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Turn Your Problems into Possibilities · The Daily Writer

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever had one of those weeks where things didn't go so well?
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I just had one of those weeks, and I'm going to share three specific problems I faced and how I was able to turn each of those problems into possibilities.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, hello, my friend.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: This is Kent Sanders from Inkwell Ghostwriting.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to this episode of the Smart Business Writing Podcast.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is the show that helps you grow your business, amplify your authority, and increase your impact through the power of writing.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for joining me today.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, we're living in an unprecedented crazy time.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: As I'm recording this, the coronavirus situation is getting more intense by the day.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of things are going wrong for a lot of people.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel like the most helpful thing I can do right now is to help you see negative events from a different perspective because, of course, there are a lot of negative events happening right now.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, of course, writing is important, skills are important, strategies are important, marketing is important, all those things are important with our writing business.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: But without the right mindset behind our writing and our business, it's all in vain anyway.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why I talk so much on this podcast about our thinking and our mindset, because those things are super critical.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Take this past week, for example.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Here are three problems that I faced.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, we had a big family argument on Thursday night, and in fact, this was the biggest argument that we had had as a family in a long time.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm married, my wife's name is Melanie, and I have a 16-year-old son named Ben, and we got into this pretty big family argument on Thursday night.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Number two was that a book ghostwriting project that I had hoped to start in May was put on hold indefinitely.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, I was disappointed by that.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then number three, I had multiple technical problems when I was editing a podcast episode on Friday.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now, at first glance, these all seem negative, but I think it's important to not view things as they are, but rather as they could be.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Or to put it another way, how can you take your problems, which we naturally view as bad, how can you take those problems and turn them into possibilities for growth and success?
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let me share with you how I tried to do that with these three situations.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Let's first of all talk about the family argument because that's the one you're probably the most curious about.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm not going to go into massive detail about what the argument was actually about because that's kind of irrelevant for our purposes of this discussion right now.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: But really, it came down to this.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: My son was asking for something, and my wife thought it was a good idea.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I strongly disagreed with both of them.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: And the discussion, quote unquote, and what I mean by discussion is actually an argument, the discussion ended with everybody being mad at me.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: So really it came down to my son wanted to buy something expensive with his own money that he had worked for in his part-time job.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this was something he was buying with his own money.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: I thought it was kind of a silly purchase, but my wife actually agreed with my son.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: So we got into this kind of heated uh argument about it.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now, of course, I thought I was right.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, why can't they see this?
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Why can't they see the logic of my point of view?
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's so obvious.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: But they couldn't see it, and of course I thought I was right.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: And as I recall, in this, I'm laughing because this is kind of funny thinking back on it.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: As I recall, in this argument, literally I said, How can you guys not see this?
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: How can you not see this?
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's so obvious.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Which, of course, is a classic sign of arrogance and that you're that you're not willing to listen to somebody else's point of view or consider what's important to them.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Looking back on it, I see that now, but in the moment, you know, when you're arguing and when things get kind of heated and you're you're emotional, um, sometimes we just say things and we'd stick to our point of view even though we know there might be holes in our logic.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: So about an hour went by after this argument.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: We all kind of went our separate ways in the house.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: And do you ever have that moment after you have an argument with somebody where you're thinking, and there's this moment where you just go, you know what?
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I wasn't totally right about that.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they did have a point.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that happened to me.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: About an hour went by, and I started to realize that I had not really listened to either one of them.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: Which is kind of ironic because like one of the college courses that I teach in my day job is I teach speech, you know, like a it's a freshman public speaking class.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, my whole the title, literally the title that I have, is Professor of Communication Arts.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that is what my title is.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's what my job is, is communications.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: So it's kind of interesting that, you know, that's what my job is.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yet many times in my personal life, I don't put that into practice and I don't truly listen to people in the way that I should.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: So an hour went by and I started to realize that I hadn't really listened to them.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I talked to my wife and my son, and I heard their point of view, and I changed my mind on this issue.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: I realized that I was making a mountain out of a molehill.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: And in addition, I apologized because I had reacted emotionally instead of just calmly listening.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: And the problem of this argument actually ended up being a possibility for growth because I bonded with my son through that experience, and I was able to show them that real men apologize when they're wrong.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: So, guys, if you're listening to this, you know, women can be stubborn too.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, everybody can be stubborn.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a uh thing based on being a man or a woman.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: But for all the guys who are listening, man, it's important for us to model apologizing when we're wrong.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh especially to our sons.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's really important because they need to see that, hey, real men can see when they're wrong, and real men apologize when they recognize that.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: So the problem of that family argument ended up being a possibility for growth.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, let's talk about the second situation, which was um a client had given me the green light to write a book for them.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we hadn't signed a contract or anything, but they gave me the green light, and then because of the coronavirus situation, they some of their business had shifted a little bit, so they said they needed to put that on hold for a while.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: So it's kind of on hold indefinitely.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: So that was a disappointment, and I'm not sure if they're actually going to do this book or when that might actually happen.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think it probably will, it may just be like later in the summer or something.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: So at this point I don't know, but it was a disappointment.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: But after I thought about it for a while, I realized that this extra time gives me a chance to continue building my client base, to work on my podcast and also to work on my next book.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: So the problem of having a book put on hold ended up being a possibility for growth because I'll have time to develop a stronger business and a stronger client base.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: So that problem ended up being a possibility for good things.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now the third situation was some tech problems.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: And if you've ever done any writing or any podcasting or pretty much anything in modern life, you know that technical problems are par for the course because we're dealing with computers, apps, all kinds of technical stuff all the time.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what happened was I was editing some podcast episodes on Friday, and I was having trouble importing a certain file type into Audacity, which is the audio editing app that I use for podcasting.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I'm recording on it as we speak.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I spent about 45 minutes trying to download the right plugins to let me import the files to no avail.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I was starting to get pretty irritated because I'm usually pretty good with technology.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Again, you see this theme of arrogance popping up in this episode.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh apparently that's that's been a running theme running through my whole week is my own arrogance and unwillingness to see the obvious.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: So then I noticed that I didn't have the most recent version of Audacity.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: And once I downloaded the newest version, I was able to import the files with no problem.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: And another cool bonus of that was that now I can avoid an extra step in file conversion that I have been doing literally for years.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't have to export a WAV file and then import that into iTunes and then turn into an MP3 and all that jazz.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: I can just export a great MP3 right from Audacity, which actually I could always do, but I'd always heard that the MP3 conversion in iTunes was better than in Audacity and all that stuff.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, this actually saved me time and it solved uh multiple problems at once.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: So this technical problem ended up being a possibility for success for a couple of reasons.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, it forced me to start using a newer, more reliable version of Audacity.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: And number two, I'm now going to save several minutes every time I edit a podcast episode since I don't have to do that extra file conversion stuff.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: Andy Andrews wrote a great book called The Noticer, maybe you've read it.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: And in that book, the main character Jones says, sometimes all a person needs is a little perspective.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I would ask you, what problems are you facing right now?
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: What are some of your frustrations?
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: What do you see as an obstacle, a wall, or an impossible situation?
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: And as you look at those situations in your life, is it possible that these problems or these roadblocks are going to force you down a side trail that can actually lead you exactly where you want to go?
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: Could the frustrations that you're facing in your life be pointing you to solutions and opportunities for growth that you haven't thought about, that you haven't yet anticipated?
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: And is it just a teensy weency bit possible, as it was for me this past week, that your arrogance has blinded you to a possible solution that might be staring you right in the face?
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I know it's hard not to be angry and frustrated right now.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: We all just want our normal lives back.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: And all the regular problems that we have in life are only made worse by a global pandemic and all the disruption and all the craziness and all the emotions that go along with it.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: But let me tell you, your anger is not serving you well.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: And here I'm speaking from experience, those negative emotions don't do anything to help you advance toward your goals.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: You're much better off directing that emotional energy towards something productive.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: And here I'm absolutely preaching to myself.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: So take a step back, take a deep breath, and try to look at your situation through a different lens, which is the lens of possibility.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: And when you look at the lens of possibility, what do you see?
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, hey, thanks so much for listening to this episode.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I hope this is helpful to you on some level.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: As always, remember that you can find lots more resources for writers at KentSanders.net.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: And until next time, remember that your writing has the power to change people's lives.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you in the next episode.