There are two ways of thinking about challenges in your life.

The first way is merely to think of them, which is to say that you spend lots of time ruminating on the roadblock in front of you. You examine it mentally from all angles, turning the problem over and over, noticing all the mini, in-built challenges you hadn’t even realized existed before within the larger challenge.

Frozen in an uncommitted, woeful stance, you start to believe that you’re incapable, unsuccessful, and generally a slothful nobody.

Though you might try to delude yourself into thinking the opposite is true, nothing about this mind state is aimed at resolution.

Bemoaning a challenge is not the same thing is being motivated to solve it, but rather another form of feeling sorry for yourself.

You want to know the scary part? You can spend whole days, weeks, years even, pretending that you’re figuring it out. It’s akin to wearing leggings and thinking you’re exercising, when you’re really just eating popcorn sprinkled with nutritional yeast on the couch while wearing leggings.

The second way of thinking about your challenges is to think through them. When you can look at a situation and see not just the obstacle in your way, but the possibility that your ideal solution exists, you enter an entirely different mental realm.

You work backwards from your ultimate desire to where you are now. You consider things on a detailed level: facts and figures and phone numbers. You engage with the challenge, rather than gaping at it.

And when you do that, you realize how solvable your situation is.

You recall that you, alone, have the power to transform it, and you can start doing that today, right now, by figuring out what you really want, and the first steps you can take to make your vision a reality.