Strategy is everything when it comes to long-term wellbeing. A good strategy is one that makes you feel resilient and optimistic, because you then feel motivated to persevere through challenging times. To think strategically, you need to ask yourself questions that engage a problem-solving mindset. But what do the right questions look like?
The science of strategic thinking
A recently published set of studies examined how self-directed questions impact problem-solving. In their first study, the researchers surveyed how often students asked themselves motivating questions during challenging times. These included questions such as “What can I do to help myself?” and “Is there a better way of doing this?”. Students who reported applying this kind of strategic mindset had better grades than those who didn’t. Strategic mindsets allowed them to better analyze their problems, plan what to do next, and monitor their progress.
This effect wasn’t just specific to students with academic goals. The researchers found the same associations in a wider population with different goals. Success with fitness goals (e.g. losing weight) and professional goals (e.g. learning to program) was more likely when people reported using strategic questioning.
Those findings are all well and good, but they’re still only correlations. We don’t know if strategic thinking caused better outcomes for people, or if a different variable was responsible for the effect. So the researchers took a final group of people, and randomly gave half of them an article to read about the importance of strategic thinking. Everybody else read an unrelated article. When later given a tricky problem-solving test, people who read about strategic thinking were more willing to practice, and ultimately performed better. When you push yourself into a strategic mindset, you’re less likely to give up and more likely to come up with effective plans.
How to think strategically
The research above highlights specific questions that can help during difficult times. When you’re stuck on a task at work, wondering how to handle trouble in a relationship, or trying to motivate yourself, take a step back and ask yourself:
“How else can I do this?”—What alternative strategies could be available to you right now? When you’re too narrowly focused on a problem, it’s easy to miss opportunities outside of your current plans.
“What can I do to help myself?”—How could you make your life easier while achieving your current goal? Should you be taking more breaks? Are you rewarding yourself for progress?
“Is there a way to do this even better?”—Is your current approach really the most effective one? When we start plans, it’s easy to feel like we shouldn’t quit early, even when it’s clear that our plan isn’t so great. And even when a plan is going well, we rarely consider whether it could be going even better. When more effective plans present themselves, we need to be willing to dump old strategies and jump straight into new ones. Don’t let inertia carry you toward failure.
The questions are almost too simple, but the whole point of them is that they help you escape from tunnel vision. Have you ever made bad decisions by overcommitting to a bad plan? How much time have you wasted trying to make unworkable plans work, when a far better answer was sitting right in front of you? Sometimes, you can escape these problems by relaxing and expanding your attention rather than focusing it even harder. Zoom out rather than zooming in, and you might see what else lies in the picture.
Think outside the box
That final quote
“You’ve got to think about big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.”
~ Alvin Toffler
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Erman Misirlisoy, PhD
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