In May I posted a blog titled …Then Don’t Do That – A Glance at the Art of Sowing and Reaping. It explores why we do things we know we ought not do, even when we understand the consequences. We talked about how knowing the right thing, or best thing to do isn’t always enough. We need to strip ourselves of all the obstacles that cause us to make excuses and wrong decisions and get to a place of self-transparency (oh, I like that term, I should have used that in the other blog).

But what about those times when the best option isn’t clear? Maybe it’s not enough to know that you need to lose a few lbs, or confront someone about something, or get to some things you’ve been putting off. Maybe you have some understanding of the situation, but you have come to the end of your expertise and just don’t know what the next steps should look like. What do you do? Do you do nothing, or run away? Do you guess and hope? Do you fake it so no one else can see you are clueless?

If you are stuck in a complicated situation and don’t know what to do or how to proceed …Then Ask Someone Who Knows. There is a good chance that someone in your life or even someone not yet in your life has experienced something similar to what you going through and could shed some light on the situation for you.

“If you are stuck in a complicated situation and don’t know what to do or how to proceed …Then Ask Someone Who Knows”

So why, when we find ourselves in difficult situation, do we try to solve many of our own problems ourselves? Why are we so hesitant to seek out advice? These are the questions we will try to tackle in this blog.

Other peoples Blind-spots

Ever notice how clearly we can see other people problems? We spend some time with friends or relatives and after we think “They should really hire a financial adviser” or “see someone” about this or that. You listen to people give you reasons and excuses for doing the things they do and in your head you can’t understand how they could be so dense or what they could possibly be thinking. To you and many others around them the solution is so clear. You wonder why they can’t see what everyone else can see. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how many people tell them something, they just can’t see it because it is a blind-spot, like the back of your head or the place you can’t see from the drivers seat because the mirror is limited and the windows are not 360 degrees.

Your Blind-spot

Well, that person with the big blind-spot is you! It’s also me, and everyone else. We all take our turn being that person, some of us more than others. You see we are all born with a huge blind-spot. Our eyes were created pointing away from us and not toward us. We need something outside of ourselves like a mirror to see what we cannot naturally see in ourselves. We can never completely get rid of our blind-spot, but over time, through many failures and accomplishments and careful instruction we can gain a much clearer perspective on just how much we need other peoples input in our lives.

It is true that generally other people can see your situation from clearer more objective position when provided the facts. Their eyes are pointed toward you. Unlike you they are more able to take personal feelings, prejudices, historical bias’s out of your equation, just because they are not you.

We need others input but we do need to be careful to who we trust with advice. Some people seek out advice, but the problem is that they may be asking the wrong person. When you hang out with fools, the advice you get is going to be foolish.

The Fool

A fool is a person who makes decisions without thinking through the consequences. They typically live their life from one moment to another gratifying their desires with instant solutions doing whatever feels natural to them in the moment. They usually have a wake of broken relationships and lost opportunities following them that they have failed to learn from. It’s one thing to have a history of failed experiences and relational strife, but to continue the same foolish patterns over and over is indeed what defines us as a fool.

“When you hang out with fools the advice you get is going to be foolish.”

When you put a bunch of foolish people in the same environment or community, like crabs in a bucket they pull each other down and keep each other from succeeding feeding the foolish behavior. Most of us grew up with fools all around us. We bought into so many of these foolish ideas without even knowing. Until something from outside comes in to shed some light we will continue to move through life at the bottom of the bucket being held down by people just like us. It doesn’t have to be that way.

The Wise

To be wise means to give careful thought to your ways, to base your thought on knowledge and good judgement. Wisdom doesn’t come by simply thinking right. It comes from experience. There has never been a wise person who did not fail many times over. Wisdom comes from understanding adversity and adversity can only be understood from experiencing failure and learning from it rather than repeating it.
Wisdom is all around us if we just look. Sometimes we get so caught up in dwelling on the problems in life we fail to see the answers staring right at us.

“The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

Building Blocks

For every skyscraper or bridge, how many had to fall down before they got it right? The complexity of a modern airplane or automobile is incredible. The engineers didn’t start from scratch, they stood on the shoulders of the great engineers that came before them. They learned what they knew, then took it one step farther. Modern medicine is learning more and more every day about how the body works. They do it by sharing information in Medical Journals and shared research. They learn from the ones that came before them.

I think sometimes we try to reinvent the wheel in our own lives. We get into difficult situations and don’t know what to do so like a pioneer we start trying to figure it out on our own. Sometimes when we can’t figure it out we lose motivation, quit and nothing gets any better. We move forward clinging to a fixed mindset that keeps us in the bottom of the barrel. We need to tap into other resources to maximize our success.

Stuck in your own head

I remember particularly when I was young when I was faced with a stressful situation or a dilemma I didn’t know how to handle I would begin to internalize the problem. I would be at school or work and a stressful problem would monopolize my thoughts and I would find myself zoning out when I was suppose to be focusing. I would sometimes be oblivious to what was going on outside of my head and be fixed on the problem. If someone had offended me my mind began racing trying to put it all together in my brain in such a way that I somehow would escape blame or responsibility. I would have entire conversations in my head about how I was getting the short end of the stick or what I was going to say to my offender or accuser. Sometimes I would just think about how bad the situation is or imaging how bad it will get and how helpless I felt. I think I would get a little obsessed with the moment and allow it to consume me. I was stuck in my own head.

Escape your head!

Here is what I realized about those times. My thoughts were all focused on the problem and not the solution. They were limited to the worries and negative thoughts inside my skull and failed to address the solution which was outside my skull. Over time I learned that in order to be solution minded I needed to get out of my head and into other peoples head. By other peoples head I mean find out what they know, what they have experienced and how they overcame obstacles.  Sometimes just getting a fresh perspective was energizing and helpful.

“Over time I learned that in order to be solution minded I needed to get out of my head and into other peoples head”

When I was the center of my own world I could not escape this self-serving perspective that was going on inside my head. It was all I knew or could know. When I was removed from the center my universe and was rightly replaced by God as the center of my universe a whole new world of knowledge and perspective opened up to me.  I found truth was outside of my own head and much bigger than I ever imagined. I no longer had to figure out or decide or determine how the world worked on my own. My skull no longer provided the boundaries to my problem solving arena.  An age of discovery opened up to me.

The beginning of wisdom is realizing what you do not know. It is coming to the end of your own head and learning how to see the world through the eyes of others and God. Wisdom grows when you see the world and your life through the lenses of scripture and other people and how they see you. When this happens, your knowledge base and experiences to draw from are greatly multiplied and begin to build on each other on a much greater level than the old self-reliant model of thinking.

Be a receiver

If you want to expand your capacity for knowledge and wisdom, tap into other peoples brains and gather from their experiences. Ask someone who knows. Get connected to wise people. This, I believe is the secret to personal growth.

“For who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?”   1 Cor 4:7 NIV