The book “Switch – How To Change Things When Change Is Hard” by Chip and Dan Heath offers excellent advice on how to create change both in your personal and professional life.

The authors begin with a counter-intuitive proposal. When we consider change, most of us look at what is going wrong in our lives not what is going right. The authors propose to begin the change process by looking at the bright spots in your life. Look at what is working well and build from there.

They propose that you ask the question – “What’s working, and how can we do more of it?” Instead of being problem focused we need to be solution focused and use the bright spots in our lives to “illuminate the road map for action and spark the hope that change is possible.”

This is a major challenge in our problem focused world. We are all naturally inclined this way. Imagine if your child came home with a range of marks. How would you react? Inevitably, we would all focus on the lower ones – ‘what’s wrong?’, not on the higher ones – ‘what’s right and working well?’ The challenge is to look honestly at our lives and make a candid assessment of what is working well and begin to build from there.

Nicole Scheidl is the founder of Fit Minds, which provides support in the area of cognitive health.