Thinking About Things Differently Can Get You the Results You Need

Sometimes creative solutions are the only answer

Photo by Daniel Lincoln on Unsplash

My last pair of sunglasses broke.

A good friend I hadn’t seen in a while met me for lunch. I’d just walked in the restaurant door and hadn’t removed my sunglasses. Seeing my friend in the lobby, I reached out. We hugged deeply and I heard the undeniable crack separating the lenses from the frame.

My friend was horrified. I smiled and told her it wasn’t the first time. And frankly, the minor loss was worth the embrace.

The funny thing is, I’ve never “lost” a pair of sunglasses. But I sure go through them pretty good.

So there I was, back on Amazon searching for the specific type I prefer — wide, dark mirror lenses with a slight curve to shield the side of my face. I’d ordered them dozens of times before and typed in the familiar phrase. But no matches came up.

I tried using all the descriptive words I could think of — sunglasses, mirror, polarized, perfect for me. But I kept getting results that had nothing to do with what I wanted to buy. Frustrated, I closed down the screen.

After sleeping on it, a few new thoughts came to mind.

How else could I search for this particular type and style — the ones I’d always purchased before and desperately needed again? Maybe I was approaching the quest in the wrong way.

So I decided to think differently about how to track down that elusive pair of sunglasses that decided to avoid the search engine. Because my eyes couldn’t take the sun’s glare much longer and I refused to huddle in my cave of a house any longer.

Then I remembered a different time when I’d used those same sunglasses. My husband and I were working on a home reno project. A lot of the work was being done outdoors — cutting tile and lumber, installing new landscaping, painting, etc.

A light bulb went off in my head: We were all wearing tinted safety glasses — the kind that curve and shield the eyes from the side.

I sat down at my computer and typed “safety glasses” in the search window. A full page of different styles, varieties, and colors popped up. And sure enough, there in the list was a bulk pack of the dark tinted glasses I’d been looking for. Same product, located by using another slant and way of thinking.

The lesson?

Creative solutions can achieve the exact results you’re aiming for — if you’re willing to think outside the frozen patterns that keep you twirling around in frustrated circles.

As they say, different strokes…

In health & happiness,

Jill Reid | Pathway to Personal Growth

• Coming up next in Real Life:

4 Suggestions for Navigating the Changes in Your Life - How to recognize the symptoms of a life headed in the wrong direction

• In case you missed the previous article, here’s a link:

10 Simple Ways to Make Our World a Better Place to Live – It’s okay to be human again

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Jill Reid is the founder of Pathway to Personal Growth and author of the Real Life Series, including Real Life, Discover Your Personal Truth, and Life in Small Doses. Available in eBook and Paperback from Amazon.