The Skill Of Figuring-It-Out

Sometimes you don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t have everything you need and you feel stuck. In this instance you need to employ the skill of figuring-it-out.

Figuring-it-out is a useful skill to have, but one that takes practice to develop. It’s handy in any situation where you feel overwhelmed and haven’t got a clue how to proceed.

Figuring-it-out encompasses any skill/talent/accident that takes you a step closer to what you need/want to achieve. It’s always there with you when you call on it, and is a toolbox filled with an infinite number of tools of infinite variety.

In the midst of figuring-it-out you often feel even worse than when you started. That’s because you’ve put yourself in the midst of whatever mess it is that you are dealing with. It feels uncomfortable, but really things are getting better, not the least of which because you have the courage to face whatever it is head on.

Figuring-it-out is really a collection of tiny steps and small tools, which taken together, creates more than the sum of its parts. Soon enough, you will have taken so many tiny steps with small tools that you actually begin to get somewhere, even if it feels like you’ve been stumbling around from place to place. If stumbling is the only way you can get somewhere, I’d take it. It’s usually better than standing still.

The great thing about figuring-it-out, is that at the end when you look back, you may still have no idea how you actually got to where you did. It may feel like a jumble of accidents, timely help and a few small skills you possess that you had no idea would make any difference. But you made it anyway and you did it with whatever you had at the time and any help that came along the way. And really, that’s what figuring-it-out is all about.

If you knew exactly what you were going to do and how it was going to get done, it wouldn’t be figuring-it-out. That would be a plan, which is nice to have, but often in the most difficult circumstances we have no plan.

But luckily for you, you have figuring-it-out.