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Realise your Resourcefulness

How resourceful are you? If you don’t have all the information or skills you need to complete a task do you give up and give in, or do you go looking for the information, leaving no stone unturned until you get it, or get the training required, then continue with your task?

Or do you look in one or two places for said information and if you don’t find it fairly, quickly give up altogether? How resourceful are you when you really, really want something?

I was watching my youngestyesterday, after I’d told her she couldn’t have something and put it out of reach. She walked past the place where the item was and would glance up and keep going. Now normally she wouldn’t even be in the room where this item was, but she found reasons to go in.

After a while she stopped and I also left the room and about twenty minutes later she came running up to me with the item and a triumphant expression on her face. So I got her to show me how she got it – another hiding place gone!! She kept at it looking at possible ways to get herself up to a height beyond her reach in a safe manner and eventually she succeeded. It reminded me of how resourceful we can be.

I had a friend ask for advice a few months ago. They needed to raise over two thousand euro and didn’t think in the current economic climate that the banks or credit union would lend them the money. Nor would they be able to borrow it from family, none of them would have two thousand euros to spare. So I suggested that they write a list of twenty ways they might raise the money and it didn’t matterhow hare-brained it might seem, if an idea came into

their head it was to be put onto the page.

If they could go over twenty ways, even better. Most people get stuck somewhere around fourteen or so and this friend was no different. Some of the ideas were to do with getting an extra job. None of them were to do with breaking down the amount required into smaller manageable loans.

When we had exhausted the possibilities on the list I suggested breaking the amount into smaller sums and seeing where those smaller amounts could be found. They were amazed, all they saw was a huge sum of money to them and no way of getting it.

I did the very same thing earlier this year when I was upskilling. I had some of the money required but not all of it, but I was determined to get to the course, so I looked at all the ways I could earn the money and all the ways I could raise it by other means.

I did my course!

Another example of realising your resourcefulness was the son of a friend of mine who had left school before sitting any exams, who now in his early twenties and in temporary employment wanted to go college to upskill. He was in a lowish paid job but because he had no formal qualifications he was being overlooked for every permanent position that was being advertised. He enquired as to what would be needed to secure a place and discovered that he was too young to qualify as a

mature student, but that he could get a place if he did a certain pre-qualifer course to determine his knowledge base and learning ability.

The fees for the tutor who facilitated that particular course were also outside his financial capabilities. So rather than let all that stop him, he enquired whether he could do the pre-qualifying course with other tutors and discovered that he could and then went looking for “experts” who would teach him within his budget.

He kept applying for all the relevant jobs within the company he worked in and always let the interviewer know of his plans to study at night if not that year, then the following year. He eventually got offered a permanent position, finished the pre-qualifying course and applied to the college of his choice and been accepted. The really nice upshot of it all was his employer agreed to reimburse his college and exam fees if he passed, which gave him an extra incentive to do well.

So, just how resourceful are you?

Can you turn a problem into an opportunity, or do you let it stop you in your tracks?

How do you deal with your problems? Do you let them build up until you are at exploding point or do you face them head on, tackling each issue until it is no longer an issue?

A famous quote says: “if you have a problem, deal with it, if you can’t deal with it, change your attitude to it”and that is very true. All it takes it looking outside the boundaries of the problems to see the solutions that are facing us if we only pay attention to it.

Where have you found a resourcefulness rising up within you that you hadn’t realised you had?