When You Are Trying to Solve a Problem, the Ideas Start to Come

A few weeks ago, my family went on a Hawk Walk in Ireland with a falconer. As he led us through the Irish forest — the hawk flying ahead, landing on branches, dropping down onto our arms — he told us about the ancient origins of falconry. How it began not as sport but as survival. Hungry people. Hard land. A problem that needed solving.

And then he said something I haven't been able to stop thinking about since.

"When you are trying to solve a problem, the ideas start to come."

Seven words. Said simply, the way people say things when they've lived with a truth long enough that it no longer feels remarkable. But it stopped me.

Because I work with people who feel stuck — capable, accomplished people who have lost access to what feels possible. People who feel like they don't have any ideas, at least not any good ones. People who say, in one form or another: I just don't know what to do.

That line contains something I want every one of them to hear.

The Wrong Relationship with the Problem

One of the most common things I hear from the mid-career professionals I work with is some version of: I can't see a way forward. I feel stuck. And here's what I've come to understand about that experience.

Often, stuck isn't simply the absence of a solution. It's what happens when we're in the wrong relationship with the problem.

Those ancient hunters didn't solve the problem of hunger by sitting safely away from it, waiting for inspiration to arrive. They faced the problem. They went out into the land with it. They stayed present with the difficulty of it. And in that presence — in that willingness to remain with what was hard — something opened. They saw the birds. They watched how they hunted. And an idea arrived that would become one of the oldest human-animal partnerships in recorded history.

When you are trying to solve a problem, the ideas start to come. Not necessarily all at once. Not as a perfectly formed solution. But when you're engaged with the problem — when you're present with it — you begin to see things you couldn't see from a distance.

That's the beginning of getting unstuck. And there are three things that can help make it possible.

Hear What Your Fear Is Trying to Tell You

Most of us do one of two things with fear, doubt, and worry. We get overwhelmed by it — consumed, paralyzed, unable to move. Or we try to suppress it — push it down, manage it away, perform our way past it. And both responses cut us off from something important: the information fear is carrying.

Fear is a messenger. It may be pointing toward a need. A value. Something important to you. A real risk that deserves your attention. Or an old protective belief that needs to be understood before you decide whether it's actually true.

So instead of asking how do I make this fear go away? — try asking: What is this fear trying to tell me matters? What is it trying to protect? And what, if anything, actually needs my attention?

If you're afraid of being fired, maybe there's a real risk you need to prepare for. Maybe you need more financial security. Maybe something at work has been telling you for months that it's time to create options. Or maybe the fear is touching an older belief that your value depends on your performance. Those lead to very different next steps. That's why listening matters. The goal isn't to let fear make the decision — it's to understand the information it's carrying so you can make the decision.

Expand the Container You're Holding Fear In

Once you've heard the message, the next step is to expand the container you're holding it in. Here's an image I find useful.

If you dissolve a teaspoon of salt in a teacup of water, the water is almost undrinkably salty. But if you pour that same teacup into a basin of water — the salt is still there. It hasn't gone anywhere. But now it exists in a much larger container.

A basin that holds perspective. Context. Trust in yourself and in something greater than you. The memory of other hard things you've navigated. Curiosity about what might be possible. Alex Honnold — the free solo climber who climbed El Capitan without ropes — has talked about how people assume he doesn't feel fear when he climbs. But he does. What he's developed is the capacity to act in the presence of fear. To hold it in a large enough container that it can inform him without controlling him. That's not fearlessness. That's an expanded aperture.

From inside the teacup, fear becomes the whole story. The problem feels enormous. The risk feels immediate. But from the basin — with a wider view — you can see more. How important is this, really? What do I know that fear isn't currently accounting for? What might be possible here that I can't see when fear fills the entire frame?

One of my favorite questions for moments like these: What else might be true? The fear can be real and something else can also be true. I can be afraid this won't work and know that I've figured out hard things before. I can be uncertain about what comes next and trust myself to take one step. I can acknowledge the risk and stay curious about the possibility. That discernment is only available from the basin. It is never available from the teacup.

Receive the Ideas — and Move

From that wider, steadier place, something becomes possible that wasn't available before. You can receive.

The ancient hunters who founded falconry weren't sitting in a room thinking harder about the problem of hunger. They were out in the land. Present with the difficulty. Looking. Watching. Experimenting. And somewhere in that process, an idea emerged: What if we partnered with the birds? The idea didn't arrive because they had figured everything out in advance. It arrived because they were engaged enough with the problem to notice something new.

Many of us get stuck at this stage because we're waiting for the good idea. The complete one. The guaranteed one. The one that's fully formed and impossible to criticize. And while we're waiting, the inner critic dismisses everything that arrives. Too simple. Too obvious. Too risky. Not good enough.

What if you let that requirement go? What if instead of waiting for the good idea, you let yourself receive all the ideas? The half-formed ones. The obvious ones. The ones that might lead nowhere. You don't have to act on all of them — you just have to stop requiring an idea to prove its worth before you've allowed yourself to explore it.

I keep an idea journal for exactly this reason. I write things down before I've decided what I think about them. Some go nowhere. Some sit for months. Some eventually become something completely different from what I originally imagined. And some are worth trying.

Because here's the other half of getting unstuck: at some point, you have to move. You don't need the entire path. You need a first step. Try something. Have the conversation. Write the first paragraph. Research the possibility. Apply for the job. Make the call. Then see what happens. See what it teaches you.

And very often, the next idea arrives because of the first move — not before it. So don't judge an idea before you've even received it. Choose something that makes sense and that you have capacity for. And take a step. Because movement — even one small, imperfect step — is the opposite of stuck.

The Deeper Lesson From the Hawk

The falconer told us one more thing that day. He talked about how you build trust with a hawk. You don't rush it. You don't force it. You don't demand that it perform before it's ready. You build trust through repeated experience. Through presence. Through consistency.

There's something important in that for us, too. You don't get unstuck by forcing the fearful parts of yourself forward. You listen to them. You widen the perspective. And then you take a step from a steadier place. And every time you do that, your inner world learns something: I can trust myself to lead. Not because you'll always know what to do — but because you can stay with yourself long enough to find the next step.

I left that walk in the Irish countryside changed in a quiet way. Not because of anything dramatic. Because of a line from a man who had spent his life learning to sit patiently with wild things.

You don't have to have it figured out before you begin. You don't have to be fearless. You can face what's actually here, listen to what your fear is telling you, expand the container you're holding it in, and take one step — just one — and let that step show you something you couldn't see before. Then take the next one.

That's how possibility begins to reopen. Not because you suddenly have the whole path. But because you're moving again.