The Power of Finding Hidden Opportunities in Our Problems

“The solution to every problem is to be found on a level that is slightly, or even greatly, above the conflicting perceptions. As long as you are eye to eye with the difficulty, you will fight the problem rather than resolve it.” ~Glenda Green

Years ago, my city was in the middle of a heatwave. My home had no air conditioning. It was so hot indoors that I was sticking to my office chair. Even well after 11 p.m. I was still sweating away at the computer.

Then the office lamp overheated and shut off. Sudden total darkness. Did I get up, take a break, and do something else? Nope.

Did I relocate to a cooler part of the house? Nope. I wasn’t paying attention.

Then it got worse.

Several website pages I had created suddenly vanished into cyberspace. Poof! I was in the middle of a promotion that was directing people to those very sites.

My frustration level was rising fast—almost to panic levels—which of course, naturally led almost immediately to the next disaster: I locked myself out of the house.

Now it was serious.

I had gone into the garage for something and soon discovered that the door back into the house had closed and locked behind me. My hidden spare key was nowhere to be found.

Fortunately, one of the windows around back was open, so I managed to get into the house by hilariously climbing through the kitchen window like a Cirque du Soleil performance gone wrong. It was just the thing to bring me back to my senses.

It’s a rare person who, when presented with what looks like a problem, thinks, “Great, how is this amazing? How is this an opportunity?”

Albert Einstein once said that a problem cannot be solved at the same level of mind that created it. So, it’s helpful to zoom out and look at the issue from a higher and wider perspective. When we do, we can see the hidden opportunities.

When we take a step back, we often realize those less-than-awesome things were happening for us, not to us.

During my three-part problem of the heatwave, website crash, and the lockout from my house, there were the obvious lessons of “always know where your spare key is” and “go somewhere else when the office is sweltering.” The bigger opportunity, though, was to be reminded that:

There is very little in life that is worth panicking over. In fact, little is as bad as our minds would have us believe.

So what if the web pages vanished? They can be recreated. Big deal if it’s hot in the house and there’s no air conditioning. At least I have a house.

Someone once said that “life is largely a matter of paying attention.” Had I fully paid attention to the first two events—the rising temperatures and the vanishing web pages—and paused to consider what the message might be, I likely could have avoided the trip through the back window.

The truth is, opportunities are around us all the time. But we must look for them.

When I sleep through my alarm, for instance, I end up running late for appointments, and then the whole day feels off. But perhaps arriving late for an appointment is really a gentle nudge from the universe to reassess my expectations of how much I can realistically do in a day. Maybe sleeping through my alarm meant I avoided a car accident that happened during my usual drive time.

Within every problem is an opportunity, even if it might not seem that way at the time.

Recently I drove over a nail, only to discover my car needed not one but all four tires replaced. Here was another opportunity to observe my default mode when unfortunate things happen. The natural tendency is to react. “How did this happen?” “What do I do now?” “This is awful. I can’t believe it.”

For many of us (myself included), our automatic reaction to a setback is fear, worry, and frustration. Although it is important to acknowledge and validate these totally normal feelings and accept that they are there, these automatic reactions do little to find a solution and fix the problem.

We can train ourselves to meet each perceived problem with the question, “How might this be a good thing?”

After that initial moment of frustration and sticker shock at the price of the four new tires, I actively searched for the silver lining. Since I was going on a long road trip in a few weeks anyway, it made sense to have the car in top condition now.

Replacing all four tires also led to discovering a more serious problem with my car—something that would have gone unnoticed had I not driven over that small nail.

When confronted with what looks like a problem, the mind wants to jump in and run endless doomsday and what-if scenarios. One way to interrupt this tendency is to give your mind a funny name.

For example, imagine your mind as an annoying neighbor who loves to complain. The next time it starts rattling off how things are terrible, you can tell that mind, “Thanks for sharing, Buzzard.” Seeing your mind as something separate from you allows you to acknowledge its concerns and simultaneously interrupt its negative patterns.

Another way to release yourself from a downward mental spiral is to grab a slip of paper and write down how that unpleasant event or circumstance might be a good thing.

Start by sitting quietly and taking some slow, deep breaths to calm your mental Buzzard down. Once you’re in a more neutral, centered place, look for any hidden opportunities. Write down one or two potentially positive things that could come of this.

Writing them down vs. just thinking about them or typing them on your phone or computer is important, as physically writing something interrupts the conditioning and habits of the mind. Writing them down with your non-dominant hand is even better since it engages the often-underused side of your brain. It’s a great method for receiving creative insights about the perceived problem.

Our daily activities offer countless opportunities to notice how we react and to practice looking for the hidden opportunities. In fact, a few hours after I started writing this article, my computer suddenly stopped working. It was a chance to practice the very thing I was writing about: awareness and opportunity.

I noticed how my mind still wanted to frantically imagine a variety of worst-case scenarios if I weren’t able to recover all my files. When I ignored the mind and looked for the opportunity, I decided I was being forced to take a much-needed timeout from my computer. I suddenly had plenty of time to spend on other activities I had been putting aside because the computer work seemed more important and urgent.

If you have a problem in your life right now, take a step back, grab a piece of paper, and consider it with a wider and brighter lens. Get creative and brainstorm until you find at least two ways that situation might actually be a good thing. Look for the opportunity!

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