When You Feel You Don't Have It — The 9-Grid Method That Builds Resourcefulness From What You Already Have

There is a moment every founder knows. You are about to walk into the room, and something inside quietly says: you don't have it. Not enough confidence. Not enough calm. Not enough capability. The feeling is real, and it is ruinous — because people who feel resourceless make smaller decisions, hold weaker frames, and hand the room over to whoever feels more equipped.

Here is what almost nobody teaches: resourcefulness is rarely about acquiring something new. It is about rediscovering a resource you already have but cannot currently reach. The problem is not that the resource is missing. It is that your current viewpoint cannot see it, and your current state cannot access it.

This article gives you a precise instrument for that: the SOAR modeling method run through the 9-grid vantage point (Perceptual Position x Time). It turns "I feel resourceless" from a vague feeling into a structured search — nine distinct viewpoints, each generating a comparative question that points you straight at the resource, the gap, and the installable strategy.

Honesty note before we go deeper: SOAR and the perceptual-position grid are modelled NLP frameworks drawn from Dilts' modeling tradition. They are practical, experience-tested tools for structuring skill transfer — not controlled-clinical treatments. Use them as structured skills; they are strongest as communication, self-regulation, and performance toolkits.

Two axes, crossed, give you nine viewpoints for any situation.

Axis 1 — Perceptual Position

• 1st position — you, in your own body. Your feelings, your stakes, your view out of your own eyes.
• 2nd position — a guardian or role model. You step into the perspective of someone who already embodies the resource — an exemplar, a mentor, or the future you — whose strategy you extract and install. This is the position that holds the blueprint.
• 3rd position — a neutral observer. A detached bird's-eye view of the whole exchange, no horse in the race.

Axis 2 — Time

• Past — what has already happened, what was already achieved.
• Present — what is happening right now.
• Future — what could happen, where this is heading.

The Grid

Cross them and you get nine cells. Each cell is a different vantage, and each vantage asks a different question. From the grid you move deliberately — like moving pieces on a board — to generate comparative viewpoints that a stuck mind would never produce on its own.

The core idea: you cannot see your own blind spot from inside your own position and time. The 9-grid is the mechanism for stepping out of 1st-position-present and looking from everywhere else. That is where the lost resource is hiding.

Resourcefulness is not an inventory you carry. It is a relationship between a state and a situation. The same person can feel powerful with a close ally, and resourceless with a powerful client — in the same week, same competence, same week. What changed is not the resource. What changed is the position and the time-frame they were looking from.

The three traps of feeling resourceless map exactly onto the grid:

• The 1st-position-present trap: You judge the whole of yourself from where you are right now, in the live moment. Your present state feels exhausted, so you conclude you are resourceless. You never step to 3rd-person or to your own past to check the evidence.
• The single-timeframe trap: You only look at the present. You never scan the past (when you had the resource) or the future (where it is heading). A resource feels absent because it is currently parked in a different timeframe.
• The single-position trap: You never step into a guardian or role model's position (to extract a better strategy) or the observer's position (to see the truth of the situation), so you cannot see what the resourceful version of you would actually do — or what you are actually missing.

Why it beats "just be more confident": telling yourself to be confident from the same stuck viewpoint is asking the problem to fix itself with the same brain that has the problem. The 9-grid breaks the stalemate by changing the viewpoint, not by demanding a new feeling. When you move to a different cell, the resource becomes visible — and once it is visible, it can be accessed.

This is the heart of the method: the movements between cells. Each movement is a question that forces a comparison a stuck mind would not make. Here is the core movement pattern, with the questions Stuart teaches:

The Core Comparative Moves

• 1st position, present — "What are the current symptoms? What is going well?" (Establish the baseline: the problem AND whatever is already working.)
• 3rd position, future — "What is the 1st-position present missing?" (From a detached future, name the exact gap between where you are and where the observer sees you should be.)
• 2nd position, past — "How did so-and-so achieve their goal?" (Step into someone who already did it, in their past, and extract their strategy.)
• 3rd position, present — "Would it work for me now?" (Bring the modelled strategy back to your present and test it for fit.)

More Permutations

• 2nd position, present — "As a guardian looking at me right now — what is the resourceful version of me doing, feeling, and saying in this exact moment?" (The guardian sees the strategy I am failing to run; their perspective gives me the State and Operator to adopt now.)
• 1st position, past — "When did I already have this resource? What exactly did I do?" (Mining your own history for the exact State and Operator that delivered the Result you now want.)
• 3rd position, past — "As an observer, what did I do the last time this worked? What did the other person respond to?"
• 2nd position, future — step into your guardian or role model, standing in your future: "What state am I in there, and what key steps got me to this outcome?" (The future guardian's journey reveals the path you cannot see from the present.)
• 1st position, future — "Walk into the future where I have already succeeded. What am I doing, feeling, and believing?"

The movements are not random. They form a search protocol for a missing resource: baseline (1P-Present), gap (3P-Future), blueprint (2P-Past), and fit-test (3P-Present). Once you have run those four, you have extracted enough comparative information to know what to build. The other permutations deepen and cross-check it.