We do not thrive as human beings when we are purely in problem solving mode. Hi, uh I'm Chris DeSantis, and this is the Swim Brief. And today I want to uh talk about our natural problem solving orientation as human beings and why I use positive psychology to uh coach people and get them to develop a different cognitive pathway because I believe that that pathway uh allows them to thrive in a way that that sort of instinctual orientation does not. So in order to understand what I'm going to be talking about, um it's important that you accept, I guess, some theories about human evolution and uh history, and uh those are always subjects that I find myself very interested in, and we'll give a very surface-level um introduction to some of it. Human beings have evolved over millions of years, in my opinion, to be problem solvers. And I think the reason is really simple. Solving problems is the skill that will keep you alive. Okay, if you haven't had water for three days, for example, solving the problem of where to get your next drink is the line between life and death. Uh, if you're under some really dangerous physical threat, solving the problem of defeating, of avoiding, or otherwise deflecting that threat is what allows you to go on, procreate, uh, you know, pass your genes on. So I think that we are uh we are the descendants of millions of years of natural selection that have selected for problem solving qualities. And our greatest gift in terms of problem solving, I think one that distinguishes us from the more instinctual reactions of many other species, is our capacity for foresight. We spend a lot of time thinking about the future. Our mind projects into the future and it tries to identify problems before they are salient, before they are right in front of our face, so that we can solve those problems before they arrive, or sort of know what we're gonna do before they arrive, because big problems, right, they trigger powerful emotions that actually inhibit the cognitive part of our brain, the thinking part of our brain, the rational part of our brain that could possibly do some more sort of detailed problem solving from working in that situation. You know, that it's rendered almost uh useless the higher the emotional state that you're in. All that said, I believe that we can be much more than problem solvers. And I believe that because although our evolution has led us to that point, I would guess that the majority of decisions made by anyone listening to this podcast are not life or death. Right? They're not like the the ones I introduced this on. It's not, you know, where do I get my next drink of water? And I'm gonna discuss two reasons why I coach people and sort of the process for why I coach people the way that I do, and the intersections that that has with problem solving. Problem solving is an automatic orientation for nearly all of us. And the foresight that powers it can lead to a very mechanistic system of thinking. The better we get at solving problems, the more problems we look to solve. This is one of the reasons that high achievement often leaves us pretty unhappy, because that competency in problem solving that we've used to achieve at a high level leads to us actually expanding our capacity to see more unfixed problems. So it actually being very competent at problem solving makes us see more problems, right? And and experience that there is more, but we become more sensitive, become more aware to the problems in ourselves that we perceive or the problems that we perceive around us. Um I coach people to set their orientation to opportunities rather than problems. And that is extremely difficult. Uh part of which, part of part of part of why I should say, uh is that we are extremely naturally talented problem solvers. Okay. We are not naturally talented opportunity realizers. Okay. And so that means that it takes a lot of conscious and intentional work to develop that orientation, and it requires cognitive upkeep, and it is, as far as I can tell, basically impossible to do by yourself. Maybe there's some um monks out there that are, you know, in a cave somewhere um in solitude that are that are doing it. Um but in my experience in the work that I do, I I I think that it is facilitated so strongly by having another mind to interact with and sort of meld with. Um but one way to maintain that connection is actually comes back to problems. And it a part of setting your orientation to uh opportunity is that you realize is is is developing a new definition for the role that problems serve in your life. Um, they are not outside of the problems of pure survival, little things that we need to fix, right? Problems are, for the most part, opportunities. Obviously, the problems that kill you are not opportunities because if they kill you, you're out of opportunities. But all the other problems we encounter reveal our strengths. And while there are some situations where our strengths can be used kind of in a brute force fashion to solve a problem, those problems are not the ones we get the most growth from. We grow from problems that are essentially unsolvable because these are the opportunities that reveal our capability to change the rules of the game in a way that uh puts that situation in our favor. Okay, so I just like I did a lot of high-minded talking there. So before I go any further down the rabbit hole, I want to go back to the beginning and explain what I mean by orientation and explain what I mean in greater detail, everything that I just outlined. Um and then and then hopefully I'll wrap it up in a final bow for you where I'll sort of show you um where I see the patterns in a in a problem orientation and where I see the patterns you can develop with an with an opportunity orientation. Start this way, okay. Imagine the number of decisions that you face on a daily basis. Many of them you probably make without consciously thinking about them whatsoever. Like the one I always use as an example. I go, you know, did you really think about whether you were going to get dressed this morning? Right? But there's there's a long list of habits like that that um you know your mind has formed shortcuts, and there's various systems it uses for forming shortcuts, so you're not burdened by having to, you know, weigh each and every decision. And without these shortcuts, um you would have such decision paralysis, uh, it would be it would be crippling, right? And the shortcut that I want to talk about today is bias. Okay. Um, bias is something that you know, I think when a lot of people think of it, um they they think it's bad, right? Um because they associate it with unfair decisions, they associate it with people discriminating against um other people uh for some reason, they associate it with stereotyping, etc. But I want to discuss bias um outside of that connotation, and just focus on the fact that when I say bias here, bias is a filter for decision making, right? And I believe that most people have a problem-solving bias, right? And as I said in the beginning, the reason is evolutionary. We're not far from the descendants that faced a lot of decisions that were life or death. So a bias towards problem solving was essential for survival. And like all biases, or really shortcuts for that matter, there is a downside, right? You you gain some utility through biases, right? It makes decision making easier, it can make decision making basically unconscious for you, so you don't face that paralysis of what to do next. But there's no there's uh I uh somebody much wiser than me said this there's no free lunch in nature, right? So, you know, you get a benefit from your biases in certain situations. Um, and again, I'm not talking about the biases that have to do with discrimination, etc. Um, but just in terms of like this problem-solving bias, right? It it you the huge benefit is you're a survival machine. But there's a downside. And um actually, in my mind, there's there's two downsides that are really important and salient to the work that I do. Um, one, I mentioned above, is that a bias towards problem solving makes us look for more problems. Right? And I'll say that again. A bias towards problem solving makes us look for more problems. Because if you start with that orientation that um, you know, solving problems is important, solving problems is sort of how I make decisions, um, that is what I apply my rational thinking towards, that is what is making me successful at what I'm doing. Well, then naturally your your mind is going to scale up, right? To go, like, okay, well, uh, if problem solving is what it's all about, let's find some more problems to solve. Right? But this leads to paradoxical situations where that rising competency actually leads to growing pessimism about ourselves and our circumstances. Because you you, first of all, you're and and I I said this earlier, you you because you're so talented at it, you can scale up the your perception of problems around you really quickly. Um you can really get exponential growth in terms of your perception of problems. This is a a bias that is super easy to train. Um, if you've ever noticed on the flip side, right, somebody who seems oblivious to all the problems you perceive, and it's like it's really pissed you off at how content they seem, you know exactly what I'm talking about, right? So the second downside to a problem-solving bias is that it uh it also favors a kind of mechanistic thinking. I referenced this earlier and I want to explain what I mean by mechanistic thinking. Well, imagine a uh giant machine with hundreds of moving parts, right? And you are um you are sent in the room um because one part of the machine is not working properly, right? And you gotta fix that, right? There's a problem with that part quote. So you set about trying to find a solution that focuses on the part that isn't working properly and fixing it. And you do. But that leads to problems with multiple parts downstream. Um, let me give a give you a sports example of what I what I just the analogy I just used, um, where I see a lot in the work that I do. Um I've often now I'm uh I'm getting into the hundreds of athletes that I've worked with because you know, people seek out somebody like me because their perception is I have a big problem and and you know I need some help solving it. And one of the most frequently cited problems that I get at the outset of work together is that they feel totally emotionally overwhelmed prior to racing a big competition. Like I just um I'm locking up in the competition, I feel like I'm psyching myself out, some some variation of this. And when I ask them, and this is one of my questions that uh often annoys people or flusters people, is um, but it's it's sort of necessary uh in the coaching process to be to ask, right? I ask them, okay, this is the situation you're describing. Uh right now, what is your plan for dealing with? And most of the time, actually, they don't even have a plan. They don't even, right? They're they're like, why that's why I'm here. I mean, like, I don't have a plan. Um and in my opinion, they haven't they don't have a plan because in their mind they go, well, I haven't figured out how to fix the problem. And they think that the problem is that they are in a heightened emotional state around a big competition. Well, the solution to that problem actually is really easy. It's to not give a damn about how you do, to not care. But people only come up with this solution as an absolute last resort. And uh they usually call it quitting, or um, if they're uh a little bit later in their athletic career, retiring. And the reason why they don't use it as a solution is because it creates cascading problems downstream in the big machine of I've invested tons of time and effort at being my best, it's something. And so to just, you know, brute force this fix in is basically to break the entire machine, right? Um and it's a mechanistic solution that solves the problem of being nervous around swimming competitions, um but it but it breaks the machine. So my approach to coaching is to start from the premise that that massive surge of emotions around a big competition is not a problem. Okay, and I'll give a short version of it here because, like as I'll reference earlier, I mean, I'm I'm trying to describe some of the process of coaching that you know is pretty intensive process that I do over 12 weeks. I'm not gonna do that in 30 to 40 minutes here on the podcast, right? But I'll give you the short version. Um if you understand the system that creates these massive surges of emotion, and that takes some work to understand, right? To to to to define within your mind, you realize it's not a problem. Do you think, for example, that the um you know urban legends, which have some shred of truth in them, of mothers lifting cars off of their children came from people that weren't experiencing a massive emotional surge. No, emotions are the most powerfully motivating force we have. Okay, so athletes that have big surges in emotion around competition are actually people that care the most, that have their most of their heart invested in what they're doing. And that's why we see people who say that this is their problem, they're most frequently people who are super dedicated and actually train really hard and really invested in what they're doing. Personally, if it were me, if I were building my team from scratch, okay, I would take a team full of competitors that had their heart so much in what they were doing that they were saying that, yeah, some sometimes when I race, I just feel totally overwhelmed. Okay, I want I want a team full of those people because those are people who are all the way in. Okay. And I think that another kind of bias informs the way that most of us perceive the way that athletes, quote, should be around competition. And that's a survivorship bias, right? We are not teaching writ large what to do in high-stakes emotional situations. There's a lot of people out there who are offering kind of mechanistic solutions, like, you know, um. It's not that it's it's it's a it's a bad solution, but you have to understand that it doesn't address a full system. And we're not teaching what to do in a high-stakes emotional situation because, in my mind, a survivorship bias among the highest level competitors, right? These have either been people who you have some people who are so singularly talented that they achieve at a high level or a high enough level without actually investing that much emotionally to like care enough to encounter what people term as this problem. I'm doing big scare quotes because I don't believe it's a problem. Or they were simply resilient enough to quote, endure these moments. But as I said in a previous podcast, I think we can do far better than resilience. Okay? The panic that many athletes experience as emotions flood them. The heat of the moment is both a product of vestigial systems of survival and a lack of capitalization on the opportunity of the power of that flood of emotions. The panic also owes its connection to a mechanistic problem-solving orientation. We get emotionally invested, and our heart is broken by a result. So, like, you know, we've we've experienced a moment where like our heart was just pumping right before the race, and then we, you know, dove in and swam, we touched the clock, and went, oh man, that was so bad. We're so disappointed, right? And then because we're so invested, you know, we become obsessed with like I gotta solve this problem. I was too emotional, um, or I was too like emotionally unregulated uh ahead of time. I've got to solve that problem. But it's not a problem to be solved, it's an opportunity. Okay. And as I said on a previous podcast, which you can listen to, I don't have the title here. Um unfortunately an error in my prep, but but you can, I think you can find it. Devastating emotional situations are the biggest opportunities we get for growth. If we view them as problems to be solved, as a way to avoid, as a, you know, like I gotta find a solution to avoid being in that situation in the future. We're actually really inhibiting our own growth. Okay, so to wrap this all up, let me describe the pattern that a problem orientation or a problem, I mean, like you're never gonna not have some bias towards problem solving. Like that's just so heavily put into us that you're not gonna get away from it. But I'd let's just say a um a dominant problem orientation can set you up, okay, to to to the pattern it can set you up to be in, and then I'll I'll describe the pattern that I uh coach people to be into. Okay, so you start with a problem orientation that biases you towards identifying problems that need solving. You use pessimism to solve them. I didn't really get into this, but pessimism is plays a really important role in problem solving because it uh it is you know, it is another part of that vestigial system, right? I need to solve this or something terrible will happen. I will die, right? So you you use a lot of pessimism to solve problems. You encounter more and more problems as you train your, you know, like world-class problem solving, identifying, uh, threat identifying mind, right? So you start start to feel overwhelmed as the list of problems exceeds your ability. You begin to avoid emotionally charged situations because you know on some level that your emotions override your ability to reason, so you start viewing those emotions as a problem, and you cut yourself off from growth. Then you become frustrated with your lack of improvement, right? But you've through that problem orientation, you've actually cut yourself off from exponential growth. Okay, sound familiar? To me, honestly, it sounds way too familiar. I've been down that pattern more times than I'd like to admit. Okay, here's a different pathway. And as I said, you can just give some space for this. You can start to train this up, right? Opportunity orientation. You actually train a bias to identify the potential for growth in any situation. You develop optimism, something good can happen. I mean, optimism, again, is the best system for identifying and capitalizing on opportunities, right? So you you synergistically develop optimism when you train up in opportunity orientation. And in the same way as um as with problem solving, you encounter more and more opportunities, but but you actually the growth of the opportunities that you perceive is quite slow. Because you're not naturally talented at being biased towards opportunities, right? So it it grows at a very manageable rate. You start to look forward to emotionally heightened situations because you actually begin to understand that they are the biggest opportunities you get, right? If you have an opportunity orientation, well, um you know, like if you have a problem orientation, you're not necessarily excited to find giant problems that are extremely hard to solve. But with an opportunity orientation, you want big opportunities because those have the highest rewards, right? And the reward in this case is uh growth. And you learn to, in that way, love your own emotions, both positive and negative, and as a result, um, you can really grow like crazy. So this podcast, I will admit, is wholly inadequate, right, to describing the process that I typically use, 12 weeks of intensive coaching to develop this in people. But I hope that you can see some of the concepts in what I just described. Thank you as always for listening. If you're interested in coaching, you can contact me through my website, Christycoach.com, DM me on socials, Christy underscore coach on Instagram, CD swim coach on Facebook. And later this week, listen back. Me and Joel are going to be talking about how we evaluate potential. So I hope you guys are going to enjoy that, and uh, I will see you then.