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Here are 2 success tips to find hidden solutions. These are tips you might not expect, yet are highly valued among the best and brightest in history.
1. Close your eyes and take a nap! Yes, that’s right, by powering down your brain you can actually charge it back up. Our brains consume about 20% of our body’s daily energy usage and putting your mind to solving complex problems can severely tax your focus and give you that bedraggled and burnt out feeling.
We’ve all experienced the ‘analysis paralysis’ of trying to solve a math problem or think through what our options might be in creating new plans. We’ve even experienced this in confronting too many choices in a store!
This technique comes in several different forms: (a) the cat nap where you simply lie down for a few moments and let your mind process what you were working on; and, (b) working on what you want to solve right before you go to sleep. This last one might seem counter-intuitive (and I wouldn’t recommend doing this every night as a habit) but I’ve found the solutions to some of the hardest problems this way, by letting the REST of your brain actually work, no pun intended
You see, we only use less than 10% of our brains during our conscious day, the rest goes either unused or to run our autonomic functions. When we sleep, this portion of our brain comes alive and can lend us a helping hand in our quest to find those pesky hidden solutions.
Your subconscious is a powerful tool so sack out and let the solutions come flooding in.
2. Make yourself laugh! By changing your emotional state from tense to relaxed will release the mental grip you have on yourself when trying to find elusively hidden solutions. We get so wound up in trying to focus on a problem that we close ourselves off to finding it – we actually become our own stumbling block.
When we laugh our brain releases endorphins in a lovely, creative cascade of positive hormones. This release opens us back up by distracting our brain. It’s the same as shaking out your muscles when they’re fatigued, you are eliminating the lactic acid that has built up while under sustained duress. Call it your brain’s lactic acid!
Laughing, and by extension smiling, can get rid of your brain’s lactic acid. Taking the time to laugh or smile will recharge your creative energy and help you find that hidden solution.
I have found that the quick nap has been my best friend in solving analytical problems. From economic equations to structural issues at work, and even genealogical roadblocks. It’s great for logic-type stuff.
I remember one day my cousin and I were stuck looking for documentation on a particular ancestor. After emailing back and forth I decided to call it a night, it was about 1:30am. I spent that night in a semi-restful state pummeling myself with all of the data I had spent the day covering, and then bango! It came to me in a flash! Bazzinga! It struck me like a bolt of lightening, that hidden solution.
The funny part is that the next morning my cousin emails me that she had the same night I did and came to the same conclusion as well! As she put it to me “I was doing genealogy in my sleep!”
That was exactly right, our subconscious had been reanalyzing all the data in our heads, efficiently organizing our thoughts as if it were putting a deck of cards in order and had found that hidden solution for us. It was the ace up our sleeves!
🙂
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