How does solving problems and pursuing interests dissolve anxiety? First, if you have unresolved problems, you will feel anxiety; second, if you have dull interests, you won’t feel purposeful (such as transforming your work environment, starting a business, or helping others), and this lack of purpose will create anxiety.
So how do you solve problems and pursue interests? Through the 5 ways of effort: persistent effort, varied effort, creative effort, research effort, and collaborative effort. This is actually a revolutionary process, because most approaches from therapists focus on relating to feelings, replacing thoughts, and other passive methods that don’t lead to actionable changes.
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The coaching involves two steps:
1. First, we review 40 areas of life, to determine the exact problematic areas. Then, we use the 5 ways of effort to solve the problematic areas.​
2. Second, we review 15 areas of interest, to determine the exact interesting areas. Then, we use the 5 ways of effort to pursue these interesting areas.
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In the information that follows, you will learn what I mean by the "5 ways of effort" and see pictures of the sheet of 40 areas of life and 15 areas of interest.
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The five ways of effort
--Persistent effort: sometimes we give up after the first solution. It’s fine to take a break, but we don’t want to forget about our need for a solution entirely, and just get stuck with a problem. Instead, we need to be patient with ourselves and persistently apply effort–try many different solutions–over not just days or weeks, but years. Eventually, something will stick. And that something that works may not solve the problem entirely, but even making incremental, small progress is an incredible success.
--Varied efforts: when you persistently apply effort, it begins with one solution. You try it out again and again in different ways, until you decide that that solution did not work. But that’s where we combine persistent effort with varied efforts. You don’t just stop at one solution attempt. You creatively think up, research and collaborate to discover many more solutions, and persistently try those ones out, one at a time, over years. This is what it means to apply varied efforts.
--Creative efforts: trying out a variety of different efforts involves creativity! You need to think outside the box, outside of what you wanted your life to look like, outside of what others thought your life should be like, to really be creative in finding a surprising and different solution that could be the one that works. For example, a creative solution to exercise for someone who never exercises, could be a 3-minute home workout that is not very strenuous. This short format (3 minutes, instead of 30 minutes) and easy intensity (non-strenuous, like gentle kicks, instead of difficult pushups) is a creative way of looking at exercise. Another example could be your housing situation. If you are finding rent to be too expensive for your apartment, you might think of renting a room for yourself to save money, or to get a similar career job in a state with cheaper housing. These creative solutions required you to look outside of what you wanted your life to look like–to think outside the box.
--Research effort: besides your own ideas, be humble and look online to find ideas for the problem areas. You can use research sites like ChatGPT, Google and scholarly articles, and video sharing sites like YouTube, to go into incredibly deep dives into simple or complex solutions. Plus, you can use community forums like Reddit and Quora to find incredible, surprising solutions that other people facing the same exact problem as you, applied to their own lives–and then you can do what they did!
--Collaborative effort: work hard. While thinking, researching, and trying out solutions, keep going, keep going! Make a post on community forums like Reddit and Quora where you ask people questions about ideas you have or just ask for open feedback on your problem area. They will gladly give you valuable, free advice! But don’t stop there: if your problem is something that you think a subject-matter expert could address, then look up their job title and contact them, whether it is through LinkedIn, Google Maps, or Google. For example, say you wanted to become an engineering drafter (designs engineering drawings using online software), but you don’t know what the field is like. You do plenty of research on ChatGPT and watch YouTube videos… but you just want to get a feel, a sense, of what engineering drafting is like. So you look up “drafting company” on Google Maps, call 12 in your city and a neighboring city, and get ahold of a real drafter who tells you what a day in his life is like. Suddenly, you feel more sure than ever before that this is the profession for you, so the next problem you start working on is how to get an internship in the field, so you can try it out.
The darkness of not applying effort
If we get overwhelmed by the great work required by this process of transforming our life, we might consider just not applying effort and not solving problems and pursuing interests–letting things stay the same. If you are thinking like this, it is helpful to consider how life would be like in the long-term if we let things stay the same:
--If you had a problem with your “relationship with partner,” and it went unresolved, you might end up having to give child support to your children, only see the children twice a week, and lose out on a great relationship.
--If you had a problem with your “health: exercise,” and it went unresolved, you might end up just feeling uncomfortable in your body and icky more often, which makes you not radiate the bright energy that you could.
--If you had a problem with your “career” and it went unresolved, you might end up spending decades feeling dissatisfied with work: uncomfortable, limited, not thrilled, not being able to earn the money that transforms your life, or even abused.
--If you had a fascinating interest that you never discovered, you might end up
misaligned from a mission, such as starting an effort that helps people, learning long-term skills, contributing innovatively to work, or acquiring more education and transitioning to an engaging industry.
These examples show that life can be unfulfilled, limited, and despondent if you ***don’t***apply the continual, intelligent effort that is necessary to break through the barriers of solving problems and pursuing interests. You don’t want life to be like that, so just keep applying effort through the five categories: persistent effort, varied effort, creative effort, research effort and collaborative effort.
This is actually a revolutionary process, because most approaches from therapists focus on relating to feelings, replacing thoughts, and other passive methods that don’t lead to actionable changes.
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The structure that we begin with
When a session begins, we inspect the 40 areas of life and 15 areas of interest to determine what areas we need to apply the 5 ways of effort to. See the sheets below.
