Several years ago, I taught a psychology course in Creative Problem-Solving. For practice, I had a group of students ponder the solutions to ageless clichés such as, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” After a week of furrowed brows, sleepless nights, Excedrin and unmentionable statements about activities which are anatomically impossible to perform, they announced their bewilderment and failure to solve this problem. Then suddenly the following week, while engaged in an unrelated activity, one student offered a plausible solution, claiming it hit him “like a bolt out of the blue.”
Many individuals use a “feeling” criterion to solve problems. How many times have you been “stuck” and much later “struck” with the answer? While bolting to solutions may be your key to success, it is only useful to the extent you can predict its occurrence; capricious bolting is like grasping at straws! Unfortunately, most people have difficulty making bolts happen. You cannot manufacture a bolt, which seems to invariably come “in its own time” (like California wine and the Long Island Railroad!). If a feeling is required in order to know you have in fact solved a problem, then any activities which increase the chances of a feeling happening are useful. In other words, if you would like your “bolts out of the blue” to happen more predictably, perhaps a few suggestions might help you:

• 1) Define the problem in a clearly detectable fashion– something you can sink your teeth into: “Horse will approach trough and drink at least one gulp of water.”
• 2) Get in touch with all the logical solutions you have considered thus far that have failed, and write them down: “Drag horse to trough and push head in”; “bribe horse”; “withhold food until he drinks”; “stimulate equine curiosity by hiding trough and making horse run long distances to find it.”
• 3) Can pieces of previous solutions be combined in new ways that may boil down to a newly synthesized choice that had not struck you before? “Make horse run long distances… Feed horse…what? When?”
• 4) In order to fully come to grips with the situation, thereby cementing the curious fragments of your solution, try to create or think of an analogy– a different situation which contains elements of the same problem and desired outcome.

A client, dismayed by his wife’s constant redressing of him for being “dull”, requested treatment. Initially, he denied being boring and wanted help convincing his wife to swallow her pride and just enjoy him instead of trying to lead him elsewhere. After seeing both of them, it soon became apparent that this person had no thirst for adventure or excitement; an essential ingredient in order for his wife to relate successfully to him. Every time his wife tried to get him to be more interesting, he merely stiffened, thereby exacerbating the situation. In order to be struck with a new passion, it was necessary to lay all the cards on the table… and rearrange them. It was decided that what likely precedes “excitement” about new things is a state of “curiosity.” And in order to create that state, it was useful to first induce a state of “confusion.” Thus, the client was told a series of metaphors, over time, containing these various embedded states in an ordered sequence. Three months later, his wife reported that their relationship had really ”turned a new corner!”

• 5) Finally, do something else. Get away from the problem for awhile so yourunconscious mind can sort through the information to produce a useful outcome. Creative bolting still largely requires accessing resourceful but unconscious states of mind; and this process often occurs rather spontaneously.

These four steps may not only increase the opportunity for creative solutions that will produce more flexible choices in your behavior; but they can help you reframe “problems” as “opportunities” to conquer exciting challenges. You may no longer dread or fear obstacles. Now, the best way to make a horse drink water…