Get Out of the Rut - Episode # 41
What is you have been solving the wrong problem?
Hey, you. Welcome back to the podcast. I am excited to record this one, and I will tell you why. I just got out of a coaching session with my coach, and we were talking about AI. I have been utilizing AI in every area of my life, and it has been very helpful actually. I have been using it to, you know, sometimes, brainstorm a little bit before I have a hard conversation with someone that I love so I can kind of organize my thoughts before I even bring something up.
I have been using it to help in my business, right? I have been really using this AI, like the technology, to help me create courses and to create material, like marketing materials or emails. I have been really careful at how I use this, especially because I teach other coaches too.
So, you know, we have that, not so fine line of ethics and, uh, how can we use AI in an ethical way that is extremely important to me I noticed as I was talking to this coach this morning, and I brought this topic up. I was like, "Let's talk about the ethics of AI." And he blew my mind with how unethical some of the AI practices can be, especially when we're using a client or using, right, AI to not just organize our thoughts, but really giving us the material to use in a coaching, you know, courses or programs or even, expressing ourselves as coaches.
Anyways, long story short, and I remember seeing this a long time ago, maybe a year ago when I was using AI even more than I do today, and I talked to a client, and I said, "You know what? I'm gonna give up AI. I'm not going to use it anymore." Of course, that didn't happen, right? The intentions were there.
Of course, I kept using it, but I'm seeing things that, maybe when we are overly using it, especially for your marketing, especially for your day-to-day, like, not the, your personal life, but that business life. And I know that a lot of you guys, who listen to this podcast, you do have a coaching business or a business, so that's more of what I'm talking about now.
And you might be using this to make up maybe even a little bit of your insecurities. I know I was using for that reason. If you look at my Instagram and you can see the posts that have been, heavily AI generated.
First of all, as much as I wanted to say that I gave AI, and AI just organized, right?
I gave the, thinking, I gave the ideas and the structure, but AI kind of restructured it to be a little bit more friendly using, right? Like, readable or, maybe even used a better word so the grammar would be better. So now it's very robotic. And when I see those posts, if, you know, I just open something on my Instagram and I read that, it doesn't, it doesn't sound like me at all.
Even though when I first looked at it, it's like, "Oh, yes, it's just like me," because it's just what I said, what I asked the AI to generate. But then it changed. It wasn't really that. And anyways, I am just right now really trying to bring it back my essence into my business, and I am really seeing this almost as a before and after.
So today is the first time that I'm recording something, and the first time I mean in, you know, , It's not the first time ever, because my, especially my first episodes were not, had nothing to do with AI, but I used the excuse as, "Well, I'm just learning. I'm just checking this out. I'm just seeing what I'm doing here."
But this episode right now is the first one that I am just talking from my heart. So I actually wanted to test them and see how I feel, because as I am preparing the material and as I am preparing the ideas that I wanted to share with you here, it felt great. I have my little notes. I didn't even write on a Google Doc.
I was just writing on paper, and it feels great. So I hope you like this episode, and I hope I like this episode, and I actually share it because it is all me. Okay? Let's get started. This podcast is about what if you have been solving the wrong problem. And I wanted to talk to you about this specific topic because one of the things that I love the most about being a coach is the ability and the skills that I have learned to see things that not, you know, normal people people who are not coaches, who are not trained as a coach can see.
And seeing this really helps me, you know, with questions and with ways of speaking to my clients to allow them to see what they couldn't see either and actually understand what the problem really is. ,
When I have clients come to me and they're typically feeling, two of those main emotions, guilt or shame, and most likely it's because they have this picture perfect life, they have everything they could possibly dream of, but they feel like they wanted more, right? They don't feel fulfilled. They don't feel content with the life that they have created.
But there's nothing really wrong in their life. You know what I mean? There's nothing that they can necessarily pinpoint and change. Like, if you feel unfulfilled or you feel Upset or angry at a specific thing. Let's say that your roof has a hole, and whenever it rains, it gets water in your house, and you're very frustrated at this.
Well, the main or the smart thing to do is to fix the specific problem, only because you know what the problem is. And it's the same thing with when you're creating your business, when you're losing weight. If you know that it's the specific behavior that it's causing you to feel whatever it is you're feeling.
Let's say that you are a business owner and you are trying to, you know, start a business, but you don't really have an offer. You don't really know how to sell. When we pinpoint the specific problem, we can learn how to sell. We can learn how to create your offer, right? It becomes very simple to figure out what the answer is to the specific problem that you have.
Weight loss. If you had been going to fast food you know, three or four times a week, maybe that would be a great thing for us to work through to maybe come up with different solutions. But what if the problem is, you know, not as easy to solve? Let me just say something here, and I say this to my children all the time.
Every problem has a solution. This is something that I fully believe in. There are two things here that I wanted to point out. One is when you just don't even know that that thing is a problem. Let me use a very simple and kinda silly, example to, to explain this. When I was a teenager, I had curly hair, but I didn't know that I had curly hair because my mom, my sweet mom, really wanted me to have straight hair.
So every morning, like a normal person, I would brush my hair, and it would be this, you know, like imagine a curly hair being brushed. It, it doesn't really have a shape. it's not wavy, it's not curly, it's not straight, it's just a thing. And for many years, I believed that I just had bad hair, that my hair was really ugly.
And it wasn't until I saw somebody else doing their curly hair and I was like, "Oh, you put cream, like curls cream in your hair." They're like, "Oh, yes." And she kind of showed me how to, how she was doing it. I wasn't even looking at, oh, I wanted to have that type of hair. Was just my first little insight that maybe the problem, it wasn't that I had bad hair.
The problem was that I didn't know how to do my hair that would serve the shape that I had. So it's such a silly little thing, but I wasn't even trying to solve the wrong problem. I wasn't trying to solve anything because I didn't know that there was a problem. And the problem in that situation was you're brushing your curls.
It doesn't work that way. You need to put some lotion and shape it, right? Instead of brushing. So how much we do this in our lives in general when we just don't know that that is a problem. We just think that life is the way it is just because.
The only issue that we have here is when you're trying to solve the wrong problem. Let's say again the, this same silly example with my hair. If I was trying to solve because I believed my hair should be straight, and actually I did this. I thought at that time that my hair was straight because every hair that I knew was straight.
unless people had that very beautiful curly hair, I thought that that was just how their hair was. They got out of the shower and they had curly hair. But my hair when I got out of the shower, it was that shapeless, weird thing. So I thought it should be straight because, you know, my mom liked straight hair.
She had straight hair. I didn't know that she was, you know, straightening her hair all the time. So again, a silly little thing. But I, I was... maybe thought that there was a problem with my hair, I was trying to solve the wrong problem. I was trying to make my hair straight because I thought that that was how it should be.
So I would spend hours and hours trying to brush to make it straight, trying to, straightening with a straightener to keep the shape that I wanted, and then it rains, and it, you know, got ugly again, and I just didn't know what else to do, and I would burn myself, and my hair was falling. All these things because I was trying to solve the wrong problem.
The problem was not that my hair was supposed to be straight and it wasn't working out. The problem was that the hair was actually curly, and I had to embrace the curls, right? Accept that that was the hair that God gave me or the DNA of my parents gave me, and go for it, and learn how to deal with that, not because it's a problem, but because that is what I had. So I know this example sounds so silly, but that is the point of you trying to solve the wrong problem.
Now let's go to a little bit of a better example, maybe a little bit of a more realistic example, especially when we are talking about having this picture perfect life, and you can even translate that to a, a picture perfect business or a picture perfect, ways of losing weight. Okay? Sometimes
There are clients that come to me and they have everything. They have the gym at home. They have, a membership, a gym membership. They have this elliptical that they like to use. They have a beautiful trail they like to walk and run. That is their picture perfect, right, exercise life, but they are overweight, and they just don't understand why.
They have a chef that comes to their house to make their food. They have, again, everything they can have to lose weight, but they are not. So when we are trying to solve the wrong problem is when we keep on adding more and more dumbbells or maybe I'm going to get this new software. Maybe it's this new course.
Maybe I'm gonna hire a different personal trainer, and you're keep on trying to solve things that are outside of you when what you actually need to look at, it's within, right? So again, the, the life when you have this picture perfect life and you have a beautiful family and, you know, the, most beautiful Christmas cards.
Everything is so great, but you feel so unfulfilled. A lot of times you try to solve the wrong problem, and what is it? It's buying a designer purse. It's getting more shoes. It's getting a different type of clothes or maybe it's fighting with your husband because you think that he's wrong or maybe it is, trying to get your kids in better schools or whatever it is, but the, it's still outside of you.
And the thing what I have noticed, especially with coaching, is that rarely,the actual problem that is causing you suffering is outside of you. But when you don't have a way to look within, it's very abstract, right? when you hear people, and I actually use this, it is on my notes, to say, "Getting more connected with yourself."
It sounds so cheesy. It sounds so abstract. But, and I will show you how to do it, that it's not abstract. It's actually quite objective of how to do it. When we start getting more connected with yourself and you're able to see what you want, what you need, what you desire, now we have a little bit of a guidance, a path to go through to not to achieve happiness or to achieve fulfillment, but to learn how to feel those things today as you go through the journey.
But if you don't have this idea of where you are going, right, if you don't know what you are becoming, you are just sitting here living day by day on this autopilot, and you don't really know what to change because you keep on trying to solve the wrong problem. That's the main thing right here.
Another quote that I live by, I love this quote so much that when I found out that it was an AA quote, I was like, "Oh my gosh." I don't really drink, so I was a little bit surprised when I noticed that. But I think I can understand why this quote is used with AA.
The quote is, "Every progress starts by telling the truth." This quote has changed the trajectory of my life, because it's so easy for us as human beings to lie to ourselves, trying to make us feel a little bit better about who we are, that we forget that telling the truth actually help us progress in life, help us feel more connected, not just connected with yourself, but connected with the people around you.
This week, I think was last week, I went out with a really good friend of mine, and she moved away so she came to town. We were hanging out, having dinner, and I just vented to her. I was just saying all those things in my heart that was really hurting me. And later on, I even apologized. Like, "I'm sorry, I think our date was a little bit down and not as happy as, typically, you know, the good time that we have."
And but what I notice is that just by me telling her the truth of how I was feeling, just getting out to some of my insecurities, some of my parenting failures, what I deem as a parenting failure, just by telling her the truth that I hadn't been able to talk to anyone else before, allowed me to reorganize how I think and what I wanted to do instead.
Not just the action, but how do I want it to be instead. So one of the things that I was talking to her was about my children. And if, if she was there trying to help me parent my children, she would have given me some strategies. But that wasn't the case, and that wasn't the point. Giving strategies for me to be a better mom, and, and again, this is extremely useful in many ways, not in that case.
And I'm so glad she noticed that. That would be solving the wrong problem. The problem had never been my kids. The problem had been who I was being when I was being their mom. It's the person, it's the identity of who I was. Now, when we get connected with who I wanted to be, right? Not just in the future, but like this, the next five minutes, who I wanted to be as I am teaching my kids and educating them, and, you know, helping them understand what life is or what life isn't.
When I focused on me and what I want, then it was wonderful that I was, was actually having these bad thoughts about my children. It was great because when I was able to reorganize the thinking and realigned my priorities and realigned how I wanted to feel around them, it just in, in one day things already became very different.
In one day I was able to look at them very differently with love, with respect, because that is the type of mom I wanted to be independent of what they do, independent of who they are being, right? Because I know when I show up from love and respect as a mother, I can teach so much better than when I show up being very judgmental, being very angry at them.
So again, every progress, and this is the progress that I have made as a mother just this week, every progress starts by telling the truth. So it's not about lying to myself and saying, "Oh, I'm such a great mom." No. When I don't feel like being a great mom, when I don't feel like I have been a great mom, saying it out loud to somebody else or even saying it out loud to yourself can be so helpful.
My job as a coach, as a life coach, as a future self coach, as a mindset coach, my job is not to solve your problems. I can't. There is nothing I can do or say that would solve your problems.
But my job is to help you discover what you believe the problem is and what it really, really is. That's what I can do for you. And I couldn't even tell you what the problem is. But listen, I heard this a while back from a family therapist, and she said, "When couples fight over money and sex, it's never about money and sex."
And that just stayed with me because it is so true. Just observe. When you're fighting with your spouse about the finances, it might look like that it is the how much money we are spending. But as I say in the beginning, what I really like, being a coach is to see what other people can't quite see, and this is what I'm telling you right now.
Observe. If you have fought with your husband lately about your finances, just take a step back and see what was actually the problem. Was the actual problem that maybe him or you swiped the credit card one or two times more than you should have? Or it's about control and about humiliation and about, uh, your sense of inferiority or your sense of disrespect.
What it really is, the problem there. Okay? Just noticing this, it'll give you an insight of what to work towards because then you can, you can go out there and it's like, "Okay, we're gonna follow the budget," and you have you're never gonna have this problem again, because you're solving the wrong problem.
So I have two main questions to answer to you here right now. One is how to find the real issue. And I have developed this process that actually came from the idea of every progress starts by telling the truth, and this process is what I call now evolution through evaluation.
And I say this, I called this process this name because it's truly about evolving yourself. If we keep fighting the superficial problems that we have, the superficial issues that we have, we can't really evolve as a human being. You can't evolve as a person. You're always trying to solve the superficial crap instead of really looking at yourself and saying, "How can I become more emotionally intelligent," right?
"How can I become more assertive, more confident?" Because you're trying to solve the wrong problem. So evolution through evaluation comes with three main questions. Now, inside of the Future Self Mindset program, I teach you not just to answer those questions, but I teach you how to look at the questions in a different way so it's not judgemental.
So I just want you to have some compassion with yourself here, especially if you're trying this exercise on your own, because this is not to cause any type of self-judgment or self-shame. Here are the three questions. What worked? What didn't work? What would I do differently? Those are the three questions.
I say it again. What worked? What means this, when you have a problem or you have a goal to not have the problem, right? This is not how you set a goal, but just saying here. If you have a problem, let's say that you wanted to have a more, loving relationship with your partner, and you can ask yourself, what worked?
What did you do this week or today that worked really well for you to achieve the goal of having a better relationship? And you name all those things down.
The second question is, what didn't work? This is where the judgment can come, and this is where I ask you to use the self-compassion because you're just collecting data.
You're literally just seeing things to see, how you want it to change. How do you want it to be different? Why do you want it to be different? Okay? So what didn't work around the goal that you have to have a better relationship with your partner? Now, use this for goal that you're working towards.
Maybe it is losing weight. What worked for you to lose weight? What didn't work this week, right? Maybe it is building the business. Actually write down the things that you did this week that worked really well, and then you write down a list of things that did not work very well. Why is that? Because every progress starts by telling the truth.
If you cannot tell yourself the truth of what is working and what is not working, guess what? You can never choose to do things differently because you don't even know what the problem is that you're trying to solve in next week So this is the third question, right? First question, what worked?
Because you wanted to see your wins first. Second question is what didn't work, because you wanted to see what. But the third question is, what would I do differently? Now that I know what works and what doesn't work, what do I wanted to do differently? This is how we answer the question of how to find the real issue, how to find the real problem.
You need to have something that you're working towards, that you wanted to change in your life, and then you ask those questions on a weekly basis or even on a daily basis, right? What is working, what is not working, what do I want to do differently next, right? Tomorrow, or next week, or next month, or next quarter.
What is it that you want it to be different in your life? Now, it begs the second question then, right? Now that we know what the actual problem is, the next question is how do I solve the problem, right? We have these questions that we asked. We have better awareness. We might even be able to create some acceptance on how to change those things, and then it begs the question is how do I solve the issue?
And I will tell you how. The very first step is to be more connected with yourself. By being connected with yourself means, can I see the things that I'm doing or not doing without any type of judgment? Can I see those things without being judgmental towards myself, without thinking that things should have been different?
So you see, when we're looking at what didn't go well, I'm not saying, "Oh, what should be different then?" No, it's data, it's objective, what didn't work very well so that I can do something differently about this. So it is connecting with yourself, but just being connected with what you do and not do from a non-judgmental place, it's not enough if you don't know your values, if you don't know who your future self is, who you are becoming.
That is where the word, where the, idea of who you are makes a lot of sense. That's being connected with yourself. It's understanding who you truly are being today, not because it's good or bad, but because it is. If this is the brain that I have today, and this is the brain that gets me eating fast food three or four times a week, and if I can see this as non-judgmental, just, "Oh, this is who I'm being today"...
Do we have a very clear and vivid idea or a vivid vision of who I am becoming? Who is the future self that I'm working towards? Because as I teach inside of the Future Self Mindset program, it's not enough for you to go towards your future self. We need to bring the future to today, and we have many different ways of doing this.
One of the ways is to really understand what you value the most. What is the most important to you, your priorities? When we know that, because if your priority is to have, be very connected with your family, maybe that's why you're thinking that going to fast food three or four days a week is giving you.
You go with your family, you have a great time, you have no stress of making food in your house, right? There's no mess at home, and maybe you value that, too. You value that cleanness in your house. So it makes sense. So you stopping the behavior, stopping the going to the fast food three times a week, might be very against your values because now unconsciously you are not getting those things that you wanted the most.
That is a big problem. There's a huge issue here. And again, that comes from being more connected to yourself and understanding what are your priority values. What do you value the most? But if your value is being healthy and strong, and you absolutely love that, you can see why you are judging yourself so much every time you go to the fast food place.
But that anger, that judgment, that shame does not really guide you to do something more productive with yourself. But when you understand, right, our values and what we want and what we care the most, and we have that clear vision of who we truly wanted to be today, even though we are not, even though we we're this person that I am today, but I have the vision, without judgment, of who I'm becoming, now the solution of these problems, it starts to feel a little bit better.
Mainly because you have a point of reference. That's what the future self is, right? It's a point of reference. It's the thing that you know you, are able to become if we change a few things on our day-to-day lives. So this is what I have for you guys today. For now, the only thing I would invite you to do is to write down what you think your problems are.
Write down all of them, all of them. No judgment whatsoever and no editing yourself. Everything that you have in your life that you're like, "This shouldn't be this way. This is a problem. I don't like this part," write all those things down. And notice who you are being as you are dealing with these problems, because the problem, it's typically not the actual problem, right?
And when you're blaming something else, "I'm blaming my small house to all my problems," or, "I'm blaming my old car," or, "I'm blaming my husband for not being nicer or kinder," when we're blaming things outside of us, the only thing we are doing is avoiding what the actual problem is and what is the things that I have control over to change.
And my friend, you cannot change other people. You cannot change many things outside of you, but you can change your perspective, you can change who you are being, and you can change how you feel about those things. And that's what we do inside of the Future Self Mindset program. I would love to guide you and to answer any questions you might have, and I would love to see you there.
So make sure that you are signed up to my weekly emails. And you will receive an email from this episode on Friday, and I invite you to answer back to me. If you answer with what you think the problems are, I will personally, and no AI involved, I will personally answer back to you what some of the problems might be instead.
Or I will even give you some questions for you to ponder because, as I said, I cannot solve any problems for you. But when you answer some of those questions and you're able to understand how to see it from a different perspective, you can change anything you want. You truly can. That's why I say that all of your goals are inevitable when you connect with yourself the way we are talking about today, and really work towards the things that you truly desire, that it has been filtered through your values, through your, I don't wanna say higher self, but through your true self.
That little person inside of you that you know is capable of anything you truly desire. And truthfully, you are capable of being happy with the life that you have today. Nothing has to change. You are perfect. You are amazing, and I know you can do anything you truly desire as long as you know that you're not solving the wrong problem.
I will see you next week. Much love to you. Bye-bye.
