Here is the full transcript and summary of Mel Gill’s talk titled “Uncommon Sense: Moving from a Problem-Focused to Solution-Focused Mindset” at TEDxVarna conference.
In this TEDx talk, psychotherapist Mel Gill discusses the importance of problem-focused vs. solution-focused thinking. He recounts a near-death experience in which he realized the importance of taking action and never giving up on your dreams. Gill’s friend, an American Indian rainmaker, is successful because he never stops dancing until it rains.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Thank you. Thank you very much. I didn’t realize that we gave him the long version. That’s what happens when you’re not in control of the materials that you give out to people.
The world is a very strange place. More than 95% of this Earth’s population has a problem – and we need to find a solution to it very quickly. Psychotherapists, psychologists, mental health workers, and psychiatrists understand that more than 95% of this world’s population suffers from one kind of mental illness or another. We call this loose class of mental illnesses schizophrenia. There is mild schizophrenia and there is chronic schizophrenia.
Now, mild schizophrenia is very simple. The loose definition of schizophrenia is this: the inability to tell what is real from what is imagined, what is fantasy from what is reality.
Now, imagine if we were talking and somebody else came into the room, and all of a sudden we got distracted and we stopped talking. Now, that person starts to think, “My God, they’re talking about me.” Then, they leave the room, and then we continue talking because the distraction is gone. Now, they are certain that we are talking about them, and they plan some kind of revenge. That’s heading towards mental illness.
You see, they say in Varna – Varna is now one of my homes on the planet. I don’t know if you know this. I live in Singapore, I live in Chicago, but now, I’m going to be living in Varna a lot. I suppose the clap means it’s a good thing. I’m just kidding.
And so, they say that in Varna – especially in this room – one in four people are mentally unsound. I want you to form a picture of three of your best friends. Form a mental picture. If they are all okay, then you’re the one. So, you’re in the right place. You’re in absolutely the right place.
Today, I’m going to talk to you about something that’s very close to my heart: how to change people from a problem-focused mind to a solution-focused mind. You see, the thing is, we are experiencing massive levels of depression all around the world – massive rates of suicides, all going up all the time. And that’s because people are focused on the problems. And that’s why we have so many relationship breakups.
That’s why we have people on the verge of suicide even when they look successful on the outside. They can be earning a lot of money, they can be famous beyond belief, but somehow, something is missing on the inside. And that’s called positive thinking? Not really. That’s called solution-based thinking. They are always finding solutions to whatever situations come up.
My son, who is actually holding the camera right there – and I’m now live on Facebook. So, over the entire world that is my fan base now knows exactly what I’m going to be talking about. My son and I went on an Internet-marketing cruise around Jamaica, Cozumel, Mexico, and so on and so forth. We’re trying to figure out this world of the Internet.
And one of those cruises had a tour. And the tour was on a little island called Jamaica. We wanted to go see Bob Marley’s house. Now, for me, I’m just curious about the music and the guy. But my son, he was interested in other things. We were sitting on the bus, and he was celebrating long before we made it to Bob Marley’s house.
But the tour guide in the bus said something very important, and that’s the shift I want to create in you today. The tour guide said, “Welcome to Jamaica, man. In Jamaica, we have no problems, man.” And I said, “Yes, because of the ganja.” She said, “No, man, it’s not the ganja. That’s a plus. In Jamaica, we have no problems. We have situations. We don’t call them problems, we call them situations. If your wife catches you with the neighbor’s wife, you don’t have a problem, man, you have a situation!”
So, you see, if you have a problem, it’s not solvable. But if you have a situation, there’s always a solution to it. So, if you start to see the places where you are stuck in life – you don’t have enough money before the end of the month – you have a situation, man. If your girlfriend is seeing your best friend and spending more time at his house than yours, you have a situation, man. You’ve got to solve this somehow, change your behavior, change your thoughts, change your actions, or change your girlfriend.
The solutions are so simple, but we don’t want to do it – because we are so problem-focused. I have a problem. I have a this, I have a that. I don’t know if you know it, but my office here in Varna is actually at the Kostas. It’s free. Nobody charges me rent.
But the thing is, once in a while, people who recognize who I am come by and stop and they sit down and they talk, and they don’t leave for an hour or two. And they always have problems. They talk about their husbands, their wives, their children. They talk about their jobs. They talk about the future. They talk about the lack of emotion inside of them.
And there, I turn them into situations. What are you going to do about it?
What can you do? You see, if you do the same thing over and over and over again and expect different results, you’re going to expect to wait for years before it changes. You’ve got to change something. And what is the thing you change?
I went into a mental hospital once, and I wanted to release a whole bunch of people from there – because I believe that mentally ill people face better challenges outside than inside a mental institution. Is there one here in Varna? Are we in it? No. I’m just kidding. Everybody goes, “Yeah, yeah. I think it’s here.”
Now, one day, I asked three people in the front row, “I’m going to ask you a simple question. If you can answer this, I will let you go.” I asked the first person, “What is 3 times 3?” The fellow scratched his head and said, “164.” I said, “Go back to your room.”
I asked the second person, “What is 3 times 3?” The person scratched his head, looked up and smiled and said, “Tuesday.” “Sorry. Wrong answer. Go back to your room.” I almost gave up until I went to the last man and said, “If you can answer this question, I will let you go. What is 3 times 3?” He looked at the other two people, smiled at me and said, “Doctor, it’s 9.”
I said, “Great.” I gave him the release papers and said, “You can go.” He started running to the door. But before he ran away, I said, “Young man, I need you to tell me something. Your two friends did not come up with the right answer. How did you manage it?” He said, “It’s so simple. I multiplied 164 by Tuesday, and I got 9.”
So, you see, sometimes we come up to the right answers in life, but the thinking is not quite correct. But somehow we find the answers. We don’t know how. We find answers to any situations that we find ourselves in. So, today, I want to give you a precise way to find answers to your situations. Would that be useful? For two or three people, that would be.
They told me that in Varna, people are very shy. When you ask them questions, they don’t raise their hands or answer back. But I don’t believe you are shy. I believe that in Varna, when you ask a question, people don’t realize it’s a question. So, when I talk to you for the next ten minutes – which I think that’s all I’ve got – I am going to say something, I’m going to ask, and I’m going to say, “That’s a question.” So your answer will help me. Would that be useful? That’s a question. Yes. Great. Thank you so much.
My ability to think in terms of possibilities started when I was 18 years old. I was climbing a mountain in Malaysia, and I lost my footing and fell down the slope. I survived, but I had compound fractures – mostly my left arm – and it took about ten days to find a decent hospital.
Now, imagine me, a bodybuilder, losing his face because he couldn’t climb this mountain and just fell. Well, anyway, in the ten days that it took to find the hospital, infection had set in – gas-gangrene had set in. I was supposed to die on the operating table. And in fact, I was clinically dead on the operating table for 19 minutes. I put that whole story in my book called, “The Meta Secret,” or you know it as Meta Tайна.
When I was in the process, and as they were amputating my left arm just to save my life, because they didn’t know if I was going to live or die, I stepped outside and saw the whole process. I don’t know what was happening. I went through the tunnel of light, had a near-death experience, and over there, there was a being who was dressed in blue with long hair. At that time, I thought it was Jesus Christ. And he said, “Son, it is not yet time. You have to go back. There’s a lot of work to do.”
Now, people ask me, “Really? Was it Jesus? You’re sure it wasn’t Buddha or somebody else?” I said, “It could have been the lead singer from the band Kiss, but I’m not sure.” It doesn’t matter who sent me back. The point is I came back.
Now, as I came back, I realized that I was in a different situation. Here was a young man, 18 years old and starting to do bodybuilding – something my son is just taking up. And everything about my body was everything about me as a person. And how was I going to face this – until that morning when I woke up from this coma, and my mother walked in. And I didn’t know what to say to her.
Because here she was – and she looked very sad, and this was my mom. Everybody loves their mom, right? How many people do love their mom? Good. If your mom is here, you should be putting your hand up – otherwise, the allowance stops. You could see the helplessness in her eyes.
So, I decided at that moment – and I don’t know what made me decide – I decided to create a joke. So I said to her, “Mom, don’t worry, this is part of the plan.” She looked at me like I’ve suddenly gone insane. She was going to call the doctor. “I think too much medicine for him. Stop.” “Morphine.”
I said, “Mom, this is part of the plan. I purposely decided to lose my arm in this accident.” She said, “Why? Why did you do that?” “So that at the end of my life, I can say that I did everything single-handedly.” She couldn’t stop laughing for ten minutes.
And then I did another joke with somebody else who was coming because there’s a whole row of people coming in to tell me how sorry they were, and they said, “Oh, this is so bad. Tell me about the story.” I said, “Well, it all started one night. I was playing poker and I had a bad hand.”
I started to go inside the people I was talking to. You see, if you want to have possibility thinking, your EQ has got to be a little bit higher. If you are a possibility thinker, your sense of humor will automatically develop over a period of time. Why? Because you see possibilities. You see, the problem is school has damaged you. You come to school, you come to university, they make you all believe one thing, one way.
And yet the people who have given you new technologies, the people who have given you new inventions were never in school to do that. You see, they developed that on their own because they didn’t know it was impossible. They didn’t know that something could not be done. The person who was told so many times, “You cannot climb Mount Everest. It’s impossible to climb Mount Everest. No one can breathe on Everest. No one can survive.” One man decided – he didn’t go to school. His name was Edmund Hillary. He’s from New Zealand where they don’t go to school very much.
I’m going to hear from my New Zealand friends for that. They just learn how to raise sheep. Oh, that’s even worse. He decided to climb Everest and broke the mold. And after that, in that same year, eight more people started to climb Everest. Now, a 164 bodies are on Everest, and we cannot bring them down. So, I don’t know if he did a good thing or a bad thing. But somewhere along the way, someone has to show you that it’s possible, then you start to do it.
How about you be the one? Someone told a fellow a long time ago, “You cannot break the four-minute mile.” And yet, Roger Bannister decided to ignore everyone, and he ran one mile in under four minutes. After that, three more people broke the record – because one man showed them that it was possible.
You see, I believe that you in Varna have a lot of creativity. There’s something in the energy of the place. It’s not about the economy. It’s not about the buildings. It’s not about everything. It’s about the people. I love the energy of the people here because the creative people are in this room.
Look at TEDx. Whose idea was this here? Everywhere else, people are hesitant to start this, but one young man – Boyan, where are you? – decided that this was possible. And so he sets the stage for other people to say, “Yes, it’s possible. I will start to organize my own stuff. And soon, there’ll be nobody coming for Boyan’s talk.”
I’m just kidding. But you know what I mean. The possibility that sets up inside of you is the thing that says, “There will be nothing that stands in my way.” How do you develop that? Very simple. You start to pay attention to where you are. Where are you now? And this, you can use for achieving any goals and anything that you want, as well.
Is this my clock? Just out of curiosity. Wow!
(Man in audience:) It’s not a problem. It’s a situation.
Okay. Great. Fantastic. I just saw I have a little bit of time – like somebody left me the last piece of pie here. So, if you just take inventory of where you are right now, understand where you are, what resources you have, how much money you have, what education level you have, what connections you have, and then think about where it is you want to go.
What is it you want to be? And don’t think five years. Think two years – just two years, something that’s within vision. And then notice what it will take for you to get from here to there. What is the path between here and there? And if you don’t know the path, find someone who has taken that path. Find someone who has already done it. And if you cannot meet them directly, find it out in books. You’ve got the Internet. You’ve got all of these resources.
And this is the step that no one takes – the fourth step – and that is to take the first step. No one takes action. They think about it. They draw it up in plans. It’s a great plan. They put it out in their notebooks. “It’s a great plan. Look, I came up with this five years ago, dadadadada.” Someone told me three days ago, “I really wanted to start TEDx in Varna about three years ago, but (gasp), and somebody else did it.”
How many times have you walked by and say, “Hey, I invented this several years ago. I thought about it and now, somebody made it an invention.” How many people have had that thought? One man walked into the offices of Facebook. How many people are familiar with Facebook? The largest mental hospital in the world.
And the geniuses that came up with Facebook sat there and said that if anybody writes any rubbish, the only response you can give is “like.” So, when somebody responds to you, they like the nonsense that you post. And so, all of a sudden, all the mental hospitals in the world start to put all the stuff they’ve done: take pictures of their food, take pictures of their dog, take pictures of their dog eating their food – all of that.
Do you remember a time 15 years ago when you and I had cameras and we took pictures of our food? We went to the store, developed them, and then sent it by mail to our friends? No? Possibility thinking means never accepting failure as your final destination. Failure is a means to success.
One young man walked into Facebook, asked for a job in 2006. They turned him down. They said, “Sorry, we don’t have a place for you. You’re not qualified.” That man did not get depressed. Maybe a couple of days, he drank some Rakia with some Bulgarian friends. But after that, he decided to sit with a group of people and created an app. And the app was to text people for free. He thought it’ll be wonderful.
Soon, he had a couple of million people. Soon, he had several hundred million people, and then Facebook made him an offer and said, “I will buy your app from you, young man, for 16 billion dollars.” The man who did not get a job did not become depressed and go into spirals. He thought, “What can I do next? Here is an opportunity.”
So, every time you meet with success, it’s because you are followed by a lot of failure. And if you have not failed, you will not become successful. Let me tell you, I am one of the biggest failures in the world. To experience massive success, you’ve got to have massive failure. There’s no ands, ifs, and buts. You must try, and if you don’t try, you will not get ahead.
Possibility thinking is refusing to accept limits. Possibility thinking is recognizing that you are fully capable of making any change you want in your life. And people, I come here to give you one piece of good news. And I’m a predictor of your future. Would you like to know what your future is?
Again, that’s a question. I’m sorry, I should have told you that. You are all going to die. None of you are going to get out of this life alive. You are going to die. No matter how much you stretch it, you’re going to die eventually. So, before you die, why don’t you make it a spectacular life? Why don’t you do those things that other people are afraid of doing? Why don’t you try and try and try and never, ever stop?
I have a friend in south Arizona. This man is an American Indian. One more story and then I’ll step down. This man is an American Indian. He’s the most successful rainmaker on the planet. He has made rain come down by doing a rain dance. He does a rain dance. And do you know why he’s 100% successful? That’s a question. Because he keeps dancing until it rains.
Thank you.
SUMMAR OF THIS TALK:
Mel Gill’s talk, “Uncommon Sense: Moving from a Problem-Focused to Solution-Focused Mindset,” offers several key takeaways that emphasize shifting one’s mindset from dwelling on problems to seeking solutions. Here’s a summary of the main points:
Prevalence of Mental Health Issues: Gill begins by highlighting the widespread nature of mental health problems, loosely referring to various conditions as forms of schizophrenia, characterized by the inability to distinguish between reality and imagination.
Impact of Problem-Focused Thinking: He points out that a problem-focused mindset contributes to rising rates of depression, suicide, and relationship breakups. People, even those who appear successful, often struggle internally due to a negative, problem-centric outlook.
The Power of Solution-Focused Thinking: Gill emphasizes the importance of solution-based thinking, where challenges are seen as solvable situations rather than insurmountable problems. This perspective shift is essential for personal growth and happiness.
Anecdotes and Personal Experiences: Throughout the talk, Gill shares personal stories and anecdotes, such as his visit to Jamaica and a humorous episode involving a mental hospital, to illustrate the importance of positive thinking and humor in overcoming challenges.
Overcoming Limiting Beliefs: He discusses the dangers of limiting beliefs ingrained by traditional education systems and societal norms. Gill encourages breaking free from these constraints to unleash creativity and innovation.
The Importance of Action: A key point in Gill’s talk is the necessity of taking action towards goals. He stresses that merely planning or dreaming is not enough; one must actively pursue their objectives to achieve success.
Failure as a Path to Success: Gill argues that failure is an integral part of the journey to success. He shares examples of people who faced rejection or failure but later achieved significant success, highlighting the importance of perseverance.
Possibility Thinking: The concept of ‘possibility thinking’ is central to Gill’s message. He urges the audience to see beyond perceived limitations and view every situation as an opportunity for growth and learning.
Humor and Emotional Intelligence: Gill underscores the importance of humor and emotional intelligence in problem-solving. He believes a good sense of humor and high EQ are critical in developing a solution-focused mindset.
Urgency of Living a Full Life: Finally, Gill reminds the audience of the inevitability of death and the importance of making the most of one’s life. He encourages taking risks, trying new things, and relentlessly pursuing one’s dreams.
Overall, Mel Gill’s talk is a call to action for changing one’s perspective from a problem-focused to a solution-focused mindset, emphasizing the importance of humor, action, and the refusal to accept limits as fundamental to personal growth and success.