Imagine Jo: Everyone in Jo's life recognizes her as an outstanding problem solver. She's the type of person who seems capable of almost anything. Jo excels at intuitive problem-solving. Over her life, she's built a big toolkit of skills for understanding and working through challenging situations. Nothing fazes her anymore.

If you'd like to develop these skills, similar to Jo, read on to understand the building blocks.

1. Imagine a Smaller Problem

Imagine Jo is tasked with planning a virtual seminar for 300 people. She feels momentarily flustered at the scale, but then she considers how she'd plan a seminar for three people. She realizes the ingredients for success are mostly the same in both scenarios.

We all learn the skill of visualizing smaller problems when we're learning math. To understand how math works, we need to first think of simpler scenarios. If we need to figure out how far we'd travel in eight hours at 60 mph, we might first think about how far we'd travel in one hour.

If we translate a problem into numbers, we can visualize the mechanics of the problem easily, and the answer often becomes obvious. We can mentally grasp smaller numbers better, and this allows us to get an

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