Realitycharting: Seven Steps to Effective Problem Solving and Strategies for Personal Success

As thinking animals, we understand our world by giving objects names (called nouns ) and we describe actions using various words that we call verbs. We express variations of these nouns and verbs by adding qualifiers, which we call adjectives and adverbs. We then assemble these words into sentences and tell stories (made of many such sentences) to communicate with others what we think we know. All humans interact with their environment in a slightly different way and thus develop a unique perspective or reality. By sharing our unique reality with others we gradually increase our collective understanding of the world we live in. However, not all of us are good at sharing what we think we know, nor are we always correct in our understanding. As a result, we often find our realities in conflict with others, which can result in ineffective problem solving and can sometimes have serious consequences. Humans have always debated the notion of right and wrong and this conflict is at the core of ineffective problem solving. The cause of these conflicts is a clash of realities, so before we can expect to find effective solutions to human problems, we need to find a way to create a common reality that everyone can agree on. The basis for a common reality is what we call a principle, which by definition is a causal relationship that works the same way every time regardless of the observer the law of gravity is such a principle. As you will learn in this book, several wise men, who have come before us, have defined some fundamental laws or principles of causation that we can use to better understand reality. At the peril of all humankind, we have not learned these fundamentals well and we continue to ignore these great insights this error will be corrected by reading this book. The RealityCharting process described herein is based on these fundamental principles from the ancients and thus provides a principlebased approach to understanding and solving human problems. By expressing the causal relationships of a given event that includes all stakeholders reality, we can capitalize on the knowledge of the many to create a more complete reality. Not Reality with a capital R, because there is no such thing, but a common reality that everyone can see and agree with. Success in life is driven by the human need to be happy, regardless of how you define success or happiness. Among other things, happiness/success is caused by the absence of stress. To avoid stress we attempt to create stress-free conditions by controlling the causes of stress in our lives. To be effective at removing stressful conditions we need to understand the causal relationships that initiate stress in the first place. While we seem to know that removing stress makes us happier, research shows that stress actually damages the mechanisms that control the division of living cells in our bodies. This damage results in a shorter life due to cancer and early aging. On the flip side, research also shows that those who have more control over their lives have less stress and live longer. So, personal success and individual happiness are directly related to understanding the causal relationships that govern stress. As you will see, the RealityCharting process is very simple and can be used on any event-type problem. But this book is more than just a way of learning how to be a better problem solver. It will take you on a journey of principles and philosophy that can lead to a better understanding of the big questions in life, like what is reality and why are we here?