Why You're Not the Problem

The first thing we do is blame ourselves.

Lend me 5 minutes and have a better day.

5. Let the Problem Be the Problem

I’m in Tokyo. I planned a trip in a week. And despite countless hours of “try-hard,” I did just about everything wrong. I was desperate to pick out the right place to stay, the right things to do, and investigate how to not mess up.

This is a thing I do. I spend hours planning, thinking, researching. Often this ironically leads to a poor execution. What follows is self-criticism, blaming, shaming.

Why did you mess this all up? What’s wrong with you?

What is the real problem here? No matter what I tell myself, it’s not actually me. The problem is that I didn’t have enough time to research and under time pressure was not able to select good options. The second problem is that in another country, it’s nearly impossible to get it right and it’s really a matter of luck. The problem is that photos are amazing and reviews can be fake and sometimes when you show up, you have to make the most of it. The problem is not having a list of requirements for a place I stay. Now that I know the problem, I learn how to avoid it. Now the problem is something I can tackle. With more time, recommendations, and a list of requirements, it’s unlikely the problem will come up again.

We are not the problem. Let the problem be the problem.

4. Changing Your Language

If we don’t change the way we speak to ourselves, we will always feel like the problem. We spend precious energy rehashing past experiences, breaking down scenes to see what we did wrong. We lay it all out in our head, a prediction of how we could have made a situation better, more perfect, easier. The truth is we will never know if there were other realities because we did not do something different. We did what we did. No dreaming and imagining will ever change that.

We must speak to ourselves with the understanding that we are always, in every moment, doing our best. Our best is good enough. When we learn something, we have a revelation. Our best after that is different. But we use these revelations to tell ourselves we should have done better. But better was impossible before the revelation. We’ve got things in the wrong order.

3. The Problem With Blaming Yourself

We are the harshest ourselves, and the treatment we give ourselves sets the standard for how others will treat us. But for some reason we find it hard to stop. It’s easier to just add a qualifier after every achievement, thank you but I just got lucky…I’m clearly not as smart as them…

“It is no longer about being good enough for anybody else. We are not good enough for ourselves.” -Don Miguel Ruiz

We must talk to ourselves with the kindness we deserve. If we don’t talk to ourselves with the deepest love, others will follow our example. They will start to agree with us. You will hear your own words back at you, but then, they will hurt:

You do seem to always mess things up. You often crash under pressure! I hear you say that a lot.

We are creating our own reality without even realizing.

2. The Third Person Perspective

We can use the third person with us all to create compassion. Who is the third person? Imagine you are talking to a friend about the same situation: You didn’t know that hotel was going to be total shite! You made the most of it!

Turn to yourself like you are talking to a friend. Tell “them” encouragement about the situation that you’re struggling with, but you are telling yourself. Maybe you don’t believe it and think it’s stupid to talk to yourself this way. Try it again. Say more encouragement. How do you feel? Do you feel the same? You deserve the same treatment as a friend. Why would you treat yourself worse? You are the one you love most. You feed yourself, go to a job to earn money to give yourself shelter, you care about taking care of yourself. So why don’t you care about speaking to yourself with kindness and caring not, just for your physical body, but for your mind?

1. Problems Create Solutions

We should welcome problems. Problems are wonderful. They are challenges to help us become the person we want to be. Without problems, we would stay the same. We would not learn anything. Learning is the beautiful gift of being alive. Learning makes us filled with joy. Imagine you are trying basketball for the first time but you can’t get the ball in the hoop. You try for hours and you walk away without a single shot. You come back for weeks and then you realize that you had not even been looking at the hoop. The first time you do, you nail a shot. It goes straight in. You’re filled with joy. We love learning. We love problems. But our culture has taught us that failure and learning should not come with time. We should know how to do everything first try. This is a lie. Don’t believe it. Enjoy knowing that when you have a problem you will learn and you will become more of the embodied person you are inside with each misstep.

Let the problem be the problem.