Breaking out of stuckness with bottom-up thinking

Sometimes, you can’t see too far down the path. That’s okay. (Image by Waldrebell)

Sometimes, you can’t see too far down the path. That’s okay. (Image by Waldrebell)

One of the first rules of living in a cold climate is that you must dress for it — not just outdoors, but indoors.

The idea of turning up the heat seems like an appealing solution…until you receive your first bill. Then, you realize that thick socks, slippers, a thick sweater, and even a hat and fingerless mitts are necessary for comfort indoors.

If you are still cold after putting on all this clothing (it happens), paradoxically, you’ve got to get outside and get some exercise. When you get your blood moving, you will be warm even in freezing weather. It’s the key to making it through the winter. And when all else fails, a hot bath.

Yes, ideally, New Englanders should live in well-insulated, efficient homes with tons of southern exposure and solar panels to boot. However, we don’t live in an ideal world. When we don’t have ideal conditions, we have to make things work with the resources we have readily available. Like socks. For lack of a better term, I call this bottom-up thinking, and it is my go-to strategy for problem-solving, teaching, and coaching.

When you engage in bottom-up thinking, you ignore most of a system in favor of the part that matters right now. This often runs counter to tradition. The typical textbook has pages of overview and explanation followed by opportunities to practice or apply what you’ve learned. That’s a top-down approach.

On the other hand, my favorite math textbook series, The Art of Problem-Solving, gives you problems to solve first and then walks you through a solution for each one after you’ve given it your best shot. That’s the bottom-up way: We begin to understand the system through experiencing it in a meaningful way. We experiment and explore and find our way around, little by little.

Often, when people are stuck, it’s because they are only approaching their problem in a top-down way. This can lead to unpleasant circular reasoning: “I want to get a master’s degree so that I can make more money, but I need money to get a master’s degree.”

If we approach the problem “I need more money” in a bottom-up way, we must let go of the specific solution (“go to grad school”) that we’ve already come up with. We realize that there are changes we can make to our spending so that we need less money in the first place. We might find freelance or part-time opportunities to add to our income today. We might be able to save up to take one class that will have a meaningful impact on our professional skills, and then another. We might even find a different job, which we can also do in a bottom-up way (for instance, through networking). There are lots of options.

Aspiring entrepreneurs often end up in pernicious cycles of top-down thinking. Yes, it’s great to know your company’s values and have a clearly defined niche and a mature pricing strategy. And theoretically, you can develop these things before you start and save yourself a lot of frustration. But for most of us, it doesn’t work that way. We can learn from the experiences and wisdom of others, but we might still have to develop our own business model through trial and error. You just can’t know at the beginning how it’s all going to go. You can drive yourself crazy trying to figure it all out ahead of time, or you can start doing stuff and see what happens.

On a practical level, this means finding clients or customers even when you have a website you’re embarrassed about, or charging too much or too little for your service, or paying retail instead of wholesale for components of your product, or running your business out of your childhood bedroom at your parents’ house. It means finding some way to inch forward even when you don’t know what comes next or where it’s going. If you can find something that needs to be done, do that.

Dana K. White says that the first step toward decluttering your house is not to take everything out of the closet. She says that first, you should do your dishes, then clean off your dining room table. The next day, you do the same thing. We must tidy the obvious messes first, unglamorous though they are, to build momentum for the deeper decluttering work. And at no point do you ever take everything out of the closet and overwhelm yourself with a bigger mess. You just chip away, gradually, and gain more awareness and confidence as you do.

Most of our work is this way. Even when we’re stymied by the big picture, we can usually find a tiny, routine task to move us forward. From there, we can see another, and another. If we can come up with something to do, we’re not stuck. From the bottom up, we can rise, growing in our clarity and conviction all the while.

If you’re feeling stuck on a problem, please reach out. I’m seeking two new coaching clients for February. Let’s get to the bottom of it!