I have 2 situations which are commonly happen to us in day to day activity:
- Let’s say you’re learning something new; something that out of your usual thing. What would you do? How you will start yourself to learn?
- Or, you are happened to be in some troubles, you are confused what to do or how are you going to solve the problem. What do you do in this kind of situation?
Think about it for a while and keep the answer to yourself and I will tell my experience.
Situation 2
I will start with the most recent experience I have, number 2. Recently, I have some thoughts on about how am I going to be a good leader. What happened recently was there are some staff changes in my office. Every time changes is happened, there will be some adjustments and obviously we will lose our “comfort zone”.
This thought stayed in my mind and haunted me for the past few weeks. After some contemplations, I found out that my biggest worry is I will be compared to the previous leader and she’s a good one. Since taking roles in managing people is not new to me, I remembered the old times when I was in the student union. At that time, I didn’t think that far how others’ opinion on me. Solely, I was thinking I’m going to have some fun. And, indeed I was having fun. I learned a lot.
While having myself on remembering the sweet memory, I remembered that I used to have this worry; worry how to successfully host an event. Back then, I used to have a friend that was so great in handling this kind of situation. I watched his back quite often as event organizers and leader in some of other activities, and I know him quite well too.
I used to ask him, how to solve my problem. He will not do much to help, but what he told me that time gave me clue how to solve mine. And the rest was up to me, whether I’m going to execute it or not. Maybe it’s because of we were having discussion quite often or we had similar way of thinking, I found out that his idea was something that I thought too, but his took one extra step ahead, more creative and more appealing.
Therefore, on those times when I couldn’t ask him, I often asked myself, what would he do when he was in my situation? And the some creative solutions popped out.
Similarly, being in similar situations again, I use this old trick to find out my solution. I think myself as him, what would he do, if he’s in my situation now? Basically, we have our answers most of the time, it’s just that we are afraid to acknowledge our worries, or accept the hard truth of it.
I didn’t know the right word for this until I watched some documentary show. Let’s call this mimicry, borrowing the term from the mother nature when some animals blend in with the environment to be safe from danger. We are mimic-ing someone, in the hope to find our way out from our trouble. It’s not that we are being that person, but by thinking that we are someone else, third person who sees the problem, eventually it will bring us to see it from new perspective. And of course, we can always change the person we want to mimic, i.e. our parents, our teacher or our role model, etc.
Situation 1
Let’s say we want to learn Japanese. First of all, we will repeat what the teacher said. We do this so that we know the correct way to speak, and the words. After we know one sentence, we will change the words, one by one, replace it with different words until it becomes our own sentence.
Or, let’s say we want to learn how to create a website. There are tons of free web templates, pick one, try to build your template to have the same look and take out the elements one by one until we find our style.
To conclude, mimicry is one of many ways to solve our problem that I find it as the easiest to use. Just ask simple question to ourselves, what would that person do in my situations. IMO. 🙂 It also helps us to think from new perspective when we are trapped in our point of view and it looks like to way out to solve the problem.
PS: don’t forget about your answers earlier, please write below if you have different way, let’s share and learn from each other.