Why Problems Don’t Exist

What if I told you there was no such thing as problems? Because in my development as a professional, as a person on this planet, I actually have come to realize there’s no such thing as problems. Like problems is like a fictitious made up word. Like don’t get me wrong. There are struggles and there are challenges and there are obstacles, but there are no problems. And let me tell you what I mean and why that’s such an important realization.

Once we think of something as a problem, then we automatically have to go about trying to solve it. But the truth is there’s no perfect person on the planet. Like we all have problems and if we spend all of our time trying to solve those problems and thus be perfect,

you’re just gonna live a problem saturated life and never achieve perfection because it’s unattainable. However, if we view things as obstacles, then we rely on our own skills and we view ourselves as capable and we pay more attention to our attributes than we do the obstacle. Let me give you an example. I have a friend who really loves hiking and mountain climbing.

Like she is like super into it. I mean there’s probably nothing more of an obstacle than a mountain, but she will actually go out and seek the mountain and she climbs the mountain like full on rock climbing the mountain with the entire purpose of getting up and over the mountain. She doesn’t do that by focusing on the obstacle. She does that by focusing on her skillset, on her attributes, what makes her capable of doing this. If she were to focus on the mountain as a problem, then her only way to solve that, would be to like move the mountain.

But when she focuses on herself, then she can scale the mountain. I think too often we try to move mountains in our lives and we, we, we get frustrated and tired when we realize that we can’t move the mountain. And not only can we not move the mountain, but there’s infinite other mountains in our lives. But if we can view them as obstacles, challenges, if we can view them as obstacles, challenges, even then we focus on our ability to endure, get through,thrive beyond.

And I think that’s really like the, the key to life is to realizing is, well I think that’s the key to life is in realizing life is not perfect. We all have the mountains in our lives that we have to scale. But really smart, effective people focus on their ability to scale the mountain, their ability to climb the mountain, their ability to overcome the thing in their way.

And people who get stuck just focus on the mountain itself. And that’s when it dawned on me. There are no problems. There’s no such thing as problems. Because when you view it as a problem, it steals your attention away from where it should be.

So I think that’s why Solution Focused Brief Therapy is just so powerful and so important. It’s not that we ignore the problem. When I started doing this work, people said, I don’t like Solution Focused because you ignore the client’s problem. No I don’t. We just treat the problems like they’re scalable mountains, we treat the problems like they’re just something, an obstruction in the client’s life. We treat the problem like it can be overcome.

And once you do that, it turns to the skills and attributes of the person and thus makes the problem overcomeable. And that’s the key to life. That’s the key to this work. That’s the key to hope. And that’s why I think it’s such an important ideas.