There are always many more options available to you in any situation than you can see at any particular moment. You have to find ways how to see those options and coaching helps with that. To have a friend who cares and who is thinking for you outside of the box helps with that. You can also learn to do it yourself and make it your own habit.
If you believe in God or in higher power, you gradually develop a paradigm or a concept that “anything is possible”. If you broaden your thinking you can begin to think, "Let me explore what else can be done in this situation, and who else can help me and where else can I learn about how to maximize this situation."
Here are a few practical techniques that can help us expand our thinking and increase the number of possibilities that we have in any situation, when we face any problem or we want to achieve any result.
One of them is “brainstorming”. Some experts say that when you do brainstorming on your own, it’s called “mind storming”. Whatever you call it, it is a creative exercise where you look into as many options as possible by thinking of and then writing down ideas.
You can ask people to write down 5 ideas or 10 ideas and sometimes experts recommend 20 ideas and this forces you to stretch your mind and your creative thinking. You can ask others for ideas, even a child.
Another tool we have is called Gita Cards that stimulate your creative thinking. They have a question and a short statement and a quote by Srila Prabhupada that relates to certain important points.
One of the cards is called “Get the right question”. Srila Prabhupada speaks in one Bhagavatam Purport (SB 1.2.5) about the importance of questions. If you have a right question, for example, if you ask “What else could I do in this situation?” - you immediately expand your options.
