A few years ago, my husband, an engineer, was hunting for a job. It’s grueling when you’re over 50 and trying to find a job in high tech.

After a particularly frustrating day, he came into my office looking completely stressed out. I asked, “What’s wrong?” He said, “I’m an engineer. I’ve done coding, I’ve been VP of engineering, I’ve managed projects. This application wants me to write an essay about what assets I might bring to the company.

“I’ve been working in the field for over 20 years. How am I supposed to describe that in 500 words?”

His dilemma is one that people of any age and career level have faced. How do you condense what you know, and what you can do, into a short statement? How do you put together a concise resume that communicates the essence of your professional life? Or even, God forbid, an elevator statement?

Use Solution Mapping to Power Through Mental Roadblocks

A really common riddle that productivity coaches use to describe handling a big project is, “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer, they say as they waggle their eyebrows, is “One bite at a time.”

They don’t have a clever answer for the next question from the person who actually has to complete that project: “Which part of the elephant? Where do I start?”

The straightforward answer is this: use solution mapping to figure out where you’re going to start and what you’re going to do.

Solution mapping is a tool for problem solving, strategy, idea creation, and knowledge sharing. It’s great for finding ways around bumps in the road for just about any project of any size.

Don’t Know How to Start That Job Application Essay, Blog Post, or Article?

Starting the writing process is the most difficult part for most people. We learned how to organize our writing in school, but working that linear outline and starting with the introductory sentence is torturously slow for many of us.

Why? Because some of us are not linear thinkers or the words just don’t flow for us in sentence format all at once. Different people, learners, and writers work differently. Sometimes our working memory is so full of what we might write, we can’t seem to get started with the process of writing. That’s what we call, “writer’s block!”

Thankfully, there is a better way.

By using a simple Solution Mapping variation: clustering writing strategy, and starting with what we know, we can write more effectively, more quickly, and with much less anxiety and frustration.

Detailed instructions are explained here. I’d love to hear from you if you try this strategy and it works for you!