A boss told me that once, years ago, off the cuff. He probably didn't think much of it after he said it. It was more along the lines of, “don’t be a problem admirer, be a problem solver.” I kept this saying in my head for many years whenever I thought about bringing up an issue. I also ended up turning it into something bigger than he meant.

I started handing it down to my own teams, and even to my kids. When my kids would see trash on the ground, I would tell them: don't just admire that it's there, don't just complain about it. Pick it up. Throw it away. It's still a lesson I believe.

But somewhere between the large conference room he was known to say this phrase in and my kitchen table, that sentence stopped being advice. I slowly found that it had become how I ran myself at times.

I got good at finding problems over the years. Really good. At work, in conversations, in relationships, in rooms I'd only just walked into, and really anywhere I found myself. I felt like I could see what was broken faster than almost anyone around me.

Then I got good at the next part too. After learning through failing, I got better at naming it, researching it, building a plan for it, and, more often than I should have, offering myself as the one who'd carry it out to fix, or solve, it.

For a long time I thought that was the gift. I was someone who could solve things. I've learned in therapy that some people are just wired to solve. I told myself I was one of them, and for years I never checked whether that was even true, or whether I was just someone who kept finding opportunities and calling them problems because that's the language I knew how to move in.

It didn't matter which one I actually was. Either way, the pattern ran on its own by then. Someone described a wound, and before I'd finished feeling anything about it, I was already building the fix.

It even showed up in my marriage. There were seasons I looked at my wife like she was the problem to fix, instead of standing beside her while we solved what was actually in front of us. One version puts the problem between us, mine to carry alone. The other puts it in front of us, ours to face together. A hard lesson I had to learn.

Then, in 2025, three things landed at once. A stranger, online, grieving something he couldn't get leave to attend. A friend, asking me how to confront her unit after a suicide. And underneath both of those, grief of my own that I hadn't done anything with yet.

So, I leaned into the clarity of the unknown, and I did what I was good at doing. I researched. I analyzed. I built recommendations out of everything I'd lived and everything I'd learned in other rooms, in other careers, and I offered it up the way I always had.

I thought it would land like help. Get to work, let's fix this. GO TEAM! Sportsball!

But…no.

It actually ended up landing more like an accusation. Like a diagnosis when nobody had asked to be diagnosed. The more useful I tried to be, the less present I actually was.

It took a long time, and three people I respect deeply to this day, to remind me I was a person in that moment. Not a resource. Not a fixer standing at the edge of someone else's pain with a plan in hand. Not just a body. But a person, who was also grieving, who had also just watched three things I really cared about come apart in my own life.

There's more underneath that week I'm not going to put on this page. Some of it isn't only mine to tell. But I can tell you what it did to me afterward.

When something collapses, you find out what your decisions were actually built on. And damn it, I had no idea in the moment. I had assumptions, but not one clue outside of “I just know it was the right decision.” It took many months, not days, to start pulling the autopilot apart and understand what I'd been running on the whole time. Therapy. Discernment. Journaling. Processing. Coaching. And lots of conversations.

Now looking back, all I had, in the moment, was a question I couldn't answer: why did I feel compelled to fix it, right then, in that way, for these people, whether they'd asked me to or not?

I couldn't answer that. At least not that week. It took a long time after to work through it honestly.

But that's the piece nobody warns you about, or in my case, commands you, when they tell you to stop admiring problems and start solving them. Nobody tells you that a gift running without an answer to why isn't wisdom anymore. It's autopilot wearing wisdom's clothes.

I've spent the last few years building something slower underneath that instinct I created over time under pressure. A set of questions I run a decision through now, before I let my hands move. Questions like:

I didn't know then who I was when I wasn't fixing something.

I still get it wrong. But I ask now. With more curiosity than I used to.

Thank you for sitting with this one. This is another small step on the wayward path to restoring togetherness.

More soon, from further down the path. Until then, keep wayfinding.