Some People Have a Problem for Every Solution

There’s a sound our house knows well.

The soft click of the front door latch.

The swing of the gate outside.

A whisper that the world is coming in.

And Lewis knows it too.

For a long time, that sound wound him up like a storm trapped in fur and bone.

Pacing the hall.

Barking at shadows.

Eyes wide, tail stiff, ready to guard what he loves from what he can’t see.

To him, the door opening meant danger.

The gate meant chaos was coming.

Every visitor was a problem, every new sound a threat that needed chasing away.

He would spin himself dizzy trying to fix what he didn’t understand.

We never shouted.

We sat with him.

We waited him out.

Little by little, he learned what we hoped he would.

The door doesn’t always mean danger.

The gate doesn’t always swing open to trouble.

Not every knock is something you need to protect yourself from.

Not every noise deserves to be fed.

I see that in people too.

Some folks live just like Lewis used to, and sometimes still does.

They brace for every knock.

They stand guard in their own heads.

They stay busy naming problems so they never have to face the silence that comes with solving them.

You offer help and they say it won’t work.

You hold up a mirror and they blame the glass.

They keep the same old ache alive because it feels safer than letting it go.

It’s easy to read this and think about someone else.

A neighbor who always finds drama.

A friend who fills every room with what’s wrong.

But maybe, if you’re honest, you feel an old version of yourself in there too.

I do.

I was twenty-seven when I caught myself spinning the same old stories.

Not much was going right.

I didn’t feel like I had any control over my life.

I was just reacting to everything that came my way.

I didn’t get there on my own.

I was programmed to think that way.

Growing up, I watched my family always have problems.

Nothing ever seemed to go our way, and it was the conversation around the table.

We talked circles around what was wrong. My parents taught me that without meaning to.

That kind of thinking runs deep when you’re raised on it.

It can be generational if nobody calls it what it is.

And if the negative, defeatist talk was all we had to deal with, maybe that would have been manageable.

But the truth is, we lived in chaos. To put it nicely.

There’s more to that story for another day.

Back then, at twenty-seven, I was searching for answers on how to change my life.

I didn’t want to keep living the way I had been, but I didn’t have the knowledge that experience gives you to pull from yet.

I was tired of people keeping their distance. Tired of being the person people avoided because the noise was too loud.

So I started reading.

One day I came across a line in a book by T. Harv Eker.

Stop complaining for seven days and see what starts to change.

So I did.

For seven days I kept my mouth shut and let my mind listen instead.

Bad things still happened, but I noticed something shift.

A crack in the wall. A bit of light where I didn’t expect it.

And then something else. People stopped avoiding me.

They wanted to talk to me.

They leaned in instead of pulling away.

It didn’t fix my life overnight, but it showed me how often I was the one feeding the noise and holding the door shut from the inside.

That choice was twenty-one years ago.

Since then, my life has done nothing but grow.

I’ve built businesses that help people.

I’ve raised a family that knows how to stand tall without complaining about how heavy life can feel sometimes.

I’ve had days that broke me. I’ve had days that lifted me so high I had to remind myself to stay humble.

It all started with one choice. I stopped feeding the noise — the negative self-talk, the negativity in general — and I learned to choose better words for myself first.

Lewis is still learning.

So am I.

Some days, training him feels like training myself all over again.

He still barks when something startles him, but he settles faster now.

I still feel the old pull to complain when life doesn’t bend my way.

Sometimes I catch it in time.

Sometimes I don’t.

But now I know what it is.

It’s just old noise I fed for too long.

It doesn’t own me anymore.

Some people have a problem for every solution.

I’ve been that person.

Maybe you have too.

You don’t break that habit by yelling at yourself to be better.

You break it by noticing what you’re guarding that doesn’t serve you.

You break it by asking how many words you spend on the problem and how few you give to the solution.

You break it by starving the noise and feeding the part of you that wants to grow.

One quiet choice at a time.

Our words are seeds.

Our subconscious is listening and so is the universe.

That’s a topic for another day.

What part of you wants to grow if you’d just stop feeding the noise?