LaRae Quy stood at the top of a diving board several feet above the water. Quy, a new FBI recruit going through her academy training, just stared at the swimming pool below.
The assignment was clear: She was to jump into the pool, armed with an M-16 rifle, and swim from one end of the pool to the other.
There were only two problems:
Quy had just discovered she was afraid of heights.
She didn’t know how to swim.
As she stood there in front of her fellow students and trainers, a question kept going through her head:
Can I do this?
Needing to think fast, Quy shifted the question—and her perspective—with one word:
How can I do this?
That simple tweak empowered Quy. She informed her training officer she was unable to swim, and he promptly gave her a life vest. (Turns out the aim of the challenge wasn’t seeing how well cadets could swim, rather, how they dealt with challenging circumstances.) She then overcame her fear, took the leap, and somehow completed the test.
“I’m a big believer in reframing and positive thinking,” Quy told me in an interview. “Giving up wasn’t an option. And this lesson continued to help me in 24 years at the FBI.”
Why is this simple question so valuable? And how can you use it to overcome your “impossible” challenges? Let’s break it down. (Sign up here for my free email course on emotional intelligence.) A hack taken from neuroscience
Quy explained to my why she finds this question so valuable, and it has to do with the way our brains process emotions.
“I learned this later, but our first response to any situation is emotional,” Quy told me. “Our limbic brain is small, but powerful. And left on its own, it just spins out of control when we’re confronted with something scary. Then we find ourselves reacting and being driven by our emotions.”
“Focusing on ‘how can I’ helps me to come up with a plan that assures that little emotional part of our brain that I’m on it, so I can get it under control.”
This lesson helped Quy again some time later when she had to make her first arrest. Quy and her training agent received a tip that a wanted and potentially violent criminal had been spotted at a local bar, and they decided to make a car arrest.
After tailing the car for a bit, both Quy’s car and the suspects pulled up to a stoplight. Sitting in the passenger seat, Quy looked over and saw a huge man behind the steering wheel. The backup that was supposed to accompany them had gotten lost in traffic.
“In that instant, I knew I had to be the one to make that arrest,” Quy told me.
Quickly and decisively, Quy pulled off her FBI raid jacket, pulled her sweater down over her gun, and got out of the car. She walked over to his window, knocked, and motioned that the driver should roll down his window.
“Then I pulled my gun and I said, ‘FBI, you’re under arrest!’”
The SWAT team arrived soon after and fortunately the suspect was apprehended without issue. But it was all possible because of quick thinking on Quy’s part—thinking that focused not on whether or not she could handle on the task at hand, but how she was going to handle it.
“Change the mindset, change the behavior, change the outcome,” Quy said. That’s what I learned over all those years in the FBI.” Using ‘how can I’ in the workplace
How can you leverage this question to overcome your “impossible” challenges?
Let’s say you’re a solopreneur who’s barely surviving the hamster wheel of content creation. Instead of asking yourself whether you can keep this up, ask yourself: How can I repurpose content or streamline processes to make this more manageable?
If you’re working in a saturated niche, don’t ask whether or not you can grow your audience. Instead, ask yourself how you can set yourself apart. What unique audience can you serve, or angle can you speak from, that allows you to resonate?
Or, maybe your company has found success, and you’ve started to scale. You’re dealing with a bigger team and more customers. Instead of asking if you can manage this, ask how you’re going manage it. This can help you identify the people, systems, and other help you need.
The key, whatever “impossible” challenge you’re facing, is to change “Can I?” to “How can I?” If you do, you’ll change your mindset, change your behavior, and change your outcome—while building the mental toughness and confidence to do whatever you set your mind to do.