You can hear the phrase “there’s an opportunity in every crisis” from time to time. Some even use the word “oportuncrisis,” but if we look beyond these phrases, we see that they’re hollow. No one takes the time to figure out how to give value to chaos.
Every business doesn’t need to have a backup plan to face these types of situations where demand decreases, and operations begin to diminish; there’s always something that everyone in the team can do to help the company. Introspecting and finding our value is how we start being part of the solution.
Suppose we consider that our problem-solving skills come from the way we look at issues. In that case, we must find a way to analyze these situations from a more pragmatic point of view. Being nervous or anxious clouds our judgment and avoids finding a solution.
Life can be gloomy
An example of this is when we have a terrible day and feel like every hour is endless suffering or when we think that all of our solutions lose backing. This negativity spends all of our energy on an internal struggle that keeps us uncertain and anxious.
To get a hold of these negative feelings, we have to begin working on ourselves and build a new mindset. Doing this activity is all about focusing on the attitude we have when we face problems. There’s an incompatibility between our capacity to find solutions and having a negative mindset.
The wrong thinking can make a cool idea go unnoticed.
The first step to change your mindset is to understand that developing yourself is up to you. With time and patience, we’ll be able to construct and identify opportunities from your imagination, creativity, logic, critics, and feedback avoiding all the negative feelings we talked about before.
There’s a useful instrument to begin constructing our shift of attitude and get a general look at what’s around us; mindmaps. They’re simple but powerful if we manage to integrate it into our usual toolset. Starting a reflective activity with a mindmap is priceless.
How do I evaluate my current mindset?
Let’s begin by looking for a tool that helps us make a mindmap. You can use a pen and paper or an online tool to do so. What’s important is that we have the option of editing at any time. I feel comfortable if I can use a tool from my smartphone or laptop. One that’s simple to use and allows me to concentrate on the content and nothing else. I use Xmind because it follows those premises, but you can use any app you want.
Here are some tips to make a mind map right away:
- Imagine that you’re in a situation that creates a negative shift in attitude. Start jotting down all that comes to your mind on your map. Categorize and group what you wrote in a way that you can define mental relations between each topic. The output will be a list of words, themes, and ideas grouped in different branches.
- Now, identify the branch that’s directly related to our attitude towards problems. (we shift from focus to laser mode)
- Make a plan of action. It can be as simple as a post-it near a place you are at a lot with a call-to-action such as “avoid generalizing;” or as complex as a self-improvement plan. The intricacy of your project will depend on what’s best for you.
It’s time to begin.
A goal without a plan is just a wish
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
By making these simple steps, we can get a broad landscape of our attitude toward problems. This will allow us to create specific actions to modify our mindset, identify and prioritize solutions. Of course, there are a lot of factors that have influence. Still, the idea is to show you that executing a perfect plan and won’t always get the results we want. Here’s where our mindset gains relevance.
There’s this fantastic article written by the folks at Xmind that deepens in the process of making our mindmap.
Changing our attitude towards problems is the first and most crucial step to find solutions.
If you want to experiment with this activity, you can reach me via LinkedIn to check your mind maps and give feedback.
This article was originally written by Fernando Ferrari, Director of Operations, and Flavio Ruiz, Content Manager. We both work at Moka and the only thing better than reading a book while drinking good coffee is helping people achieve more.
