Page 6 - Microsoft Word - Thinking like a wallaby 14DEC16.doc

Then there are problems that take up much more of our thinking time because they
involve feelings – like how to tell your friend Timmo that his breath smells, or how to say

sorry to your grandmother for forgetting her birthday.

Ugly problems

And then there are the much, much harder problems – the very personal ones, like why

doesn’t Felicity talk to me any more? What did I do to upset her? Or, how can I avoid the
bully from next door when I walk to school tomorrow? Or even really upsetting

problems that involve family members doing the wrong thing.

So, every day, much of our thinking is taken up with finding answers to problems, from
little and easy things to huge, ugly and difficult things.

Most people seem to solve their problems in the quickest ways most of the time. I call

this “Crocodile-thinking” (as you will learn soon). But this way of thinking is not always
the best way because they may not have thought about what caused the problem in the

first place. Or about who else has been affected by it. Have they thought about the

whole problem or only a little part of it?

So you see, real problem solving can be tough and may need a lot of thinking time. But

there are ways to make getting the best solution just a little easier. And a bit more fun.

The idea of this book is to help you find some new ways of looking at problems and
maybe some new ways of solving them. And to do that, we will get some help from the

animal world by asking some odd questions like: what would a koala do here? Or, how

would an elephant think about this?

Still sounds silly? Maybe it is – or maybe you have just come across a bit of ‘wallaby-

thinking’. And perhaps, with the help of this book, you will learn some slightly sideways

thinking that will help you to deal with the huge and difficult problems as well as the

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