- 2026-05-22
- I really like the framing I landed on below of "having a problem about how your handle your problems".
- This is the meta problem, or perhaps, meta-problem-solving.
- “I don’t know how to handle my problems” feels like very much a real thing. “I don’t touch my problems because I don’t know how to touch my problems”. Seems very meta to me.
- And this is where coaching can be so useful, because it gives you capacity to actually work on your problems. It collapses the meta problem, lets you get out of the loop and just tackle the things
- Porting from Co-thinking notes - meta-problems, 3 stages, 2026-05-21:
The meta-problems
1. Stuckness downstream of ~confusion/mental tangles
- Ediya = stuck on what to do with her channel → get unstuck via personal values excavation & finding the conflicting parts/beliefs → unstuck
- New client = stuck on whether to stop doing x or not → [have only had one session yet but] figure out stuckness and conflicting parts/beliefs and make behaviour change much easier via clarity/identity change
- Both of these feel like “personal philosophy” problems to me, feeling confused and blocked by mental knots. I wonder (said the Duning Kruger guy who currently has n of 2 clients[^1]) if this is the meta-problem: being confused, basically. Buddhist ignorance, also Wittgensteinian “the point of philosophy is to show the fly the way out of the flybottle”
2. Don’t have enough resources: time/money
- Actually, there’s another thing I’ve come across: “I’m not confused, I just don’t have enough capacity”. Entrepreneurs, founders who know where they’re going, what they’re building and why, and are resource constrained (time and/or money)
- So, there’s a kind of funnel emerging here (from my very simple and lossy model that includes 2 meta-problems): (1) I am confused (2) I am no longer confused but am resource constrained
3. Don’t have enough resources: emotional capacity
- After writing up the bullet points for (2), I wrote:
“And this is where I probably can’t help C-suite people who run companies, because they are neither confused nor resource-constrained”. Or, if they are confused or resource-constrained, it’s in a more technical way, like, “I need someone with deep expertise to help with x”, “I need someone with deep expertise on business strategy”, etc)”
- But then I thought, what about Joe Hudson of the Art of Accomplishment? He works with high level business executives and is very emotions-focused
- And what he helps them with is their emotions, as they’re dealing with emotional problems. Procrastinating on high-stakes decisions, feeling blocked again, etc
4. “Things are not ok until I solve this problem”
- This is a really key one, and actually links to the key consensusism thing of “the key problem is that we (~insecurely-attached-to-life people) feel that “this thing that I’m currently experiencing is not ok to experience and I must stop it""
- See e.g. here