6 Steps to Solving Big Problems with Small Solutions

By Jason Abell

24 years ago, I had just made a huge move in my mortgage banking practice. My career started seven years earlier when I was hired as an assistant to two high-level sales people who taught me the ropes and helped me get my life off the ground as a contributing person in the workforce. Before long, I was on my own slinging loans in the suburbs of Washington DC for a small regional bank. I started making some inroads, built some key relationships, and felt that I was ready to join an organization with a nationwide banking presence. My first day at the new place was Monday, April 3rd, 2000. I walked in the front door smiling from ear to ear. I was excited. I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to get after it for my new employer.

April 17th. A mere two weeks later would find me sitting behind my desk at 6:30 a.m. with my face in my hands, simply overwhelmed.

It was my birthday, but that didn’t really matter with the way I was feeling. I knew (or thought I knew) I had made the right decision to change companies, but I was overwhelmed by… well, everything. The new place was just so big, their systems were so different from anything I was familiar with, their benefits were great but there were so many to choose from, and I had people from all over the place calling me for loans without any idea how to handle these leads because I had not gotten through all the initial training yet. I was overwhelmed and out of my comfort zone, and I felt like I was forgetting all my prior selling habits and emotional regulation techniques.

And where were my business cards by the way? And why oh why was I working on my freaking birthday?!

So there I was with my face in my hands, totally overwhelmed and frustrated, when my hiring manager, Mike Evans , walked by with a smile on his face and poked his head in the door to say, “Good Morning!” He took one look at me and knew that something wasn’t right, so he asked me how I was doing. The next ten minutes were a blur of verbal vomiting about how awful I was doing and how overwhelmed I was. But about ten minutes in, he stopped me and said these words that I will never forget: “Jason, big problems have small solutions.”

Boom! That one little sentence hit me like a ton of bricks. I lifted my head out of my hands and listened for the next fifteen minutes as he explained to me step-by-step what he meant, and his instructions have served me well throughout my career. As I’ve adapted them over the years, I’ve been able to lead my team and my clients at Rewire to growth and greater emotional intelligence, in spite of whatever specific circumstances have them feeling overwhelmed.

Here's an overview of the steps to solving big problems with small solutions:

Step 1: Make a decision to act

Until you make a decision to do something about the problem other than fretting about it, nothing happens. This decision represents a line in the sand for yourself. No decision, no line, no solution. Make a decision to take action.

Step 2: Write out the facts and possible solutions

This step helps stop you from going completely emotional on yourself, like I was in the story above. To be clear, the problem isn’t the emotions themselves; rather it’s when they act like a runaway train and hijack the rational thought processes that we would normally use to figure out solutions. It also helps with getting things out of your head and onto paper. And as long as we’re on the topic of writing, my opinion is that you should write these facts out by hand as opposed to typing into a device, because research has shown that when you are writing by hand, your brain is solely focusing on what is at the end of the pen and nothing else. When your brain is this focused, you are giving it power to also focus on possible solutions.

Step 3: Schedule when you will begin to solution the problem

This step gives your solutions a timeframe and takes them from being a pipe dream in your head to actually happening in reality at a specific place and at a certain time. Specificity is a key in getting things done. Ambiguity is not. Get it on your calendar.

Step 4: Start

We have written many articles on the power of starting something. Starting something, even when it’s not a great or perfect start, gets you off 0, gets the momentum going and gets you that much closer to a solution. There's an old adage that says it's easier to steer a moving car than a stationary one. And this idea definitely applies here: no start, no solution.

Step 5: Measure along the way

What gets measured gets done. As my friend Tony Horton asks in the P90x video series, “how do you know where you’re going unless you track where you’ve been?” It is much easier knowing what kind of progress you are making towards your solution when you are measuring along the way and either celebrating the path to the solution or making adjustments along that path.

Step 6: Make adjustments

If you see from your measurements in step 5 that you’re veering off course, this step ensures you make the necessary course corrections and continue on the path towards the solutions.

The beauty of these six steps is the simplicity and the universality of it all, meaning it does not matter if your big problem is:

• how to best lead your people,
• losing 50 pounds,
• rewiring your brain to actually enjoy nutritious foods,
• building a better relationship with your spouse,
• developing a new technology,
• or, as in my case above, being overwhelmed by starting at a new company.

These six steps are your guide to turning that big problem into a small solution.

I’ll close this article by saying that these six steps really do work. After my manager gave me the talk I described above, I went on to become one of the nation’s top mortgage bankers for several years running by using the “big problems have small solutions” system repeatedly. I’m confident it can work for you too. Give it a try and let us know how it goes.

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P.S. If you'd like to read more about this idea, I'd recommend Chip and Dan Heath's Switch: How to Change When Change Is Hard. They talk more in-depth about the mental block I faced in this article, which is that we assume that "big" problems require equally big or complex solutions. But as my colleague Mike shared, this just isn't the case.

Speaking of Mike, I'd like to give a public thanks to Mike Evans for stepping in and getting me off the dime in April of 2000, and helping the many who came after me with the same type of sage leadership.

When you're ready to think more about mindset, leadership, coaching, and other ways to grow your team, schedule a call with Jason here. It's on us.