568. How to be a ninja problem solver

It's like the realization that as an entrepreneur and being surrounded by other people, like, you don't have your pity parties and at least you don't have them alone anymore. Like, how fast can you get over this thing that happened? Like, maybe you lost $100,000. That's devastating. Now what? Welcome to the earn your happy podcast. I'm Lori Harder, founder of The Bliss Project, 3 Time Fitness World champion, fitness expert and cover model, turned self love junkie, lifestyle entrepreneur, author. Each week I'll bring you a guest or a thought that will help you bust through your fears, connect to your soul, and get focused and clear so you can elevate your life, business, and relationships. We don't wait until we're ready for someone to tell us we're good enough. We take what we want and we anoint ourselves, get ready to earn, own, and unapologetically rock your happiness every single day. Are you with me? Here we go. Foreign.

Welcome back to another episode of he said, she Said. All right, today I've got something really specific I want to ask you about. Okay.

Oh, yes. Let's do it.

Hold on. It has something to do with, well, what happened yesterday when I was trying to park the motorhome. It got me thinking a little bit about one of your superpowers, and it actually led me to doing a whole episode that's coming out soon. So spoiler alert on your three superpowers that have absolutely caused your massive success in business. And while I don't want to repeat that episode at all today, there's one specific superpower that I actually wanted to ask you about today because I think it is maybe one of the most imperative, most important things that anybody could have as a trait, and anybody could actually build this superpower.

Oh, I love this.

And it is.

No, but I do want to say it's not just parking the rv, guys. It's parallel parking the RV with trees and branches that, like, you are are near hitting like. It's an insane, like, feat to be able to park this thing.

Yes, it is setting it up. I will vouch for my amazing driving skills. Okay, well, here's what happened. I don't know if you remember this, but when we first pulled up at home yesterday after being away camping for a few days, and for those of you listening, we have to find storage. We live in LA. We have this huge 41 foot new bus, and we have to find storage for this thing. They have storage all over, but we haven't found it yet because we keep taking it every Weekend. And, well, let's be honest, because we haven't made it a priority. And so we're parking in front of our house for now. And we've got these cones that reserve about 50ft of space out in front of the house. And I got home. We got home yesterday and somebody had picked up all the cones, put them in the yard and parked one car there. And when I pulled up, I blew a gasket. Like, lost my shit, right? And so I'm sitting there laying on the air horns. Yes, I have air horns. You know, like what my trucks have. They're amazing. Nothing makes somebody move like an air horn. So picture this. We're in our beautiful neighborhood. I'm laying on the air horns with the bus pointed at this person who parked there. And I'm just laying on them hoping.

That nobody's in the parked car, you.

Guys, somebody would come out of their house.

And I've never experienced this.

Now, even as I describe this out loud, it's kind of spazzy and juvenile. But sometimes I think just I don't have any other way of reacting. It's like in me. So here's the point, here's the point. Lori yells at me. She yells at me and she says something like. And I don't remember the exact quote, but you're like, are you going to keep being an a hole or are you going to be a problem solver? Because you're not probably solving the problem.

I said, are you going to be a problem solver or a baby?

Oh, that's what it was. That's what it was. She literally yells at me as I'm doing. She goes, are you gonna be a problem solver or a baby?

Now, could I have said it better? I'm sure, but I was in the heat of the moment of an rv, like, directly blocking the entire street and him air horning in a neighborhood with people watching to a car with no one in it. What is that like? I'm so confused.

That was being a baby.

Oh, my God.

Now here's the thing. This snapped me out of it. This made me realize right there, I really am just one of two things right now. I'm either a problem solver or I'm being a baby. And I'm sure half of you out there are natural problem solvers. But I'm sure the other half of you listening right now are maybe closer to the spazzy baby. And Lori has taught me over the years, I still have have these spazzy moments, but have I gotten way better?

Oh, God, yes.

She's taught me over the years to chill out and to be a problem solver. Now, it is not one of my superpowers yet. It's gotten exponentially better. But it is a superpower like I have never seen before in Lori. Ever since I've met her 15, 18 years ago, married 15, known you for 18, you've been a problem solver. You don't panic, you don't freak out over the challenge. You simply solve the problem. And that's what I wanted to talk about today because I've watched it get you over hurdles, under hurdles, around hurdles, or smash right through hurdles by simply solving the problem. And I believe that if every single person listening for their personal life, for their business, if they actually chose to start exercising and developing this problem solving muscle, that their businesses, their dreams, their life would be exponentially better. So first question for you, sorry for the long setup. First question for you is this. Why are you such a problem solver by default? Where did that come from?

I mean, I think we're all born with somewhat of our natural inclination in things, but I definitely got a bird's eye view into what happens when you don't solve problems. Just growing up in my environment and the people around me, and one thing that I always say to you is sometimes you're like, I don't wanna. You just wanna talk about something that's happening in the moment. And my brain won't let me just think about that moment. It thinks all the way down the road to the end of the thing by default. By default. So sometimes it annoys you because you're just like, oh, this weekend we should go to X, Y and Z. And I'm like, okay, but what about blank, blank, blank? And when do we do this and that? And you're like, God, why do you always have to do that thing? Or like, bring in all these different problems that could come up? And I'm like, because it's not just the thing. There's always a million things surrounding it that you're gonna need to think about and solve. And I think going back to what makes me, like, what makes me solve a problem, you guys, there, there's always only two ways to deal with problems. Sit in them, cry and sit in the pain. Be annoyed and think that life is happening to you or freaking get rid of it and solve it. Like, the only way through that problem is to go through it. The only way to get around it is through. So I always say, this isn't going away. Like, I literally in that moment, face the fact that the only way it's going to go away is if I solve it, or we figure out a way to solve it or hire someone to solve it. But I refuse to sit in it and waste time, because all that does is waste time.

Yeah. So where. Yeah, this is your default. But you didn't touch on how you built this muscle. You just touched on how it comes naturally to you. And I had a hunch, I said in this other podcast I did, that I think it was all those years working with your dad, remodeling and building kitchens and homes and all that, where he forced you to. He'd show you the problem and force you to help him figure it out. Am I way off or do you think it came from that?

I think there's a million things like that. That was definitely a huge part of it is there's never. Like, nobody's on those kitchen jobs when we would be doing whatever it was. And there's. Here's the thing about this is so interesting. So building a kitchen. Now, typically when you're building a kitchen, the house is already not typically every single time you're building a kitchen or remodeling a kitchen, the structure is already there. So you don't get to create the kitchen out of thin air and like, just work with this perfect room. So what happens is remodeling or building a kitchen is always problem solving because you are fitting this model that you have created that you've already drawn up. That's perfect if the home is perfect. But guess what? 9 times out of 10, the home is never actually, 10 times out of 10, the home Is never perfect. So you have to solve all of these problems before your idea can fit into this already made box, which this is. Works perfectly with thinking about how the world works. You have this dream, this vision, but. And it's going to work perfect in your mind, but you have to retrofit it into something that's already built in someone else's idea.

So.

So in that kitchen, what happens is you bring all your materials in there, everything's cut to size, and then you start putting it in the kitchen. So you fit it against the. You fit the countertop against the wall, you put the countertops down, you put the cabinets down, and what happens is you put those cabinets down and you put the level on top of the cabinets and realize that the entire thing is leaning to the right.

So the whole floor is not leveled.

Yes. So you now have to go and figure out how to level the floor. So there's a. And here's the thing. When we're on a kitchen job, we don't stand in the kitchen because the floor is not level and say, who's going to come help? Oh, my God. And start crying and pouting because nobody is coming. The job is your kitchen. Right? Nobody's coming. Just like when you were park your. The job is parking the rv. In your mind, you pictured this perfect parking spot in front of the house. And when it didn't fit your expectation, you threw a baby tantrum. Like, okay. And it wasn't a baby tantrum. It was a real life big man tantrum.

It was an air horn tantrum.

It was an air horn tantrum. I mean, like, that was a great thing to. That. That was a great thing to live through.

I wish that would have been on film.

Yeah, that would have been great. That's the moments where I'm like, God, we need a reality show. And I also would be like, please don't put that in there. That was embarrassing.

I was just gonna say that's exactly what you would have made us cut out. Okay, so I want to get back to the topic here. Problem solving and why other people could develop this. So, number one, you first said, well, this is naturally natural to me. And even when I'm trying to be in the moment, I'm like, lori, let's go do this this weekend. You can only think about the potential problems and start solving them.

Yes.

Then I pushed you further. Where do you think you developed this muscle? And you gave that great analogy of working in kitchens with your dad. There's always going to be something off. You have to fit into a imperfect space and create perfection out of it. I watch you do that in our businesses right now. Everyone listening, they could help this. This could help their personal life, and this could help their business. What's the first couple of things they need to do if they're built like me, to start changing and seeing how to solve the problem right away.

Catch the frustration, because I get it. It's not that my frustration doesn't come and that I haven't. I for sure. And once in a while, definitely have a temper tantrum. Like, they won't be long, though. So what will happen is I will feel that start to rise and I'll start to feel that I want to avoid it or retreat or want someone else to solve it or get pissed. And the thing about getting pissed is it solves nothing. So feel it, get annoyed and then say, how long do I Actually want this feeling because it's not going to go away. Sometimes I think we think the more mad we get, the more it's like going to help the situation. And it actually makes it way worse because you block all of the access that I believe we all have as humans to a creative problem solving place. So the only way you can get to that creative problem solving place is to calm down and kind of sit in a space of like proactiveness, Be like, okay, take a deep breath, catch it and just be like, what do I need to solve this problem right now? Is this something I can solve right now or can I start setting it up to be solved later? It's our expectation and our attachment to the timeline and to how we think it's supposed to be that's causing that temper tantrum. So you gotta release all that in order to even solve it. And here's the thing, there's a hundred problems a day and like I have a hundred problems right now in my day that if I thought about them all at once, which is what I think a lot of overwhelmed, panicked, anxiety ridden people do because I used to do it, if I think about them all at once, I literally will have a panic attack and a nervous breakdown meltdown. Like, I am very capable of that. But it's releasing the attachment and the expectation of what you thought this problem was gonna be that solved. Right. Like right down to when we thought we would have to bring the motor home in, when we wanted to go camping and all of these different things, I had the ability immediately to go, well, we'll change our plans. And for you a lot of times, which actually can sometimes help, you're like, no, this is what we're gonna do right now. Like, I want this right now. And you get really irritated about it. And sometimes that can actually serve you. But it's also. So if you could simultaneously do that while releasing the expectation and say, maybe we won't have this motorhome fixed by the weekend, what would our backup plan be? So I'm always kind of, you know, thinking through how can I release this expectation super fast and reset. So I, I'm very nimble in my thinking and my expectation because I know that expectations just cause pain.

I love that. So don't sit in the muck, don't throw the fit. Start becoming very nimble in any situation. Like be quicker to catch the, that you're about to blow up over the situation and say, what's a backup plan? Or what are multiple backup plans?

Yes.

Okay, so Next thing. So people are like, okay, great, I'll stop spazzing and I'll start thinking, great, what's the next plan? Where do they go after that to become a better problem solver? How do they start to develop that muscle over and over?

I think when I'm in the problem, I just say I, I, I literally bring every option in to what are my actual options? Here's where people freak out. Most all the options are not good.

Yes. That's what I was looking for is it's not like I'll say like, oh, this is a great option. You're usually choosing between multiple lesser expectations than what you had.

Exactly. So you have to pick the best worst option. This is where people fail all the time because they don't accept the best worst option. You don't accept that it's still not what you wanted. So the only way to get this problem out of your way is to solve it by picking the best worst option. So I pull every option in and I say, you know, just literally, even with the rv, I said, here's our options. You can either do this and this and park over this driveway right now while we wait for this person to come and move this car, or we need to go find another spot. Those are your only two options. Pick. So it wasn't either option that you wanted. You wanted to keep laying on the air horn until some random person came and walked from who knows where. That wasn't an option.

Let me describe the exact less good option that we chose that ended up being the best, not so good option. We had to park blocking the neighbor's driveway, but the home's empty and for sale. So bad, but not that bad. We also had to scrape across this crazy set of branches in a tree overhanging their yard that we don't have overhanging ours. Bad, but not so bad. Like, you're not going to see those scrapes on the 12 and a half foot tall on the ceiling roof.

Yeah, right.

So that's a perfect example of we just had to settle for the less optimal choice that came with some small little itty bitty problems. But they're not problems that are really going to change the world, so why not accept them?

And here's what I want to say. It's not that I didn't think about parking our neighbor's driveway in. Here's exactly what I did. And it's not that I didn't think about the branch scratches because it was like, yes, this is our best worst option. Because you guys, there's no parking around our neighborhood. Like we would have to go park this thing far away. And unfortunately there's been a lot of break ins. So we don't really want our RV to be broken into or stolen or hijacked or whatever that looks like. So with that said, we wanted the RV in front of our yard. So when we parked in the driveway of the home that's empty, I was like, okay, worst case scenario, people know this is our rv. If they knocked on any door, they'd point them to us. If for some reason a realtor needed to get in here at 7 on a Sunday. Which I was like, okay, that's probably not gonna. The likelihood of that is probably not gonna happen. This car we didn't recognize. So we knew it wasn't our. We knew that it was like someone who would probably leave, which they did end up leaving. And so we also said if they ticket us for parking in front of this driveway, can we accept the ticket? Yes. We can pay $60 to, you know, park our big ass RV in front of our home until we can solve the problem. Three, are they going to tow it? Hell no. They're not going to go get something that can actually tow this. And they wouldn't be able to because there is a car parked in front of it. So they wouldn't even have access to it. So I solved all of those problems all the way down the road. Like, what's the worst case scenario of this best worst option? And that's what you have to measure. And can you accept worst case scenario of the best worst option and then move forward with it and you just have to with everything that's going to come with it and accept that. So if I didn't accept the ticket, that would just cause another problem and it would go onward from there.

I want to repeat that. If you can accept the best worst case, best scenario. How'd you say it?

If you can accept the best worst case scenario? Yeah, I don't remember. I said it three times though.

Go back and listen. Because it was absolutely brilliant. Because it hit me like duh, that's the whole secret. Okay, real quickly, how does this apply to you building your light pink, your alcohol business right now? So let's apply this to this superpower to business.

Oh God. I have expectations of who I want involved as investors. I have expectations of the way that I want this. Do I want this in retail? Do I want this? Where do I want this? And it's changing constantly. I have expectations of how I want it to come out. And the expectations all have not been exactly what I think they're going to be. So I have to keep on going back to the drawing board and going, okay, you know, even though this happened and this person or this partner is not interested or this person is interested, what would this look like? This is going to take us down a different road. Like, I have now had 20 different plans and you have to be nimble. You literally have to let things flex and change. Because I really feel like if I did not understand this concept 1 million percent, that there's always a way. And the way that you are thinking in your head is not the best way. It's just not. You have to surrender and be nimble and really think on your toes. And yeah, sometimes it's not going to come out the way that you want. Like sometimes the first year of your business is not going to be rolled out or launched or have the things or the people or the money or the website or, you know, whatever it is the way that you want. But that's never how it works. So I know that from, you know, I know that from being in fitness. I know that for even how the body changes. I understand that from being an entrepreneur now for over 10 years. Like, I get that my ideas are not the ideas that is are actually going to be the thing that come to life. It's going to be my ideas are the carrot and they bring me to the actual ideas of how it's going to go.

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One of them for you. And when you want more.

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We help you find yours, we help you find your weaknesses. We teach how to build these things, how to mitigate some of your weaknesses in our fast Foundations Mastermind which is for anybody, any entrepreneurs earning less than $500,000 a year and we are about to re enroll that five month mastermind and we are taking it all virtual this time for obvious reasons and we actually have Completely remodeled this thing to make it even better than it was before. We're like, hey, if we have to take it virtual, let's rethink the whole thing. So if people want to learn how to leverage their superpowers, apply them to business, how to mitigate their weaknesses, like me, and apply it to business, they need to go check this thing out. What's one reason that you would give that they should go check out fast foundations?

Oh, we can't. You absolutely can't build your business alone. The amount of conversations that I have with you and other business people who have done this before, I mean, I'm having five to ten conversations a day with other people because I do not have the answers. And I need to know what the journey actually looks like. Because Google won't tell you. You can get all the steps and strategies laid out in front of you from a, you know, business course without being able to ask questions. But you need to be able to ask questions. You need to be like, you know what? I did all these things, but here's what happened. What would you do? Like, problem solving. So that's all being an entrepreneur is. We always talk about this, Chris, because you are such a good strategist that I use you all the time for strategy. But I think between you and I, with you laying out strategy and me being super nimble with like, hey, we got this far with this one. Now let's reassess. Because here's the problem with, with this strategy, you know, with fast foundations and with masterminds, what it is is when you hit those walls, you get to ask the questions of people who have been there before. Get really nimble, change direction quickly. And that' it is. It's your how fast your com, what your comeback rate is in business is what's going to make you successful. It's like the realization that as an entrepreneur and being surrounded by other people, like, you don't have your pity parties and at least you don't have them alone anymore. Like, how fast can you get over this thing that happened? Like, maybe you lost a hundred thousand dollars. That's devastating. Now what? Now what? Now what? Like, you don't get to sit in it. Now what?

And that's from people sitting it. And this group will lift you out of it. Now you have other people. Like, oh, that happened to me last year. Oh, pick up your bootstraps. Oh, I've got a connection for you. I can help you make some of that up. It's absolutely the reason to check it out. So if you want Lori's problem solving and if you want my strategy, if you want to put those together on your business, go get on the waiting list. Because the order that we enroll this thing is this. Anybody who's already been in it, they get first dibs for a while, for like a week. And then for the spots that remain, we go to our waiting list. And everyone on the waiting list, they get second dibs for the spots. And then the general public, social media, all them, they get the spots that are left over, and then the thing gets sold out. So go put yourself on the waiting list@fast foundations.com Again, I'm not even joking. If you want us to lock arms and help grow your business, then go put yourself on a waiting list@fastfoundations.com. all right, Lori, so thank you for letting me share my spazzy story. But more importantly, thank you for really expounding on problem solving, where it came from, how people can exercise this muscle. My life has gotten better because I've started exercising this muscle. You wouldn't know it during the RV moment yesterday, but our business, our life, our marriage, everything's gotten better because I've chosen to exercise this muscle several years ago, and it's always a work in progress. I know everybody else out there, if they choose to exercise this muscle, their life, their business, everything that they're striving for is going to get exponentially better as well.

Well, I just have to point out that I think you are one of the most brilliant numbers people, strategists, and like, launch plan ideas. So, you know, I feel like, so grateful that I can offer something that is good for you because you always help my life. Like, always when I'm trying to lay out different business plans that I don't understand or breaking down the money, like, that's huge.

I appreciate that, babe. All right, guys, thanks for listening. We hope you like our stories. Like our advice. If so, share it. Tag us.

Yeah. I want to know what your biggest takeaway was from this. Did you have a moment? Make sure you tag Chris and I so that I can reshare your story.

Yes. In the meantime, go check out pastfoundations.com.

Bye.

Adios.

Thank you guys so much for spending this time with me on the earn your happy podcast. I am so glad that you stopped by. If you could take one second to share this episode with someone you think would love it, that would be absolutely amazing and we would be forever grateful. Also, please leave us a review if you feel so moved by going to itunes and leaving us an honest thought, an honest comment. Tell us what you think, Tell us what you want to hear. More of it would really help us out on our journey to helping thousands and thousands of people. Until then, don't forget to earn your happy. Thanks again guys. Bye bye Sam.