Method 1: Why am I upset/sad/slow?
Method 2: Got a problem? Flip it around.
Method 3: The totem pole
Method 4: Mess with your brain levels
Method 5: The honest assessment
Method 6: On a card, on your mind
Method 7: Flow chart graph out
Method 8: Write out 5 solutions
Method 9: Thank the problem
Method 10: How can I solve this hilariously?
Method 1: Why am I upset/sad/slow?
Method 2: Got a problem? Flip it around.
Method 3: The totem pole
Method 4: Mess with your brain levels
Method 5: The honest assessment
Method 6: On a card, on your mind
Method 7: Flow chart graph out
Method 8: Write out 5 solutions
Method 9: Thank the problem
Method 10: How can I solve this hilariously?
Download the entire Problem Solving Checklist in a PDF to keep on your desktop:
Sincerely,
Neville Medhora
P.S. Leave a comment with how you use these tactics….or if you have any “magical questions” you ask yourself. Would love to hear them!!
Neville,
Did you create the visuals for Methods #1-10 yourself? They are useful and funny = bonus.
-Todd Finley
Killer! Stealing…
Hey thanks Neville,
Your information is very valuable , I am using all of your lessons and material to help my small business launch!
Thanks bro!
Vic
I read your blogs and emails every week Neville! I’m always sending it to other colleagues and friends. Your stories are always ironically relevant to something that is going on in my life or a friends. You must be psychic.
The one thing that would be helpful for me… I don’t know what to read next or which course to try. You have a lot of content. It’s hard to figure out what will help me the most. I’ve been in sales my entire career. I’ve already been implementing a lot of your strategies (with my own flare, of course). What is your advance course work? What content would you recommend for someone like me with a LOT of energy, not afraid to try something radical, or fail?
I use the “rubber duck” method.
Every time I’m stuck on a problem I talk to my rubber duck. (OK, I don’t use an actual rubber duck, but the guy who coined this method did). I just talk aloud to myself while the other Starbucks customers slowly edge their seats away from me.
But srsly—talking out loud through your problem is a great way to recast it.
Ah, this reminds me, a friend of mine uses a similar technique. He builds a paper crane.
He says that whenever he has a problem, he builds a paper crane and usually, by the time he’s done, an answer has popped into his head.
I’ve never tried it myself to be honest, but it might be worth a shot :-)
Bahahahha….now THAT is kind of a unique one :)
Lol. I’ve tried that, it works to an extent (for me).
I personally like WRITING it down, definitely clarifies any issue for me much better!
When I read more and more, I was thinking “Wow, these are good stuff. Will there be an entire PDF on this?” Thank you Neville. Totally made my day.
I’m so printing it out to try your methods.
They take the problem by the horns. Once we have an action going, we will feel less “stuck”
Wish my friend had learned all about this.
She ended her life last year.
Rumination kills.
Sharon,
Talking about PDFs, yeah, it’s a great thing that Nev provides these mammoth posts as PDFs. Unfortunately, very few other people do, even when the content is great.
Whenever I come across a great post that I’d like to turn into a PDF, I use a Chrome extension called “Print Friendly & PDF” (no affiliation). It turns web pages into clean PDFs and allows you to remove select parts as well to clean it up even more.
Funnily enough I think I originally heard about this from Nev himself through a recent webinar on AppSumo.
Nev, can you confirm?
Anyway, it’s a great tool.
PS Sorry for the off-topic, just felt it might be useful :-)
Hey Cedric,
Thanks so much for the suggestion.
All the while I have been relying on Acrobat Pro to do the job for me at home.
Glad you showed an alternative.
I’ve been over reliant on a single software that I didn’t think of looking elsewhere.
Only when I’m in the office (no Pro), I wondered whether there’s a PDF version.
You might have guess, yup I’m reading Nev posts at work. Heh.
Luckily my predecessor had Chrome installed with admin’s blessings.
It certainly solved my problem.
I’m gonna happily PDF-ing posts now.
Hey Ced, I’ve never heard of that Chrome extension, but I’m gonna try it out for sure!
Hey Sharon, thanks! If you signup your email, the form will send you a 10mb PDF of the entire thing! In my opinion the PDF is better to have than this post, because you can save it to your desktop and view this anytime.
Maybe send it to your friend? Even one change in the way she thinks can have a dramatic improvement.
As always great storytelling and illustration!
Thank you!!
Question…do you have list of emotional words that I can just plug in aka action/emotiona/compelling words. A cheat sheet or database resource? I may not saying what i want correctly but some type of sales word generator or app.
Once again thank you sharing. You have managed to make this compelling to me. Now i can make product compelling to others.
I’m used to face to face or phone sales. And online has been murky and uncertain. I was taught not to write the way I speak (legal and business) Now you are flipping it and say write the way you speak.
Thank you sensai!
Love this list, and your content in general. It’s unlike anything else out there. A side benefit to #1 is by doing this regularly you won’t let the other catagories slip while your focusing on health/wealth/ or love!
Yup, love that one! Thanks for the compliments Josh :)
LOVED all methods, especially #3. I’m combining it with method #1 to focus in the most important stuff of my Wealth, Health and Love. Thanks a lot!
Oh sweet, so glad to have helped out Pablo :)
As usual, great stuff. Sharing with everyone I know, time now. :)
Why thank you Tom, I hope other people find it helpful also!
I may go through and add some context to the post for new people.
Thanks again for sharing!
Dr. Nev this is great!
The strategies/tactics are great, but so are the way you displayed them.
I’ve done a few of these in some form and they absolutely help. Others I’d never heard until now.
The comment above about approaching the problem from an outsider’s perspective is great too.
I’ve used the FOCUSING question from The ONE Thing to help me out with some big problems too. It asks, “What’s the ONE Thing that I can do, such that by doing it, everything else is made easier or unnecessary?”
Hope that helps someone too.
Bahahha…..Dr. Nev!
Yeah I really liked Cedric’s comment above about the third person also. So obvious, but often forgotten.
So funny you mentioned The ONE Thing book….literally like 6 days ago I went to a seminar Gary Keller put on in Austin (he also lives here in Austin)….and it was amazing! I also read the book before it and got it signed :)
I am currently using the ONE principle: JUST BUILD MY EMAIL LIST. It’s my only objective, and it’s weird how well it brings up all my other metrics by focusing on just one thing.
Love this list – great ways to disrupt usual thinking patterns. I use gratitude for problems/difficult people as often as possible – and not in a “this builds character” way, but really forcing myself to find reasons to be thankful for the experience.
I’m a big fan of Byron Katie and The Work. Her reframing has helped me move forward in my thinking, and give myself the advice I’d been (inadvertantly) saving for all the people around me. It’s awesome.
Thanks Vera! I love when I’m upset or confused about something….I can just hit the problem from a different angle and it makes everything all better. Super useful mind hacks!
Awesome post, but the PDF download at the end doesn’t work. I enter my email, but don’t get the PDF. I just go into your new email subscription funnel, despite already being a subscriber.
Hmmm…..correcting that now.
Personally sending the PDF to your email now!
Same issue here- anyway to download this? I am already a subscriber.
Great ideas btw. Thanks so much!
I have to ask Nev…
Why don’t you still use the “on a card, on the mind method”?
Any reasons? It seems like a good one and a lot of ‘self helpers’ sware by it.
It’s still in there Jordan….check Method #6!
https://copywritingcourse.com/problem-solving-checklist/#six
“I dont use this method anymore but I attest to gaining success in the begining from using it” – that’s what im referring too!
Ooooohhhhh!! Got it!
I used to carry around a card in my pocket with my goals. It actually worked quite well. After years of doing that I just got in the habit of ALWAYS having a monthly goal.
In fact you can see years of them posted in this archive!
http://nevblog.com/category/goals/
Good stuff Neville.
A quick extra tip:
I recently came across a research paper (Grossmann, Kross, 2014) that shows that by thinking about our situations in third person, we tend to make better judgments. e.g. Instead of saying, “My girlfriend cheated on me, should I dump her?”, you should say, “His girlfriend cheated on him, should he dump her?”
In a nutshell it studies why we tend to be wiser about other people’s situations than about ours.
I won’t go into the details because there’s quite a bit to write. But the paper is available here: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/25/8/1571.abstract
I’ve even written an article about it. It’s scheduled to come out in August on the Pavlok blog.
Reference
Grossmann, I., & Kross, E. (2014). Exploring Solomon’s Paradox: Self-Distancing Eliminates the Self-Other Asymmetry in Wise Reasoning About Close Relationships in Younger and Older Adults. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1571–1580. http://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614535400
Oh that’s a good one!
I should add that to the list :)
It’s definitely FAR easier to give an external person advice than yourself. Good one Cedric!
Glad you found it useful. If you want, as soon as the article goes live I’ll pm you the link so you can read the digest version of the paper.
This is KILLER!
I’ve found the books How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie and Constructive Living by David Reynolds incredibly helpful.
Great post.
I’ve heard that recommendation before also, thanks Jesse!
Boss!
Employee!?
Dang Neville, awesome format and info!
Are you becoming some kinda self-help endboss now?
I KNOW for a fact some of this stuff works..For example, i am an expert at cleaning my room fast ;-)
As a total “design” n00b – may i ask what you use to create these simple but awesome images?
Gonna RUSH off now to optimize my brain some more with this info while i got some momentum.
Talk to you later Nev!
Lol…..nope, I just thought this was a cool thing to giveaway.
This actually used to be a successful product I sold for like $10. I no longer promote it, so the residual income from it is low, so instead I’m just giving it away.
I think a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator was used to create all the images (they were made around 2013, but the concepts have been in a file for years).
Glad ya liked Jasper!
That’s really generous Neville, it’s absolutely cool!
That information should be included in the introduction of the post if you ask me. You are a copywriter, i bet your target audience would love to know that this is a product you used to sell for $10 bucks a pop (successfully). It would improve the perceived value of your freebie as well.
Personally i think it’s very interesting – and several other questions immediately pop up in my mind, like:
> How successful was it? Did you sell a lot of copies?
> How did you promote it? Paid ads? and if so:
> How much did it cost you to get one sale?
Nice! I was debating putting that in the email last night….but I was too tired to think much about it :)
I will add that info though, as it adds some great context.
I think it sold $20,000+ worth of this single file, and we promoted it solely through AppSumo.
This is awesome Neville. Thank you, sharing!
Thanks Andy, glad you liked!