This past November, I attended Martha Beck's, Unleashing your Inner Genius workshop. I came home with an extra bounce in my step, happy to know that I have problems.
Crazy, huh?
Most people I know try to avoid or prevent problems, but according to Martha, problems are cause for celebration. To paraphrase, problems help us to creatively seek solutions for whatever is causing us pain.
I love helping people solve their problems. Determining the source of the angst, (usually a toxic thought) scouring it out, and exploring an "out of the box" approach feels like play to me. I view a problem like a puzzle, which is most likely why I became a Life Coach. When I was a little girl one of my favorite things to do was to solve puzzles. I spent hours doing jigsaw puzzles, crossword puzzles, and my favorite, finding the hidden pictures in the Highlights Magazine.
I felt the same way about games. My sister and I would spend hours on a Sunday morning playing Monopoly or Life. I still love Scrabble and tried to engage my husband in a game or two when we first married. I ultimately gave up after noticing that his contributions were often limited to words rhyming with doe, ray, and me. Nothing irritates a hard core scrabble player more than putting down "so" on a triple word score. It is wrong on too many levels! My fellow scrabble players will know what I mean.
I love the challenge of creating a word that fits into a triple-word letter box, and it's especially thrilling when I can actually score two words with just a few tiles. It makes my brain hurt to think that hard, to be so engaged, and to push it to the very edge. I ultimately lose all sense of time and awareness. Phones ring, the chicken burns, and my kids tear each other to shreds in their bedroom without me noticing. It's worth the brain ache when I consider what I'm oblivious to in the next room.
This brain pain is actually the result of my using only the left side of my brain. According to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, "the left hemisphere of our brain uses words to describe, define, categorize and communicate everything. It can look at all the details of a puzzle and use the clues of color, shape and size to recognize patterns for arrangement. It uses deductive reasoning. The right hemisphere thinks in pictures and perceives the big picture of the present moment. Our right mind thinks intuitively outside the box and creatively explores the possibilities that each new moment brings. It is spontaneous, carefree, and imaginative. It allows our artistic juices to flow without judgment or inhibition."
