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Tool 66 · Develop yourself

Which of this is mine to solve?

A guided 20 to 25 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. Some problems need action. Some circumstances will not move because you understand them better. This separates the two.

A woman in her early forties sitting in her car with the door open in a hospital car park at dusk

What has six months of effort actually produced?

If the answer is nothing, the question is not whether you tried hard enough.

Impossible and expensive are different words.

What you'll look at

  1. 01The situation
  2. 02Three columns
  3. 03Where the effort goes
  4. 04What carrying involves

A note from Mark

Mark Eve, founder of TAIU

I am naturally drawn to fixing things. If something is wrong, my instinct is to get into it and sort it out. That instinct has been useful more often than not.

What experience has taught me is that effort and control are not the same thing. I have put serious energy into situations that were never going to move for me. The cost of that was not just the wasted effort. It was the things I did not do while I was busy.

Sometimes the responsible thing is to act. Sometimes it is to stop fighting something you cannot currently change and decide how you are going to live alongside it. That second one is not giving up. I would not call it acceptance either. That word usually means nothing by the time people say it.

Read my full view ↓

And carrying something is not the same as saying it was fair. If somebody treated you badly, that stays true. The question here is narrower and more practical. It is where your effort should go now.

What you'll get

This will not sort you into a personality type.It will give you answers about your own life that you can test.

  1. 01

    Control

  2. 02

    Influence

  3. 03

    Fixed for now

  4. 04

    Where the effort goes

  5. +

    Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.

See everything included ↓
  • 01The situation
  • 02What you control
  • 03What you can influence
  • 04What is currently fixed
  • 05Where the effort is currently going
  • 06What you are carrying
  • 07The rival reading
  • 08What deserves protecting
  • 09What carrying this does not mean
  • 10What remains unresolved
  • 11Where this goes next

When you finish

Bring it back to your tree.

Your tree is where TAIU keeps a picture of your whole life, in parts like work, money and health.

This session works on the whole of you, not one part of your life. Nothing is scored. At the end, you are asked once which part of your life this touched most. You can answer none.

The conversation writes this summary for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.

  • Session
  • Date
  • The part of life this belongs to
  • What we found
  • The alternative we tested
  • What deserves protecting
  • What should change, if anything
  • Next actions
  • What to notice or find out
  • What remains unresolved
Open My Tree

What now?

  1. 01 · Save it

    What you control.

  2. 02 · Test it

    Write the three columns and put every part of the situation in one of them.

See more ↓

What I would do

  1. 01

    Sort it into three columns before doing anything else.

  2. 02

    Test both directions. Impossible is sometimes only expensive.

  3. 03

    Follow the effort and see what it has produced.

  4. 04

    Refuse any plan whose first step is that somebody else changes.

  5. 05

    Decide what to stop pushing at, and say why.

Test it

  1. 01

    What would it actually take to change the thing you called impossible?

  2. 02

    What has six months of effort produced?

  3. 03

    Whose decision is the first step of your plan?

The alternative

There are two errors here and both are common. You may be calling something unchangeable because changing it would be expensive, frightening or slow, which is a different thing entirely. Or you may be spending everything you have on something that was never yours to move, usually another person's behaviour and calling that responsibility. The evidence for which one you are doing is what the effort has actually produced.

Think about this

  • What in this actually moves when you decide it moves.
  • What you can affect without being able to decide.
  • What has not shifted in six months despite the effort.
  • What it would genuinely take to change the thing you have called impossible.
  • What living alongside this would involve in practice.

Take this to Ask Mark

You have done the exercise. Now look again at what it found.

This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.

Take this to Ask Mark →

Want to go further?

TRY · 12 MIN

Change / Influence / Carry

TAIU

Three columns for a situation that will not resolve neatly.

Try it →
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LEARN · FREE TOOL

Every Mind Matters

NHS

Free, clinically grounded and available today if something here is heavier than an exercise can hold.

Find out more ↗
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READ · BOOK

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Steven Hayes, Kirk Strosahl and Kelly Wilson

The clinical case for describing what living alongside something actually involves, rather than using acceptance as a word that ends a conversation. Read it for the practical framing, not for the language.

Read more ↗
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Recommended by the TAIU community

What helped you?

If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.

We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.

Finished the exercise?

What did this uncover?

Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.

A person in their late twenties standing among passengers on a morning commuter train, looking out of the window

Next tool

Something I am carrying

If the weight itself is the subject

Continue →What am I responsible for? →

Before you start

Reading, if you would rather understand the question first.

Further thinking

  • Changing the World and Changing the Self

    Fred Rothbaum, John Weisz and Samuel Snyder

  • Stress, Appraisal and Coping

    Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman

  • Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function

    Anandi Mani, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir and Jiaying Zhao

See the thinking ↓

Article

Changing the World and Changing the Self

Fred Rothbaum, John Weisz and Samuel Snyder

The paper that separates changing a situation from adjusting to it, and treats both as forms of control rather than treating the second as defeat. Useful when the honest answer is that something will not move for now.

Book

Stress, Appraisal and Coping

Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman

The origin of the distinction between tackling a problem and managing the response to it. The argument is that the right choice depends on whether the situation can actually be changed, which is exactly the judgement most people skip.

Article

Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function

Anandi Mani, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir and Jiaying Zhao

Evidence that financial pressure itself consumes attention and judgement. Worth reading before concluding that anybody under money pressure is simply making poor decisions.

Book

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Steven Hayes, Kirk Strosahl and Kelly Wilson

The clinical case for describing what living alongside something actually involves, rather than using acceptance as a word that ends a conversation. Read it for the practical framing, not for the language.