Are Problems Outside Of Us? Let’s Find Out

“You can get discouraged many times,
but you are not a failure until you begin to blame somebody else and stop trying.”
― John Burroughs

There are two ways of looking at any given situation. Is it something in your control? Something that you can do something about? Or is it out of your control, something that you can do little or nothing about.

When we face problems in our lives, we tend to blame other people or the circumstances; we think that the problem is actually out there. Outside-in thinking is the type of thinking that says the environment controls us. The focus is outside of the individual self, on other people, the weather, the government, the location, the season etc…

There is another way of thinking, the inside-out, that we create our environment. This is not a new concept. For centuries people have consciously or unconsciously used either of these ways of thinking at different points of their lives. The self-help industry leaders have discovered, through deep research and analysis, that successful people throughout history have, in varying degrees have been using the inside-out approach. From Nelson Mandela to Joan of Arc to Abraham Lincoln to Margaret Thatcher to Gandhi.

Gandhi believed in ‘being the change that you want to see in the world’, that everything starts from within. He explained this thoroughly in his book ‘My Experiments with Truth‘.

By habit, we go out and try to solve the problem or try to ‘fix’ other people’s behaviours so they can ‘behave’. The reason we do this is that we believe that their fixed behaviour will solve our problems. It may seem that the problem has been solved when people behave as we want them to. But usually, the underlying problem still exists, because we may have used force, authority, emotional blackmail or shaming them. But in the long run, it does not work that way because sooner or later the problem will surface again.

It is like treating the symptoms of a disease and not finding and eliminating the root cause. When we try to find out the reason why people behave the way they do, that is, the root cause, it will be clear as to what is the solution. When you remove the cause, the problem will go away. No smoke without fire right? when we put out the burning fire, (the cause), you remove the (outside) smoke that troubles you.

When you live from the outside-in are easily irritated, disturbed, reactive, offended and defensive. They focus on other people’s behaviour, dresses, government etc. Wherever you focus, it is neither wrong nor right, it just is. But if we want to move ahead in life we have to make sure our decisions and actions are effective. Acting from the outside in is not effective. There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers. When I say that a question is stupid it only means that I (a) judge others, (b) am focussed on the outside world, (c) think that I am entitled to judge others (d) am not focussing on myself and (e) that I live from the outside-in approach.

On the other hand, when you live from the inside out, you will eventually notice a lot of benefits. You will work on your goals and you will not react to other people’s words or situations, and that is a huge relief in itself. You will be able to answer stupid questions with smart answers that are based on universal principles and are aligned with your values. The greatest freedom you can have is the freedom from what other people think.

If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.
Theodore Roosevelt

Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves — Friedrich Nietzsche

To enjoy freedom, we have to control ourselves. — Virginia Woolf