Imagine growing up without electricity or running water. Imagine the lights going out so often it stops surprising you. Imagine not knowing where you’ll live next month, while watching your classmates plan birthday parties and compare lunchboxes. Now imagine that instead of letting that become your story, you decide to write a different one.
In high school, you take a legal pad and a pen and you write down where you want to go. You walk door to door to local businesses, your report card in hand, asking strangers to invest in your college education. You have no safety net, no roadmap, no guarantee. What you have is a mindset that refuses to accept your circumstances as permanent.
That mindset has a name: Everything is figure-outable.
What This Has to Do With Your Leadership
Here’s what I want you to embrace: figure-outable is not a personality trait. It’s a developed skill. And it’s one of the most critical capabilities a leader can develop and model for their team.
Too many leaders operate from a fixed frame. The budget is the budget. The org chart is the org chart. The timeline is the timeline. When reality doesn’t match the plan, they freeze or they escalate. But the leaders who build lasting influence are the ones who look at a problem and ask, “How do we figure this out?” rather than “Here’s why this can’t be done.”
Resourcefulness is a form of resilience. And resilience, as I’ve always believed, shows up across all five pillars of the Fulfillment Centric Leadership™ (FCL) model.
Figure-Outable Across the Five Pillars
The Fulfillment Centric Leadership™ model is built on five pillars: Health, Fitness, Career, Relationships, and Legacy. The figure-outable mindset doesn’t live in just one of them. It runs through all of them.
In your career, it’s the willingness to step into a role you’re not fully ready for because you’re willing to build the competency in real time. In your relationships, it’s the commitment to repair a rupture, have a hard conversation, or rebuild trust after it’s been broken. In your health and fitness, it’s refusing to accept a setback as the final state. And in your legacy, it’s the understanding that impact doesn’t wait for perfect conditions. You build it now, with what you have, in the season you’re in.
The Leadership Ask
Think about one area of your life right now, whether it’s your health, your team, your relationships, or your sense of purpose, where you’ve been telling yourself it’s not possible. Not yet. I need more (fill in the blank). Not for someone like me. Now try on a different story: this is figure-outable.
That shift in framing won’t solve the challenge overnight. But it will open the door to the next question, the right conversation, and the first step forward. And, that’s the pivotal action. The first step forward.
The Unfair Advantage You Didn’t Know You Had
Consider that the hardest challenges you’ve had to figure out aren’t liabilities. They’re assets. Every time you faced a problem that had no obvious solution and pushed through anyway, you were building something most people never develop on purpose. You were building the muscle of resilience. And resilience, over time, becomes your unfair advantage.
Leaders who have been tested, who have had to dig deep, find creative solutions, and keep going when the path isn’t clear. They see problems differently than leaders who haven’t. They don’t catastrophize. They contextualize. They break the challenge into digestible pieces, find the people who can help, and get moving. That skill doesn’t come from a course or a certification. It comes from hard life experiences, usually outside your control, and choosing not to let it stop you.
The figure-outable mindset is the training ground. Resilience is the outcome. And the unfair advantage is the asset you gain.
Meet the Woman Who Lived It
The person I asked you to imagine at the beginning of this post is real. Her name is Jourdan Hathaway, and she is currently the Chief Business Officer at General Assembly, a global talent and upskilling company.
Jourdan didn’t just survive her childhood circumstances of poverty. She built a blueprint from them. When she was elevated to a C-suite operations role without a finance background, she didn’t say she wasn’t ready. She designed her own professional development program, called it Project FLAT (Financial Literacy Advancement Training), networked her way through the gaps, and owned every developmental step along the way.
When I spoke with Jourdan on the Life Fulfilled podcast, she said something that stuck with me: “Even at this stage, I go, okay, here’s the next bunch of things to tackle that are figure-outable.” That’s not a person who has arrived. That’s a person who has fully embraced the journey. It’s a person who has embraced her purpose.
Fulfillment isn’t handed to you. It’s built, one figured-out challenge at a time.
