Your Problem-Solving Brain Is The Problem
The well-meaning instinct that makes lasting change less likely
20 years of corporate life trained me to do one thing brilliantly: hear a problem, solve it, move on.
With a blend of decent critical thinking + a loud mouth, I could fix things before the meeting was over. That skill built my career.
It is also, it turns out, the single most counterproductive thing I do to myself.
I found this out the hard way when I started coaching.
2 decades of being paid decent money to solve problems all day means it’s really hard to stop wearing the problem-solver hat. Someone would come to me with something they were struggling with and my brain was already 3 solutions deep before they’d finished talking.
And it’s not just coaching.
A friend calls because they’re going through something and I go straight into what worked for me, what I’d do, what I read.
If I’m being honest, I tend to love talking about myself…. and I have a whole newsletter about it, in case you hadn’t noticed.
It comes from a good place, I swear! Ok maybe with a dash of self-centeredness.
But coaching made me realise something uncomfortable: my clients don’t actually want to be told what to do. That’s the whole point. And you probably don’t either.
If being told what to do worked, we’d all be super fit, sleeping 8 hours a night, and running wildly successful businesses by now.
That urge to fix, the one where you hear a problem and immediately go for the solution, has a name. And psychologists have been studying it for over 40 years.
And it’s terrible.
The reflex with a name
William Miller and Stephen Rollnick are the psychologists behind motivational interviewing, a coaching method with more than 4 decades of research behind it (I’m a huge fan of the method and that’s what I use with my clients).
They identified something they call the righting reflex: the urge to help, to make things right, to push a solution before you’ve even finished describing the problem.
The core finding: the harder you argue for change, the more the other person defends the status quo.
You push, they resist. Not because they don’t want to change. Because that’s just how humans are wired.
Miller and Rollnick describe the alternative as dancing rather than wrestling.
A coach guides instead of directs. Stays engaged while the client does the thinking, which turns out to be slow, unglamorous, and unbelievably effective.
But we don’t just do this to other people. We do it to ourselves. All the time! A rough week becomes a new morning routine by Monday. A bad night’s sleep becomes a bedtime protocol and 3 supplement purchases by Thursday. You don’t sit with the thing, you solve the thing. And the solution doesn’t last, because it was built on top of something you never actually dissected properly.
The smallest reframe I know
There’s a reframe I learned in coaching training that I think about almost daily:
“I want to change my routine but I’m exhausted.”
vs.
“I want to change my routine and I’m exhausted.”
Or try this one:
“I want to get back to running but my knees hurt.”
vs.
“I want to get back to running and my knees hurt.”
The first sentence closes the door. The second one holds it open.
“But” turns exhaustion into a disqualifier, a no-go.
You can’t move forward because you’re tired. End of story.
“And” lets both things be true at the same time. You’re tired, AND you still want something different. Those two things can coexist without cancelling each other out.
You don’t have to fix how you feel before you’re allowed to move forward. “But” makes you think you do. “And” says nah, move anyway. The tiredness comes with you. It doesn’t get a veto.
Your experiment this week
This week, the experiment isn’t on you. It’s on someone else.
Next time someone you care about tells you about something hard, set yourself one rule: no solutions for the first 5 minutes. Ask questions instead. You only need 3: What does that feel like? What’s the hardest part? What do you think you need?
No advice. No “have you tried.” No “what worked for me was.” Just those 3 questions and whatever silence comes after them.
Notice what happens. In them, and in you. The urge to fix will be almost unbearable. That’s the righting reflex. Now you know what it’s called.
And if you want the advanced version: try the same 3 questions on yourself next time you’re mid-solve. What does this feel like? What’s the hardest part? What do I actually need right now? You might be surprised how different the answer is from the plan you were about to make.
The space between someone sharing a problem and you offering a solution is the most important space in any relationship. Including the one you have with yourself.
🔴 My first-ever Substack Live, this Thursday!
Thursday April 30, 12pm ET. I’m going to talk about Spring healthy habits, why your wellness routine might be the new source of burnout and do a live coaching teardown with Q&A.
Come watch someone attempt to hold her own righting reflex down in real time ;)
I’m still learning to not fix things. I’ll probably be learning for a while.
But at least now I know what I’m doing when I do it, and that turns out to matter more than I expected.
With love, from someone who wrote this entire newsletter about listening and will almost certainly interrupt my hubby 3 minutes into dinner tonight 🙃
Noemie x
Noemie Mooney is an ACE Certified Health Coach, ICF-trained Behaviour Change Specialist, podcast host and the creator of the MAKE SPACE Method™, a science-backed framework for sustainable habits and mental health. She writes on Substack about burnout, habit formation, and evidence-based behaviour change psychology for people who want practical tools without the self-help BS.
See you Thursday!