You can try all you want, but there are always going to be a few aspects of your personal and professional life that can’t be pre-planned. If it was so, you would probably not find the word surprise, shock, unexpected or similar words in the dictionary. Under such circumstances, it always comes in handy to be spontaneous and have the capacity to improvise and get the most out of the situation. However, it’s not always a virtue especially when it comes to the matters which could easily have been planned to avoid any and all inconveniences.
Believing in planning is an attitude in itself. More often than not, we wish to keep our focus on what’ll happen if things went our way in the time to come. Nobody wants to think about otherwise. Pessimism or overthinking about the future is bad, yes. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t take the negative or unexpected outcomes into consideration in order to devise your alternative plan beforehand. By changing your attitude to consider the possibility of things going south, you can have a plan B to fall back on that helps a great deal in cooking a timely solution to all of your problems.
Asking for Help Doesn’t Make You a Weak Person
This is perhaps a matter of ego. With a few exceptions, we are mostly hardwired into believing that we are the greatest, we know best, and that we don’t need anybody’s help to get over our own problems. Again, being independent is a charming trait. But start to overdo anything in your life and it will never end up in a favorable outcome.
Understanding the difference between being independent and being a fool is imperative. Under certain circumstances, it is actually a wise decision to let go of your ego and get a second opinion. Such a shift in your attitude will open the gates for a myriad of perspectives regarding the problem at hand that you would probably never had explored by yourself.
The broader the perspective, the better are your chances of finding an implementable solution for it. It’s as simple as that. So, the next time you are confronted with a problem that seems fairly complicated, feel free to share it with your loved ones or the professionals that you look up to and see how it serves the aforementioned purpose.
Take Your Time
This brings us to our next attitude problem that barricades our way to becoming a problem-solver. Wouldn’t you say that it is only a matter of pride for you as long as you are able to be quick in finding a solution to the problem at hand? For some reason, we believe in efficiency to be the most crucial component of problem-solving while in reality, it is effectiveness.
As long as you have a rushing attitude, you can almost take it for granted that your solution will always be premised on little knowledge, incomplete information, vague facts and figures, and a flawed analysis of the situation. What is required, therefore, is to change your attitude and make yourself realize the importance of taking your time so that you can go through all of the information available at your disposal thoroughly before comprehensively crafting a solution that has the maximum potential to be effective.
Remember, at the end of the day, all that matters, for the most part, is whether or not you fix the problem regardless of if you do it in 24 minutes or 24 hours.
Learn To Be Realistic Dreamer
Some people are naturally gifted with a mind that cooks solutions incredibly faster than the average mind. You could present literally any problem and they’d take a few minutes to come up with a solution. And yet, it is possible that you’d find such people failing to fix their own matters as effectively as you would expect. The simplest of explanations behind such adversity is their incapacity to be realistic.
It’s indispensable to realize that thinking of a solution is only a component of the process. Once done, you have to move on to the next important phase of actually implementing it. Mostly, people are mistaken in believing that actually going through with the plan will be as easy as it sounds. But there are always unforeseen obstacles that you didn’t account for which make it harder than you thought to apply your solution. If you are unrealistic about the ease of application, you make yourself prone to quitting your idea of a solution as soon as you face a hindrance and start working on a different one. The result? You end up with a number of half-implemented solutions with none of them actually fixing the problem at hand.
By changing your attitude towards the implementation of the solution and realizing that it’ll be harder than you think to make it work, you prepare yourself better for the unforeseen circumstances and be assertive in seeing it through.
Final Note
Being a problem-solver surely invites a lot of your personality traits into action. But none of them are as important as your attitude. In all fairness, you can think of your attitude as the essential ingredient for being a problem solver. You could have all of the other required traits, but none of them will be activated as long as you don’t have the required attitude. With the tips mentioned above, you can now start your journey of shifting your attitude in hopes of being better at solving your personal and professional problems. It is destined to take a bit of time and a lot of effort for you to go through such a transformation, but the way it dramatically improves your overall personality, it is absolutely worth the investment. So, buckle up as it’s time to unleash the best version of yourself upon this world. [/restrict]
