PROBLEMS

Have you ever encountered a sentence or paragraph that seemed to jump out of the page and hit you right between the eyes?. It happens to me all the time. I have made a collection of sentence that have affected me that way, at least long enough to make me do some serious thinking.
Here is one I ran across the other day that stopped me. There is nothing particularly unusual about it. Maybe it will not affect you at all, but it did me. It was written by Prof Robert Seasore, Chairman of the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University :

“The happiest people are not the people without problems; they are people who know how to solve their problems”.

People who seem to spend most of their time hanging onto the short end of the stick will tell you that it is because of their problems. I’m sure successful people have problems too, but instead of complaining about them, they solve them.

I wonder how many millions of people have sat and moped because they have problems they think are standing between them and the things they want. They don’t realize that trouble distributes itself without favor all over the world. So it boils down not to a matter of problems but of people, and that’s what it always comes back to.

They are several ways of trying to solve problems. One is the hectic or panic method. Some people want so frantically to solve their problem that they jump at any apparent escape hole like birds knocking themselves out against a pane of glass. When one hole won’t work, they try to find another. Sometimes they do, particularly if the problem is simple, but more often than not, it’s actually the long way around. It generally results in a lot of wasted time, a lot of worry, and sleepless nights.

Experts claim that it is possible to learn a definite system of problem solving that will fit most situations. Instead of jumping from one thing to another, think through each problem and its possible solutions before you do anything about it. There are six steps :

1. Define your problem clearly on paper.
2. List the obstacles standing in the way of your solving it.
3. List people or other idea sources that might help solve your problem.
4. List as many possible courses of action as you can think of, and take your time on this.
5. Try to visualize the results of each course of actions.
6. Choose the course of action that seems best to you, and then pursue it. Stay with it long enough for it to work or to prove that it can’t. If it finally doesn’t choose another.

This is the scientific way to solve problems….!!