Navigating Challenges: Problem-Solving Skills
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When I talked to her, I was like, I'm moving back to China and I want to resign. So actually my supervisor, she said like, if you don't secure another job, I recommend you to talk to the boss. Like you just want to move back and see what they say. They offer me working remotely. That was two weeks ago. And then she changed her mind last week and she wanted to let me go.

At first, I was thinking, oh, this changed so dramatically. Because at the beginning, she wanted to keep this relationship. She doesn't want me to quit. And even if I do, she wants me to change to a freelancer to still help the company. And then things change just like in a second. And she decided, okay, we don't need you anymore. This outcome actually is something I designed because I want to move back to China. And I wanted to resign. So this led to the outcome is...

whatever is like my volunteer left or they let me go is i end this relationship with the company and the second it has happened already right there's nothing you can do so i just let it be this is already finished for me so just look forward and to see what i can do what i want to do in the future

And how I see these things, for me, I'm quite positive about this situation, even though I think this can be a difficulty in life, but I don't really see it as a difficulty. So I see it as a challenge. I see it as something new for me to start. Welcome to Cultural Collation. I'm Victoria. And I'm EJ.

Today, we are tackling a topic that resonates with us all: navigating life's challenges and building problem-solving skills. From unexpected setbacks to daunting obstacles, we'll explore practical strategies for overcoming difficulties and developing resilience.

I think...

For me, something that's been recurring in my life that I've really noticed and it impacts me every single time is losing or leaving community and having to build that back up.

It started out when I was younger. We moved around a lot as kids. I switched schools growing up. You know, graduating from college was difficult for me. And then moving to and from China and then having friends move away. Any time where I feel like my community has felt unstable, all of those have impacted me and left me feeling like...

out of place, you know? And I feel like I find a lot of like my sense of like shared identity and sometimes purpose through community bonds. And so when people, or when those bonds are broken,

are reconfigured. I have to go through this multi-step process in order to return to some semblance of normal. And for me, it looks like a grieving process. Then I have this existential crisis where I'm like, who am I? Do I know who I am anymore? And that's something I have to interrogate a bit more. Why is it that when my community shakes, I'm not as sure of myself?

And then I have to identify places and people for new connections. And then I have to act. And like, for me, that's one of the challenging things is that final piece of navigating through the hardship is to like act and like be ready to move forward. Because sometimes people act and they like act backwards and they dwell and

And so specific to building community, like all of this is something that you're navigating while you're still trying to maintain like the previous bonds that you have with other people. And that takes time and energy to reach out and reestablish those connections. So that for me is probably...

uh, the significant challenge that I face and something that I feel like I'm even still experiencing. I noticed that this is going to be my third, the anniversary of my third year since moving back to China, from China to the U S and I still feel like in some ways I'm like dealing with some of that community piece. It's really interesting how much time and energy it can take to rebuild things back again. How about you? What's, uh,

significant challenge that you faced and how did you navigate through it? Before I share my story, I want to say like what you mentioned actually resonated, I think, for all of us. So moving, people can move from cities, from cities to cities, from countries to countries, even when you mentioned, right, like from high school to college and college to college

go to work and the community we've been built are different and how to maintain a community every time things change in our life or like we move into a different place it's challenging for us to create a new thing like you mentioned you moved back to the us already three years and you still like feel like

a sense of like belonging and how really fit into the new community. I think that's a lifelong problem we are facing and it takes time. It takes time to really try how to overcome it, right? So when I was thinking about this, I...

I realized I haven't shared this publicly. So I lost my grand granddad one year ago. So it's during COVID actually is like at the end of the pandemic.

and he passed away when he was about like around 1902 or 93 so I feel like quite lucky that he can live until like his early 90s he's been healthy for the whole time but until like around his 80s he got Alzheimer's he didn't remember me five or six years ago so when thinking about this I still like

I was hurt, broken, and still sad. But I didn't let myself dwell on it. If you keep thinking about it, you will get depressed. But you realize the people we loved and even just ourselves, we are going to die. What I choose to do is remember the good memories. When I was young and my grandpa took me to school on his bike, that is very strong

scenes in my mind, I can still, like, nowadays, I can still remember. Instead of, like, the days he got sick and got, like, really skinny and at the end. Yeah, I think the difficult scenes will, like, keep happening, like, you are alive. Just, that won't, like, happen once and it's never gonna happen again.

So I hope what we share here can help the people who are listening about this, because we know that's definitely going to happen again. And that's something like the certainty in our life. You can get control of it. You know, you can be aware of this is going to happen. Yeah, I agree with what you said. It's so important to remember that there are some things in our lives that are inevitable.

And if we know that they're coming, we can do something about it in advance. That's really important to remember. I guess thinking about that, you know, things that might be inevitable or might come up in life a bit more often. What are some common obstacles that people encounter in life? And how can problem solving skills help overcome them? I don't know if it's common for people, but I know like a few friends of mine, when we had this conversation, I realized, okay,

Or we don't have a strong purpose in life. So I don't think this is so common because people work hard to...

support a family, work hard to maybe buy a house, work hard, they want to save money until a certain amount and they can get retired. It's like people, some people have like strong purpose in life. But for me, I don't really have a goal, like a strong goal. And also I feel, but this feeling I feel is a common obstacle is like feel the feeling of uncertainty.

Yeah, like we just mentioned, like, we know there are some things, like, it's inevitable in life. But also, there are also uncertainties in life. Like, when are we going to move again? When are we going to start something new again? I think what's the...

skills will help me and there's a two way i can think of one is to practice self-care in the such uncertainty world right take care of yourself like physically and mentally is very important by engaging some activities that nourish like our mind body and soul

For example, like exercise, like I mentioned, I really enjoyed while I was in Melbourne, I really enjoyed jogging in the morning with the sunshine, with the beach, with the kindness people, like all the things are free, but you feel really good after the exercise.

And if the weather is bad, for example, it's raining, it's cold and it's windy, you can do meditation at home. And I think the meditation helps just calm you down while you are so overwhelmed by all the emotions. That helps.

and spending time in nature, which I love. So I'm staying with my friend and we would all went together on Saturday to a national park and for about like five to seven K hiking. Like I was so happy and so relieved. You can feel the energy from the nature and everything is free, right?

The track, the walk, and the view are so amazing. And also connecting with loved ones. I think that's very important. Because like when I was on the hike, I was thinking, oh God, like freedom and friendship and the loved ones are the most beautiful, important things in the world.

yeah so taking care of yourself is very important and the second is to embrace the journey because we always forget like how short the life can be and if we always keep looking forward like we're five years after five years gonna happen ten years ahead i remember it's very interesting you know like in china when we study the national exam right there is a book called

something like 五年高考三年模拟 So it's a book like you practice three years and prepare for the

national exams in five years. And people always ask about like, when you're doing the job interview, they always ask, okay, what's your plan in three years? What's your plan for five years, right? Like, I think sometimes it's good to have a goal, like to talk in the interview. But like in a life goal, when you're thinking about too long, and you feel all this so much uncertainty, and you don't know what to do, and then you feel like a lot of anxiety out of it.

But I think remember it's okay not to have all the answers right away because life is a journey. It's natural to experience periods of uncertainty and self-discovery. Trust in the process you have faced that you

will find a way in a due time. I really loved what you said about being in the moment and like not getting so caught up in like thinking about the future and like planning ahead and like imagining a future, this more like ideal future, how things can be because it does bring anxiety. Like I've been thinking about that a lot. Like,

with myself recently, just like have some work things that are coming up that I know that are going to be tough. They're going to take a lot of time. I'm like constantly thinking about the future and like how difficult it'll be. Just this little task as opposed to just like staying in the moment and saying, I'm having a great weekend. I can go outside. I can go enjoy nature. Like you said, go touch grass. Right. And like, you know, like don't be so caught up in all of these things that are going on. It's really important that self-care piece. Well,

Even though I know self-care is important, I feel like I lose sight of that because I get caught up in, like, being ambitious and, like, getting work stuff done. So, yeah, that's such a good reminder to take care of ourselves. And, like, sometimes it's like you said, it's going out and going on a walk or it's going for a run. It's like those little things in the day that we all have time for. I think that's the other thing. Sometimes it...

We tell ourselves, oh, I'm so busy or I'm so tired. I couldn't possibly make time to do any of these self-care things. But going on a walk takes 20 minutes. Everyone has 20 minutes, right? Everyone has time to go outside and doing some of those things. So thank you for that reminder. Meditation sometimes only takes a couple of minutes, right?

Yeah, meditation. Yeah. There's like five, 10 minute meditations out there. It's all you need. Exactly. How do you feel about the common obstacles people encounter in life? When I thought about this, when I think about this, I find myself

Like, there are a few things that come up for me a lot. One is fear of failure, which I think plays into my, like, the sense of perfectionism that I have. I think because I want things to be perfect, I often procrastinate doing them because I'm constantly thinking about how to make them perfect. And because I can't make them perfect because nothing can be perfect, then I end up feeling less confident in myself and lagging confidence. So I've really...

I can't remember where...

I learned this, but I learned somewhere we were talking about the difference between being competent in something and having confidence in something. And that oftentimes when we encounter a difficulty is that most times we have the competence, like the ability to navigate through it and problem solve. We just don't have, for whatever reason, the confidence in ourselves to do it. And so I always keep that in mind. It's like, I have to remind myself, like,

Like you said, in due time, I can find a way to get through this. Like I have the competence to get through this. And so I have to rekindle my own sense of self-confidence. I think that other thing I tried not to do is to avoid analysis paralysis. That's something that I learned from my therapist, actually. This idea that like,

you get paralyzed by overthinking and that, you know, sometimes you don't necessarily always need the most perfect plan. And like, when you have less overthinking, you can just jump into things and just do it. And that's something that I try to help myself problem solve with is when I find myself overthinking too much,

then I know that I need to start acting, right? Or if I find myself getting stressed about something, then I know I need to like, okay, break it down and call, not a plan, but I need to come up with steps that I can take so I feel like I'm making progress on something. Otherwise, I just like, I don't spiral, but I repeat the same thought in my head in a cycle over and over again. So action to me is really important in terms of a problem-solving skill that helps me overcome that.

Yeah, speaking of procrastination, I think that's one of the things you mentioned about paralysis. I can think of the exact moment what happened to us doing work, like what happened to me doing work.

Sometimes we feel overwhelmed by the tasks we are given. And it really just like paralyzes us. I think it's when we start breaking tasks into smaller manageable steps and try to prioritize them based on the urgency. It can help to address the issue gradually, right? It doesn't have to be like, don't let procrastination kill you, right? But I also want to say about this is like, if you feel often buried in tasks,

and address the like an experience, significant stress, I think it's a problem that needs to be addressed gradually in the long term. I remember what I used to do is try to talk to my boss about like the workload to see if it's a labor issue, right? If you can help with like help me unburden some of the tasks or is it because like I need to improve and become more efficient.

I think that's like something I learned about the procrastination, how it paralyzes me, and also how I differentiate problems that requires immediate actions. And those can be approached more gradually. How about you? I feel like for me, the

paralysis thing comes up here as well. I think like for me personally, like most times when I encounter a problem, it always feels like really urgent. Like it requires immediate attention for me. And, you know, oftentimes like we experience problems and they can be small problems or they can be big problems. Like it'd be personal work problems, whatever. And like sometimes multiple times in a day, like,

And my problem is, is when that happens to me, I allow myself, well, yeah, I get overwhelmed and then I get stuck because I'm like, well, which one do I worry about first? And so another thing that I learned, well, yeah, because they all feel so urgent, they all feel really important, even though I think a small problem shouldn't necessarily be treated the same as maybe necessarily a bigger problem. And so I,

Something that I learned, and I recently learned the name of this, it's called the Eisenhower Matrix. And it's something that can help you understand, like, the difference between high importance literature

low urgency things and like high importance, high urgency things. So an example might be of something that's like really important, but maybe doesn't require your immediate attention is low urgency is like, I want to deepen the relationships I have with my current friends, but maybe I don't know how. Right. But like,

Just because you don't know how to right now doesn't mean your friendships are going to go away. It just means you need to learn the skills. Then over time, you will practice them. And then over time, that gets deeper, right? Versus maybe a health issue that you might have, right?

that might be high importance and high urgency, meaning that you need to get direct care from a doctor. So for me, that's something that I try to distinguish between something that is like really urgent, but is less important. If it's less important, then like maybe I can make it less urgent then since it's not a priority. And that helps me figure out, okay, what do I need to do first? What do I need to do second? What do I need to do third?

I think the things in our life like high emergency and high priority is the things we need like require immediate action. Whether it's a health situation or it's a relationship or it's like personal professional thing, right? So

I'll take health situation as an example, right? If you realize this thing is so important, it caused your health problem, then you need to make the immediate action. Like you mentioned, seeing a doctor, change your daily routine.

Eat healthy, exercise. That's something you can start doing like this right away. It doesn't have to be prepared to make a plan, right? To procrastinate this. It's very easy to do. So we just have to do it. Talk about like a lot of difficulties, right? So I wonder what role does mindset play in problem solving, especially when facing difficult situations?

situations? Yeah, mindset plays such a key role because oftentimes I feel like we can get stuck in our mindsets and we're not able to shift when we face a difficult situation. And I think we need to be able to be calm and be able to reflect and that can help center us so that we're able to move forward. I think that like, especially

Certain challenges, like you said, like if you dwell on things that can lead us to becoming really negative. And so you don't want that to happen. You don't want to become, you put yourself in a situation where you're feeling depressed. And so as much as you can have a positive attitude and not like,

What's that word? Like toxic positivity, where you're positive just for the sake of being positive. But you have to be positive for yourself, right? You have to be able to believe in yourself. You have to be able to sort of see the silver lining in situations or the light at the end of the tunnel, because oftentimes the things that we encounter are temporary. And it's important to have that perspective, I think.

Yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree. I think it's very crucial to set our mindset right when facing difficulties, like you mentioned, right? For example, a positive mindset can help you approach problems with optimism and resilience.

seeing them as an opportunity for growth and learning instead of saying this is how I've encountered such a big problem how should I do it right bear with a growth mindset which views challenges as opportunities for growth and development can also empower you to tackle problems with confidence and determination like we often see difficulties when we

we realize, oh, I don't have the experience. I don't know how to deal with it. How should I do? And then we give ourselves a really negative mindset. And then the things become like,

keep going like a snowball, like keep rolling, rolling and become like a such big negative thing, right? If we see all this is opportunity for me to learn, whether it's mentally or like on the skill set, something I can learn. If I encounter this, I gain a skill, I learn a new skill, a job or work, or like I become mentally stronger. That's something like we can bear in mind when we see something and don't,

always think, oh, what should I do? Oh, this is like a huge problem. And it all depends like our mindset. So which I think like mindset is very important in our life. Yeah, I agree. Especially when you are talking about that idea of like, there's an opportunity for us to learn from it as well. I think we've been talking a lot about like encountering challenges or setbacks or obstacles and

As if, like, each time we, like, are perfect and we successfully navigate through them every single time. Like, sometimes we don't. Like, sometimes we hit a wall. And sometimes it doesn't work out. And, like, sometimes the obstacle, you know, like, kicks our butt. And we have to, like, pick ourselves up again. And we have to be able to...

look at that in a way that says like, okay, there's a lesson in here. Like, what can I learn from this? How can I build myself back up from this situation? And how can I maybe approach it differently the next time that I encounter it? So

Thinking about encountering the variety of obstacles and challenges that we've been discussing, are there any particular techniques or approaches you recommend for building problem-solving skills? I watched this short video online a week ago, I think, and I remember immediately after I watched it because I think it really resonated with me. And I really love how they say is the phrase is,

called "Let it be". So in Chinese is "run shu yi qie fa sheng" has three different levels of meanings. The superficial one is whatever happens, you've done what you could let it happen. It's like you design it or you make some intervention and

Let the things happen. And the second layer is you need to accept that you cannot control everything. Once you accept it, it becomes the past and you can look forward to the new and exciting things. And the third is all about how you see things, right? Whether it's a pain or feeling stuck, it depends on your mindset. And I want to give an example of what I just experienced last week. So I got laid off.

by the company and it was, how do I say it? I think it's unexpected news for me. But then I realized it's nothing like really so surprised because I've decided to move back to China. And before I talked to my supervisor, so I already decided to resign. When I talked to her, I was like, I'm moving back to China and I want to resign.

So actually, my supervisor, she said, like, if you don't secure another job, I recommend you to talk to the boss. Like, you just want to move back and see what they say. Right. And then they offer me working remotely. That was two weeks ago. And then she changed her mind last week and she won't let me go.

At first I was thinking, "Oh, this changed so dramatically." Because at the beginning she asked me to think about the relationship. She wanted to keep this relationship and she doesn't want me to quit. She doesn't want me to resign. And even if I do, she wants me to change to a freelancer to still help the company. And then things change just like in a second and she decided, "Okay, we don't need you anymore."

So like what I just mentioned, this outcome actually is something I designed, or at least I did something, right? Because I want to move back to China and I wanted to resign. So this led to the outcome is...

whatever is like my volunteer left or they let me go is I end this relationship with the company. And the second is it's happened already, right? There's nothing you can do. So I just let it be and don't think about it anymore. Just like this is already finished for me. So just look forward and to see what I can do, what I want to do in the future.

And how I see these things, for me, I'm quite positive about this situation, even though I think this can be a difficulty in life, but I don't really see it as a difficulty. So I see it as a challenge. I see it as something new for me to start over. And yeah, that's the story I want to share and the approach I used when I faced the

probably solving more like difficulties in life. Thank you for sharing that story. I feel like there's this like, I don't know, this like what you're talking about is like this radical acceptance of like your circumstances. And I feel like that's

Such a great thing to be able to achieve, to be able to say like, okay, like, let it be like I've done what I can do. You know, it's like past tense now. That made me think of prayer, actually. And I'm not like a particularly religious person, but I find myself coming to this prayer. It's called the serenity prayer.

And it has three sort of separate phrases to it. And one is, God grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change, which is what you were talking about, right? Like,

I want to be able to accept that I can't change the situation. And no matter what my response is or how I feel, that doesn't mean I shouldn't feel those feelings, but don't let those feelings get into the way of me accepting the reality of what can't be changed. Then it says, courage to change the things that I can.

So grant me the courage to change the things that I can change, meaning that like it's important to focus on what is in my sphere of influence. What can I can control and what can't I control? And the last part is grant me the serenity and the wisdom to know the difference between the two. And I think that that's where I like this prayer because it's a reminder that like

there is that difference and sometimes we need help figuring it out. And I feel like for me it's a reminder that like I have to look for good examples sometimes of people who have good approaches to problem solving because I don't think, I don't know if I would say that like I'm a natural problem solver or as if I just like have to observe a lot of things and figure them out. And so

I guess for me, I think there's this idea that we have, maybe it's not necessarily a mindset, but maybe it's a poor approach that I've taken that maybe people shouldn't take is that like,

I think there's this idea that like we have to do everything on our own and that because life comes at us and they're our problems. So like it's the individual's responsibility to solve them. And I do think that that's true, right? You can't solve someone else's problems for them. It's like people do have to take things on in ourselves. But I think that like,

There's sometimes that mindset becomes too extreme and then people have shame around the concept of seeking assistance when we need it. And I think as someone who has spent a lot of time having to figure things out on my own, because I've been the first person in my family or in my friend group to do certain things, I wish I would have learned earlier as an approach to rely on others and

And like, you know, maybe sometimes that's strangers or acquaintances, which feels really uncomfortable. But I wish I would have learned to like push through that comfort earlier. I think that would have helped me learn and pick up some problem solving skills maybe a bit earlier in life and a bit faster. Yeah. This is something I think you can try next time. So how do you...

think that individuals can leverage their past experiences to enhance their problem-solving abilities in the future? I think reflecting on our past solutions is important for improving problem-solving skills. Like we mentioned in the early, at the beginning, right? So some problems are going to happen repetitively. It's not like just going to happen once and never have it happen again, right? And you can...

feel and see a pattern with this. And by reviewing how you've successfully problem solved the problem, you can gain valuable insights into effective strategies. Identify the approaches and techniques that worked well and consider how you can apply them to the current or the future challenges. Also, I think learning from mistakes is essential. So I see this very interesting line is learning

from our mistakes is good, but learning from other people's mistakes is great. I think it's hard. It's hard to learn from other people's mistakes because you need to observe and you need to learn and you need to analyze why they make mistakes. So the things, it might not happen to you, but happen to the people around you. You may be the part in the problem-solving process

process, then it's also a skill for you. You can learn, you can learn experience, make other people's experience become one of yours. If you don't, that's okay. So just like consider your own experience by analyzing past failures as a learning opportunity, identifying what went wrong and why, and consider alternative approaches for a similar situation in the future.

Embrace failure as a pathway to improve and growth. And over time, you may develop patterns of thinking or problem solving approaches based on the past experience and recognize this, oh, all of these are such similar problems. And drawn past success to inform your decision making and problem solving process ultimately enhances your overall effectiveness.

What about you? Yeah, I think you were so spot on in saying that it's important that we learn from our mistakes and like we review and reflect on our past experiences. Right? Like if we do that, we can recognize patterns and if we can see certain patterns that we make, then hopefully we can understand them better so that we can avoid them.

I feel like, you know, like recently there's been this like huge, maybe not huge, but there's been discussion around like breaking patterns and breaking cycles, like intergenerationally or work patterns or what have you, or patterns in your relationships. And I heard something that was really interesting. Someone say that they didn't want to be a cycle breaker. They wanted to be a cycle starter because they felt like,

a lot of times that when someone is in a cycle, other people are in that cycle as well. And in order to fully break from it, like you can't do that without those other people also leaving the cycle. And so she said like, I'm not a cycle breaker because I don't want to have to take the baggage from that past experiences and bring it into the new patterns or routine that I'm trying to build. So she said, I'm a cycle starter. And I thought that that was really nice because it was a reminder that like we can start things anew and we would start things fresh and

And I feel like I've learned a really big lesson in that, like, I was scammed when I got my house. I got some work done on it and I was scammed out of a lot of money. And...

I learned and reflecting on that, that like I allowed the sense of urgency of the situation to get the better of me without really taking note. I was people pleasing instead of holding others accountable. And I overlooked these like really obvious red flags that I feel like in the other situations.

time that I wouldn't have because I didn't understand some of the things that we've been talking about, you know, how to, you know, understand urgency versus importance or how to not let myself get overwhelmed and make hasty choices.

And so, yeah, I definitely agree. Like take that time to reflect and you have to be able to reflect so you can learn, so you can do better the next time. - Yeah, we're talking about like all of our like self-reflection. So do you have any suggestions or advice for the people that can seek support from others in problem solving and navigating life challenges?

Yeah, I think it's so important asking for help. I mean, I think that like, as I touched on a little bit, I think that there's this idea that maybe we have to do things alone. And in reality, that's not true. I think it's asking for help a lot of times can be easier said than done. And I think understanding how to ask for help and when to ask for help for a lot of people is a skill that you have to learn. And so I think that

figuring that out for yourself, especially if you're someone who in situations is probably less likely to ask for help. Maybe that's a muscle you want to work on a little bit more. I think that asking for help is great because sometimes you don't necessarily need

But you want people to know that you are going through something because they can provide support and positivity and encouragement when you can't do that for yourself. I think often another good thing about like seeking people and how it can help in navigating challenges is that they can remind you of the small wins in life and they can give you perspective.

I think sometimes, as we've talked about, adversity can feel so big and overwhelming. But the reality is that a lot of the times, some of the things that we're facing are relatively minor and temporary. And having that outside perspective allows us to...

remember that when we aren't able to do it for ourselves because we're in like tunnel vision how about you yeah I like the the third person perspective because I can remember when you talk about I can think of the things we think oh that's the such a huge things right that's huge things in my life a big obstacle or blocker in front of me but after talking to friends and then like you realize

oh, that's nothing, right? Like on the current moment, like you said, title vision, you only see what's in front of you. But actually there's a lot of ways you can overstep it. You can even maybe turn into other direction to avoid the situation. So like the problem, I think the problem solving skill is not only you need to solve this problem. Sometimes you can cross over, just like walk away from the problem. And it's also a way to,

to solve things, like maybe temporarily, but at least like when you make you feel better at the moment. Yeah, I think seeking feedback is a really good advice. And so something I would add more is to seeking feedback from the others who were involved in the past problem solving efforts, or who observed your approach is essential for refining the problem solving skills.

Because their perspective can provide valuable insights into your strengths and areas for important helping you enhance your problem-solving abilities for the future challenges. I think this, which also means like we don't need to have a lot of friends, but like a couple of friends stay with us for a long time is important because they've seen how you face the difficulties, what challenges like,

what actions you've taken and how you helped yourself overcome. And they are just here to remind you that you have this ability and you've done this before. So you will be fine. And which is very important. And additionally, I think maintaining a curious and open-minded attitude towards problem solving is crucial. Like,

This is more like I'm thinking as professional-wise, right? Like seeking out new information, perspectives, and solutions, and be willing to adapt and evolve your approach based on what you learn from positive things that contribute to your growth as a problem solver. And all things can be very difficult, especially when you're older. Like learning something new is difficult. Like compare when we are younger.

maybe teenager or early 20s. But this mindset, you just need to have this mindset. I think it's fine to learn something hard, but we still have this ability. Just trust yourself. We still have this ability to do it. And this is very important to problem solving because new problems come. And sometimes like our past experience doesn't suit us.

for the new challenges. We have to learn something new, the new skills for new platform, like new technology, right? And that really helps. And just at the end, it's a good thing because you gain some new skills. Because life is just like lifelong learning. You have to keep learning and keep growing, which is we, everyone like should learn

have this mindset to help you with the problem solving. Yeah, I'm just, people can't see me because this is like, it's audio, but I've been like nodding my head because it's so important to like that. What did you say to have that curious and open mindedness? Because yeah, like there are times where you're going to have to learn something new or you're going to have to pivot. You're

And like, that can feel so hard. There can be so much inertia when you, especially if you're, you've been doing something a certain way and it's been going well for you. And then you realize it doesn't work. You have to pivot and change. So that's such a, such an important note to remember that we have to be willing to change. And then a lot of the times we have to put in the work to do the change and maintain it. And that can be hard, right? Like there's that resistance where we're like, oh, I don't want to have to, you know,

do these things my way but that's that is so so so key you know sometimes it's not actually this this new skill is this new platform is really hard to learn it's our mindset yeah it's just that it's a new thing we tell ourselves that it's hard or that it's inconvenient when in reality and we're afraid of learning something new yeah yeah okay

As we conclude today's episode, we hope you gain valuable insights into navigating life's difficulties and building problem-solving skills. Remember, challenges are opportunities for growth, and with the right mindset and strategies, you can overcome any obstacle that comes your way. Join us next time for more enriching conversations on cultural collision. Until then, stay resilient and keep striving for personal growth. Goodbye. Bye.