Your Secret Weapon

Did you know that you had a secret weapon to help you solve
complex and perplexing problems? It is available to each
and every one of us whether we know it or not, whether we
use it or not.

Do you want to know what it is? I knew you would: it's your
subconscious.

Stay with me here... and don't roll your eyes! This is not
some hocus-pocus new age revolution or a pie-in-the-sky
theory. This is a fact and if you're not taking advantage
of it you are missing out big-time.

The best way to explain it is with an example of how I used
it just last night.

It has been very hot up here in the mountains (at least to
me!) and I don't do well in the heat. We have central air
conditioning for the first level but my office is on the
lower level and is way too hot for me to concentrate. So, I
set up a makeshift office upstairs and wired it so I could
operate my desktop computer (downstairs) from upstairs using
my notebook computer. There is special software to do this
and I couldn't get it to work properly: I could operate the
laptop from the desktop, but not the other way around, which
is the way I needed it to work.

I tried everything: technical support at the manufacturer's
website, other user groups on the Internet, comparing the
settings on the different computers (after all, it worked
one way, why won't it work the other way??), reading
documentation, "help" files, etc. To complicate the
situation, I was using an older version of the software
which was no longer supported. Needless to say, I was very
frustrated and out of options; I couldn't think of anything
else to try.

That's when I decided to use my "secret weapon". I realized
that I was spinning my wheels, that there must be a solution
that I just couldn't see, and that I would be able to figure
it out more quickly if I put it away and let my subconscious
work on it for me.

Sure enough, within a few hours I had four new ideas to try.
At 2:00 a.m. I woke up with another one, which turned out
to be the solution to the problem.

It's kind of ironic isn't it? Sometimes the best way to
solve a problem is to stop working on it!

The secret is to take your mind off of it. Go on to
something else. It doesn't have to be an activity that is
related to the problem; in fact I believe that the larger
the difference in activities, the better your result will
be.

My wife is good at this. We often have animal-related
problems to solve such as how to take care of them when we
need to go somewhere, or how to keep the dogs away from the
flower pots, or how to allow the cats on the deck but not
out into the forest. She thinks about it a while and then
goes on to the next thing. Before you know it, she has the
perfect solution; it just pops into her mind while she is
doing something that has nothing whatsoever to do with the
problem.

Try it. It really works!