38. How to Be a Resourceful Person Who Can Figure Things Out
Episode 38
Resourcefulness is one of the most crucial professional and academic skills we can develop. As our responsibilities grow, so does the need to solve problems independently.
But what does it take to be truly resourceful?
In this episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, I'll guide you through a clear, actionable process to go from “I'm stuck” to “I've got this!”
🎙️Other Episodes + Resources Mentioned
Episode 35 → What is Executive Function Coaching and Is It for You?
Episode 11 → The 6 Most Valuable Skills for School and Work
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→ Daily Timeblock Planner (pdf)
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The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I am choosing not to spend my time fixing them. :)
How to be a resourceful person who can figure things out
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[00:00:00]
Hello, hello, you are listening to episode 38 of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. At the time that I'm recording this, it is late August and there is a huge back-to-school vibe in the air. And I absolutely love it. In fact, I have always loved back to school season and I view it kind of how most people view New Year's day. Fresh systems fresh starts. Fresh pens- if you've ever met me.
Anyway, I did have a conversation with a client the other day. And that is the inspiration for today's episode.
So this is a student who is headed into his senior year of college and he wrapped up a summer internship in the field that he's interested in, which is business. And he was candidly telling me that the internship was a lot harder than he expected it to be. He was saying that the internship people expected him to know how to do things that he didn't know how to do.
And this made him uncomfortable. It kind of [00:01:00] shook his confidence a little and it got him doubting and thinking like, do I even know what I'm doing? Am I even cut out for this business thing? And then from there, this is in one of our sessions, he started asking me about, you know, questions about starting my own business.
And did I do any internships and essentially, how did I know how to start my own business? And it's funny because I have a master's degree in special education. I've been an educator for nearly 20 years and I've worked in corporate America. I have worked in the public and private sector for education.
And when people ask me what I do, my instinct is obviously to say, I'm an educator or actually I'll use the word executive function coach. We talked about that in episode... I think it was episode 36, but anyway, Almost never do I say I'm a business owner. It is odd because I did create the idea for my business out of thin air.
The idea for SchoolHabits literally woke me up in the middle of the night one night and I couldn't go back to [00:02:00] sleep. I became obsessed with building out a vision that I had in my head. And that was in 2016 when I launched SchoolHabits as a company. And now I have a full blown product and service based business and a podcast and yeah, and it's just weird because I never, ever really think I'm business person.
And so when the student asked me about how I started my business, Like, what were the steps I took? I was almost like, why, why are you asking me? Like, I'm just a teacher!
Right, but today's episode is about how to be resourceful.
So, what is the connection here? What is the connection between the story I just told you about, you know, the conversation I had with this client earlier with this student in the internship that was harder than he thought it was going to be, and and me starting a business? Now, the truth is that when I created my business from the ground up, I literally had no idea what I was doing.
But I figured. It [00:03:00] out. I figured it out every single step along the way. Heck I'm still figuring it out. Like I do not have everything all figured out by any means.
That's not my point, but you know, some things worked, some things didn't, but I never stopped trying to figure things out. And then here we are.
And what is the ability to figure things out? It is called resourcefulness.
Now, if you've listened to a couple episodes so far of this podcast, thank you for being here, but episode 11, which are the six most important skills for school and work, we actually talk about resourcefulness in that episode.
Resourcefulness is a super power. In fact, it's one of absolutely the top skills that is required to succeed in a low stress sort of sustainable way in school and in work.
So, what do we do when we find ourselves in the position that my student found himself in for his internship, right. Not knowing how to do things. Um, [00:04:00] but knowing that they have to get done or maybe in my personal case that they wanted to get done or people expect that you know how to do them?
How do we become resourceful? And that my friends is what we are talking about today.
All right.
So there is good news and bad news about developing resourcefulness. The bad news is that there is no one little button thing that we can just, a switch that we can click on and click off and then - suddenly we have a roadmap to figure out how to do all the things. Right. In fact, if that were possible, I don't even think I would flip that switch on because what's the fun in that?
But [00:05:00] the good news is that resourcefulness is a skill. And if you learn anything on the learn and work smarter podcast, it should be that skills can be taught.
That's the good news. So if your resourcefulness skill is not at the level that you want it to be, or that it needs to be, which is usually indicated by you feeling like everyone around you knows what they're doing. And you're the only one who doesn't; you feel stuck; it feels like everyone else has some sort of like secret knowledge that you don't have, right- those are all signs that you have not yet developed this skill around how to figure things out.
Okay. So let's start with a foundational principle of resourcefulness and like it or not that is mindset. I know, I know mindset gets a bad rap, but it's foundational.
The people with the greatest problem solving skills and resourcefulness truly believe that there is a solution to every problem. I don't know about you, but I grew up with both of my [00:06:00] parents telling me that there was a solution to every problem. Now did this wisdom magically solve any of my problems on the spot?
It absolutely did not. And I probably rolled my eyes every single time, knowing me that they said it to me, but over time, that message got ingrained. Alright. I began to internalize the idea that if, if I was stuck, if I was facing a block, if I didn't know how to do something that I wanted to do, I truly believe that there was a way somewhere.
There was a map somewhere. There was a solution somewhere. Because let's flip this on its head for a minute. If you do not believe in your heart of hearts, that there was a solution to every problem, then you are a hundred percent right. If you don't truly believe that all problems are meant to be solved, then you will never be the one to find the solution and figure it out. All right.
So I'm going to use the example of my student that I mentioned earlier in this episode, the student who's actually the inspiration for this episode. I'm going to use a lot of examples [00:07:00] from his very real scenario to illustrate some of the concepts I'm going to talk about today.
Starting with this idea that you have to have the fundamental belief that problems can be solved. I asked for his permission to use the example.
And I told him that I wouldn't use his real name, but we are going to call him Matthew. All right, Matthew.
So one specific problem that Matthew shared with me was that as part of his internship, he was expected to take some data that was handed to him. Okay. He wasn't supposed to collect it, just take it and put it into some kind of spreadsheet and make some tables or graphs from that data. He was not asked to extract business intelligence from that data or analyze it in any way.
Just take the data, put it into an Excel sheet and then use the functions inside Excel to create some kind of graph or visual representation. But he had no idea how to do this. He was not required to use Excel in high school and he certainly didn't know how to turn data into any sort of table inside that program. If Matthew [00:08:00] demonstrated low resourcefulness, he would have told himself I can't do this. I don't know how to do this and therefore, I'm not going to be able to do it. But instead he demonstrated resourcefulness and he said, okay, I don't know how to do this yet. But obviously there is a solution and a roadmap that I just have to find.
Right. I asked, um, Matthew actually what he did in this scenario. And he said he tried everything. He said it took him forever, but he found a channel on YouTube that was all about Excel basics. And then he figured it out. My point here is that resourcefulness started with him believing that there was an answer out there.
Now I get it in this Excel example. It is. So black and white and step-by-step and very like how to write. He literally could have just inserted into Google or typed into Google or YouTube, whatever, how to create a table in Excel. And he could have gotten the answer. But hold up back to my scenario of creating my business.
Okay. This is less black and white. My question was [00:09:00] how do I start a business out of nothing? All right. If I, if I Googled that I probably would have come up with a million different results leading me in a million different directions. So I know that some scenarios are not as simple as Googling how to do X, Y, Z. But it still starts with recognizing that there is some kind of answer out there somewhere.
So this actually brings us to my second point about being resourceful, which is to start somewhere. How do you ever know that you are stuck if you don't start somewhere? You have to begin by taking the teeny tiniest first step in some kind of direction for you to even get to the point where you say yup. Yup. I can not move any further. If you have made no action in any direction, you can not claim that you're a stock because that is not a lack of resourcefulness. That is a lack of action and effort.
Back to Matthew's example with the Excel spreadsheet. All right. So when he was asked to [00:10:00] create something like a graph or chart or something inside Excel, he knew in the back of his mind that he didn't know how to do it. But then, you know, there was an answer out there, but he still took some kind of action out of the gate.
He didn't just go up to his boss and say, I don't know how to do that. Right? No one's looking for that professional. He opened up Excel. He started playing around with the tables and adding numbers and in his words, he made a total mess. Right. But he had to start somewhere to figure out that he couldn't go any further.
Now the example in my business. If I had just had the idea, as I said in the, you know, I, I had it at night and I woke up and I couldn't go back to sleep.
And if I didn't do anything with that, Then that's where my idea would have died- in my head. Did I know how to start a business? Of course I did not. Did I know what I didn't know? Of course I did not. But I remember taking a piece of paper and writing out some sort of like mind map of what I pictured it looking like. I actually still have this. Um, piece of paper, I saved it. There were three prongs coming out of school habits that I had put in the [00:11:00] middle. One branch was like videos and blogs and tutorials.
One branch was private sessions and the third branch was digital products. Did I know how to do any of that besides private sessions? No idea. I never created a video or digital product in my life. But if I hadn't started just by sending down with a pen and paper and making some kind of mind map, I never would have known that the first place to start would be okay well, how do I make a video to put on YouTube? Right.
Let's say that you're a student and you were asked to write a lab report based on, I don't know, some experiment you did. And let's say for whatever reason, you have never written a lab report and your teacher maybe didn't give you good instructions or like you miss the class where the instructions were given.
I don't know. A non resourceful student would say, I don't know how to do it. So I won't. Every single teacher out there will see that as a lack of effort. . But the resourceful student will say, okay, I don't know how to write a lab report, but [00:12:00] I know how to do a Google search for how to write a lab report. All right.
So that's a step in some kind of direction, which could potentially lead that student to saying, oh, okay, I do know how to write the first part of lab report, cause maybe I found that in my notes somewhere, but maybe I'm cloudy on how to present this information in, in a table. All right. So that would be the next step.
And that might be to create a table for your data. And if you don't know how to do that, then you would Google that. But my point is that you won't know what you're stuck on, or even vet your stock, unless you take the teeny tiniest step in some kind of direction. All right. The next step is to identify the wall.
The wall is actually, it's a silly little term that I use to describe the point of not actually being able to go any further with your current resources. So I'm going to go back to Matthew for an example. I'm going to use another story that he shared with me. As part of his internship, he was asked to make phone calls- terrifying- to [00:13:00] current clients as part of, I think it was like a quarterly outreach initiative or something, but he was supposed to call clients and ask them
if they wanted to set up their- I'm going to say quarterly- I can't remember, but quarterly meeting um, in person or on zoom. Now,, according to my student, this was the most terrifying part of this internship because he was skilled at writing emails, but he didn't have much experience with phone calls.
He procrastinated on this task until it was causing him so much anxiety that he had no choice, but to do it plus like, There was like a deadline. And that's when he realized that not only did he not know what to say, but he had actually forgotten where that customer data was stored. The names, the phone numbers, right of, of the people he was asked to call. He said he was given that information, he thought, but he couldn't remember if it was in a meeting or an email or maybe like a piece of paper he was handed. Did he, was he supposed to have like log in credentials? So like a customer database? He couldn't remember.
So, what did he do? He could have gone directly to a supervisor and said, Hey, where are those phone numbers [00:14:00] again? Okay, but that is not the approach that someone at his level should take.
And, and when I say his level, I mean like internship, right? So if you're like full blown professional here, we're not doing that. While it is okay to ask for help and we're going to talk about that a little bit later on, actually that is the topic of episode 39, the one after this, which I'm about to record. Okay. But we have to take some action first.
So he started by going into his emails and searching for anything that could look like. Uh, a spreadsheet or a PDF. Um, phone numbers or a logging information to the customer database. And he found it. Get this, it was actually. In an Excel spreadsheet. That someone else had created and shared with him. But he identified the wall just by diving in somewhere. Let's talk about identifying the wall and academia.
All right. So let's say that you've been assigned. 10 math problems and you can do one through four. No problem at all. I've used a similar example like this [00:15:00] before. I can't remember if it was like a YouTube video or one of my blogs, or whenever, just bear with me if you've heard it before. A student.
I said it was 10 math problems.
You get to question five. And it's so much harder than one through four. Like you can do wonder for no problem. Question five. You're like, well, what am I doing? A student who lacks resourcefulness would say, okay, this is hard. I can't do this. I'm just going to ask the teacher tomorrow. I don't know how to do it. But that is not the approach.
That's not the level that learn and work smarter. Listeners are at. I see you. Okay. So what. What a resourceful student do, they would identify the wall. They would try to identify the exact place where cognitively they were unable to go any further. Is all of question five impossible to solve, or can you get to a certain point or certain, like a certain point through question five and then you [00:16:00] get stuck. Okay.
What specific part of question five? Do you not understand? Where is the exact point where your understanding of the problem or your next steps crumble.
And this is exactly where our previous steps come. Our previous step comes into just starting somewhere because if our student didn't even attempt question five, Then they would never get to the point of being able to pinpoint where they hit that wall. The just big question, five. So starting somewhere is a critical step that has to happen before you can even find the wall. All right.
Let me give you a tip here that. Is like the more specific you get when identifying the wall, the better. You'll be able to figure out what resources to use or to console, to, or to look for, to get the answer. So sticking with this math example, let's say you try question five and let's say it's some kind of algebra equation or whatever. I'm making this up on the [00:17:00] spot, but I'm can say that questions.
One through four are solving equations with one variable, and then question five. You notice that there are two variables. So you jump in, you start somewhere and you solve the two variable equation. This is step. Uh, question five, right? Using what you know about single variable equations. Right. You get, as far as he can go. But as you imagine, that's obviously only gonna get you so far. And now you have identified that your specific wall is how to solve. To variable equations. Perfect.
That is going to bring you to the next step, which is actually to begin using your resources. Okay. And this is where the resourcefulness magic. Happens. So if you were to use the biggest resource that is available to everybody at their fingertips, you would just Google. How to solve multi-variable equations or to variable equations.
But if you didn't get that far, you would end up with something, Googling something like how to solve math equations. And that's not going to get you the answer that you need. [00:18:00] Right? So this next step for figuring things out. Or, you know, becoming resourceful involves taking what you've identified. As your wall and using that as a starting point to find your answer.
And this is where you go into your resources available to you. Okay. And those depend on what your situation is. In the case of Matthew and his phone calls that meant going into his email inbox and, and rummaging through the papers on his little makeshift desk, they gave him. Looking in all of the places where information could potentially be hiding. In the case of trying to figure out how to do question five in your math homework, right.
That could mean going into your textbook and looking at the index, or maybe at the table of contents and finding the section. That shows you how to solve multi-variable equations. You multi-variate. Yeah, that makes sense. You would open to that section, finding example, problem. Try to solve your homework question. You know, following the steps in the example, problem. All right. If you didn't have your textbook, you could obviously resort to Google or [00:19:00] YouTube. Oh, you could use your notes.
Oh my gosh. Right. If you follow my note, taking tips for taking notes that are easy to study from.
On my school habits, YouTube channel. I have a video called how to take notes that are easy to study from where I teach you exactly how to take notes that are, get this. Really easy to study from. Okay. And they become really good resources for your homework and assignments. This is relevant because we're talking about being resourceful. In the case of my business example, I identified one of my walls. There were many trust me, but I identified one of them as not knowing how to film videos or create a YouTube channel at all.
So those are two, technically two different things, but I started with one and I Googled how to make a YouTube channel and I followed the steps. All right. But let's be real. Sometimes you need to have these little micro resourcefulness moments inside of a larger resourcefulness moment. So in my process of figuring out how to make a YouTube channel, I realized this is really like basic example, but I needed a [00:20:00] YouTube banner image. Did I know how to do that?
No, I had no idea. So I Googled. How to make a YouTube banner image. And I found the name of a software program that would help me do that. Like a graphic design program. I use Canva. But I didn't know how to use Canva. I had no idea. So I found a YouTube video that taught me how to use canvas so that I can make a YouTube banner image for my YouTube channel, that I was still in the middle of trying to figure out how to do. Did that take me forever. Yes, it did. All right.
But when it came time to create my YouTube channel for the learn and work smarter podcast, that's a separate channel. I knew how to do it. For me, the lesson is in the struggle. Not that we want to like always be struggling, but I don't know, sometimes that is the point.
Now in the case of starting my business and YouTube channel, I obviously used Google.
But I also looked at my other available resources. I knew what my resources were. I did not have any friends at all, um, in the digital business space. So there were [00:21:00] not any people I could consult. But I did drink from the podcast fire hose. I remember going on these long walks, I'm talking like, you know, two hours long listening to business podcasts and taking notes on my phone.
And then I would come home. And I would take actions on those strategies. In a perfect world. I would have had a business mentor, someone who could, you know, walk me through it, but that wasn't the scenario. If I had somebody, then that would be considered a resource.
Maybe in your scenario, you have different resources that you can use. Part of being resourceful means, you know, what your resources are and you know how to identify what has the potential to be a resource, you know, where to look.
Now, let me give you another example that's connected to the early stages of my business. I am a creative person, so I wanted to design my own logo for school habits. If you haven't seen it before, it's an S and an H. And it's like a pencil in the shape of a pencil that goes through it's as an [00:22:00] eraser and a tip. And I drew it on a piece of paper, but I had absolutely no idea how to get like this paper digitized like into the computer. So what I did because I obviously started by Googling how to get a digital logo you know, On the computer,
and one of the results, I know that sounds like absolutely absurd
but I'm pretty sure I literally Googled how to turn a drawing into a digital drawing or something like that. And one of the search results that came back was this website called Fiverr. F I V E R R. I think it is. I think it's either two V's or two RS. So it was as kind of like freelance website where people offered their services and back then, All jobs were $5. It's not, not anymore, but back then, everything was $5. And I hired some random graphic designer across the globe to take my hand drawn logo, which I just took a picture of with my camera and emailed it to him.
And he made it digital.
Did I know how to use Fiverr? I did not. [00:23:00] Did I know if it was a scam? Definitely did not know that, but in my, I had faith, but in my notes, I had taken on one of my podcast walks. I had also written the word Fiverr, so I must have heard it from somewhere. And I think that made me feel like I trusted it more or whatever, but. When it came back as a search result, I was like, oh, I wrote that somewhere.
So my two instances of being resourceful, kind of click together and help me get over my wall.
Now a, another example or another tip for being resourceful is to watch others.
Not directly ask people around you for help. Again, there's nothing wrong with asking for help. There's a time and place for that. Episode 39 I give you strategies for how to ask for help, because it's okay to do that. Right. But if you're at a certain level in academia or in your professional Space, you are kind of expected to handle things on your own at first. You're expected to figure things out to a degree on your own before you send an SOS to somebody else and have them stop what they're doing to assist you with something that's technically par part of your job description.
So, what do I mean [00:24:00] by watch others?
I'm hearing right now how, a little creepy that sounds so let's change that to maybe let others be your model. I don't know if that's even better, but you get the idea. So like let other people inspire you or like watch what other people are doing. That makes better sense. Watch what people are doing.
So let's go back to Matthew's internship example. He never actually said that making phone calls for him ended up being a challenge. Um, I don't remember that being part of the conversation, but let's say that let's say that he had the phone numbers, but that his wall was that he didn't know how to interact professionally with someone on a phone in order to set up their quarterly review.
Right. At this level, he should know how to communicate over the phone. I remember him being nervous about it, but not that he like struggled to actually do it when push came to shove, but he was like, oh gosh, like I. I'm so used to writing emails. I don't know if I can like do the phone thing. I think there was just nerves, but it didn't actually stop him from doing it.
But anyways, let's say that hypothetically [00:25:00] he did struggle with phone communication. Okay. So instead of turning to a supervisor and saying, Hey, can you help me write a script to use on the phone? Could you teach me step-by-step how to do this.
Instead of doing that, he could listen to his colleagues who are also making phone calls in the office. He could just sort of low key listen in on other people in the office, on the phone, taking notes on what kinds of, you know, greetings the use, what type of tone and language that they're using that align with their company. How did they close phone calls?
What was the average length of a phone call? No, Matt, Matthew might not have gotten all of the answers he needed just from observing others on the phone, but it absolutely counts as being resourcefulness because it's taking action in some kind of direction with the intention of either figuring it out or identifying a specific wall. So hypothetically, let's say that Matthew picked up some tips from observing his colleagues, but he didn't want to royally mess up his [00:26:00] internship.
So he wanted to run it by his manager first. Good call. Ok because in that case, it would be perfectly reasonable for Matthew to approach his manager and say, hi, Looking for a little guidance on these phone calls, I watched someone, you know, so-and-so on the phone and from these observations, I have crafted this general script for my own phone calls. Alright, I'm planning to open my phone calls this way.
I'm going to close my calls this way. I'm going to keep them this length or whatever. Do you have any input? Am I going in the right direction? Okay. Now from the manager's perspective, that looks like pretty darn good resourcefulness. That looks like a potential employee trying to figure something out with enough self-awareness to know that this could use a boss tech. Before it's all systems go.
Now this podcast episode is about being resourceful. And so I don't want to go too far into the topic of how to ask for help, because again, I said, that's the topic of the [00:27:00] next episode, episode 39. That's kind of an extension of resourcefulness, but let me just leave it here that if you are resourceful to a point, and then you need to ask for help, there is a way to do that so that you get the exact kind of help that you need. And you present yourself still as capable and skilled. One final tip. I'm sure that at some point I'm going to create a future episode that dives deeper into this topic, but I want to bring up the concept of SOPs Standard operating procedures. Standard operating procedures are sort of how to manuals for individual tasks or processes that, um, either you do on a regular basis or that people in the company do. It's basically the way that, yeah, it's kind of like a, how to manual, right?
And sometimes they're given SOP. Sometimes you can create your own. I have actually mentioned them briefly on this [00:28:00] podcast before. Um, but they, they fit in here perfectly with this conversation about resourcefulness.
Because if you went through the entire process of how to, you know, figure out how to do something and let's say it was complicated and there were multiple steps, it would be wise to make yourself an SOP from that process.
This would mean that after you have figured out the steps to do something. You create yourself a simple document. I don't know something in Google or Google docs, right? Something like how to create a table in Excel. How to create a banner image in Canva. Right because resourcefulness often takes time, like a lot of time and a lot of effort until you're more comfortable with the thing that you were trying to figure out.
And your future self will be so grateful if your current self took a few minutes to write up the steps that you took so much time and effort to figure out so that the next time you have to, I don't know, create a table in [00:29:00] Excel or find customer data or write a lab report, you'll have a step-by-step how to manual somewhere in your digital space that you created for yourself.
In this way you become your own. Resource. Now, I'm going to recap the steps real quickly here, but you'll remember that the final step is consult your resources and the ultimate sign of success is when you are your own best resource. So. Let's take this from the top.
Tip one is to firmly and truly believe that there is a solution to every problem.
You must believe that there is an answer out there and that you will find it.
Then next step is to take some kind of action in some direction. The benefit of this is that we often know more than we think we do. And so sometimes we're not even stuck. It's just that we never even started. And that feels like stuckness.
But the second benefit is it allows [00:30:00] you to get to the point where you can identify, okay, this is where I can't go any further.
And that's actually tip three, which has to identify the wall, get super specific about what exact thing you are stuck on. Put words to it. And remember you can't do this until you take some kind of action in some kind of direction.
And then next is to identify and use your resources.
This is obviously Google it's YouTube. It's your textbook. It's your notes. It's employee manuals. It's your SOP is created already by your colleagues or your company or ones that you created. Any repository of information besides your boss or your professor that has the potential to have an answer.
And then lastly, the bonus step is to create SOP for yourself for all of the processes that you know you're going to have to repeat at some point again, in the future. Build a collection of these resources, these, um, [00:31:00] how to resources so that you will, by the end of the day, you know, become your own best resource. And if you go through this whole process and you are still stuck and you do need to ask for help, there's no shame in that.
And I want you to use the strategies that I teach you in episode 39.
All right my friends that takes us to the end of today's episode. Remember that all of the links I referenced can be found learnandworksmarter.com/podcast/38.
They're also in the description box if you are listening to this on the learn and work smarter YouTube channel, um, or they are in the show notes if you are listening to this in a podcast app. Thank you for your time. Thank you for being here with me. I appreciate you. And never stop learning.
