Daniel Pink explains why you're bad at solving your own problems: you're too close to them. He shares three techniques that work: talk to yourself in the third person, imagine advice from your future self ten years out, or ask what you'd tell your best friend.
And here's the thing about us human beings. We stink at solving our own problems. We're terrible because we're too close. We're too enmeshed in the details. So what you should do is do some techniques known as self-distancing. You can do things like talk to yourself in the third person. You're deciding what to do. Don't say, what should I do? Say, what should Steven do? There are other things you can do. You can imagine having a conversation with yourself 10 years from now, and it's not going to be whether I bought a blue car or a gray car. It's not going to be whether I had pizza tonight for dinner or a hamburger. It's going to be other things. And then another way to draw a lesson is the single best decision-making tool that I know, which is that you're faced with a decision about what to do. Ask yourself, what would I tell my best Friend to do. People come to me saying, "Oh, Dan, I don't know what to do." I da da da da da. What would you tell your best friend to do? Oh, that's easy. I you got the answer right there.
