It was a problem...Now it's a predicament.

For three years I have had the book Strong Towns by Chuck Marohn on my book shelf, and last weekend I finally cracked it open. The book argues that we need a bottom-up approach to build stronger, more resilient towns and cities, and the way to do this is by making incremental changes and accepting small failures, knowing we will learn from them and do better. Page after page, I kept thinking about the way this philosophy applies to everything in our life. Careers, relationships, exercise...

But before you can apply this approach you need to be honest about what is working and what is not. One of my favorite parts was when Marohn references economic researcher and author Chris Martenson, who said, “Problems have solutions. Predicaments have outcomes. This situation has moved beyond a problem into a full-blown predicament.”

Most people by nature are adverse to change and conflict, so they would rather tolerate a less than optimal situation than go through the discomfort of addressing the underlying issue. But avoidance will only get you so far.

Marohn goes on to quote James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, who writes “Even the most important and self-evident trends are often completely ignored because the changes they foreshadow are simply unthinkable.”

Despite years of therapy, a coaching certification, and endless workshops and self-help books, I still find myself to be conflict adverse and will dance around a problem. Though I strive to be proactive, interpersonal disagreements still quicken my heart-rate.

When I dissect some of the messier workplace and personal predicaments I have found myself in, there is a breadcrumb trail of ignored or unacknowledged problems. And as Martenson points out, I ceded my chance to fix the problem and was left to manage the outcome.

So how does Strong Towns suggest we get better at fixing problems instead of managing outcomes? It’s worth reading the whole book (and the next two after it), but I’ll give you their four-step process adapted for life coaching:

1. Humbly observe where you are struggling.

2. Ask the question “What is the next smallest thing I can do right now to address that struggle.”

3. Do that thing. Do it right now.

4. Repeat

Just like cities and communities that have fallen on hard times, there is no big quick magic solution. It requires a bottom-up approach of small incremental adjustments to become truly resilient.