Kate's Nuggets

You ARE Adaptable. Don't Believe Me? Here's the Evidence.
Episode 17

Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.

Kate Arms:

Do you really know how adaptable and flexible you are? Think about what you have adapted to in the last couple of weeks. How has your flexibility allowed you to manage the changes that have happened, whether you are settled into sheltering in place, or finding ways of socializing that do not put you at risk of unnecessarily spreading the coronavirus?

How have you adapted to changes at the grocery store, to schools being closed, to work going online, to losing a job, to loved ones getting sick, to figuring out whether the symptoms that you are suffering are seasonal allergies or something you need to be really worried about? Even beyond this period of crisis that the world is going through, what have you adapted to in the past? What flexibility have you demonstrated? Did you ever start a new job or start a new school program? Have you ever moved countries or cities or down the block? Have you ever redecorated a room? Have you ever started a relationship or ended a relationship?

Every single one of those is a change that required flexibility and adaptability, and the fact that you are here now listening to my voice is evidence that you have adapted to whatever changes have come into your life to date. The process of adapting to a changed circumstance is different depending on how much change there is.

Getting a new job, depending on how complex the job is, you have some level of training, some level of getting enough experience that takes you from not knowing anyone or anything or what is expected of you to showing up in the morning and knowing what you need to do and doing your job and going home, even when going to work and going to home are only metaphorical.

If you've ever lost a job, finished a project and not had a contract, you've learned to adapt to uncertainty, and you have created a way to get from where you were to where you needed to be. You've learned new techniques. This is a podcast. How long have podcasts existed? Were there podcasts when you were born?

Human beings are adaptable, flexible, creative, and resourceful. It is what makes human beings human beings. We are born with less instinct than almost any other species, maybe more than any other species on the planet. And in replacement of instinct, we have learning capabilities. Creatures that are entirely instinct-driven are not able to adapt within a lifetime to changing circumstances unless those are minor changes. Those species adapt by generations in which one characteristic allows this generation to survive, and that characteristic is what is born into the next generation.

Human beings are so different from one another across the planet, because human beings adapt to whatever situations they find themselves in. Always, always adapting and learning, even when we feel like we have become who we're going to be and that there's no possibility for change, that we are who we are. That is an illusion.

Our brains are plastic and changeable and adaptable through our entire lives. We acknowledge this when we talk about mental activity staving off dementia. When we talk about keeping our brains active so that we continue to be sharp, we are talking about the fact that our brains are constantly changing.

Many of us are familiar with the ideas of having in our heads an inner critic, an inner judge, inner saboteurs, or gremlins. Fewer of us, though I hope a growing number of us, are familiar with the idea that we have inside us an inner sage, an inner wizard, an inner wise person, an inner witness, an inner appreciator who loves all that is because it is, who sees the good in everything. Many of us have behavior habits that we look at now in this moment and say, "This is not helping me get what I want." This is a problem behavior.

It is easy to forget that those behavioral habits are things that we learned. And we learned them because some past circumstance was such that that behavior was the most effective way that we could figure out, with the resources we had at hand at the time, to solve a problem that was right there in our present moment.

We weren't thinking about the consequences over the long-term of what that behavior would do. We were doing the best that we could to deal with the situation that was happening right at that moment. And it worked so well that we did it again. And it worked so well that time that we did it again, and then it became a habit.

Sometime later it stopped working for us or we recognized that there were unintended consequences and we really wanted to see if there was a way of doing things differently so that we didn't have to deal with those unintended consequences.

It's easy when we're confronting some of our own bad habits for us to criticize ourselves, to blame ourselves for not doing better, when we set ourselves up doing those things in the first place. And the truth is we were doing the best we could at the time, and we were adapting to the circumstances as they were at the time with the use of all the resources that we had at our disposal.

Even those bad habits are evidence of how adaptable you are, how capable you are of adjusting to circumstances. You are capable of learning, "Oh, this is what works best in this situation," and doing it again. That is what adaptability is. Right now, the world is changing fast. Our understanding of the virus and how dangerous it is and what measures need to be taken to protect ourselves and our loved ones, that's changing all the time. We're watching the numbers. We're trying new things. We are adapting. We are being flexible.

One of the ways to take advantage of the human capacity for flexibility and adaptability is to make it faster. The more feedback you have with opportunities to get feedback, try something new, get feedback, try something new, get feedback, try something new, the faster you learn.

The faster things are changing, the more that you need a fast feedback cycle in terms of, okay, I get some information about what's going on around me, I try something new. I get some information about what's going on around me, I try something new. I see what's changed. I get new information. I try something new based on the new information plus what I've learned from what I did before. I try something new; I see how it works. And when things are changing fast and there's new information coming in fast, we need to have that process happen frequently.

Now, this process takes a lot of energy. The reason that we develop habits is that habits save energy. And when our habits are working for us, they are the most energy-efficient way of getting things done. Habits aid productivity when they are good habits. Habits that are good are a match between your skills and the environment.

When the environment is changing, habits can be a problem. So rather than saving energy by using the habits and then having to clean up from the unintended consequences because the habits are no longer a good match for the environment, we're going to have to spend the energy to adapt one way or another.

If we can invest the energy upfront before we take the habitual behavior, we are increasing our flexibility and our adaptability, and that is energy efficient. Now, habits can be hard to change. We resist them mentally. We resist them physically. Not consciously, often. They're just fast and they happen without consciousness most of the time. That's what makes them habits, that's what makes them energy efficient.

So, ways of breaking the pattern of our habitual behavior can be as simple as once a day pausing and reflecting, "What's changed since yesterday? What have I learned? What do I want to do differently tomorrow?" When the world was changing slowly, doing that annually made sense. New Year's resolutions are a great pacing for a slowly changing world. The faster the world changes, the more you want quarterly or weekly or daily check-ins.

Right now, things are changing so fast that many of my clients have decided that three times a month is not often enough and that a once-a-day 15-minute check-in about, given what's changed now, do I need to rearrange my priorities, is a much more valuable way of adapting and being flexible.

But it doesn't matter what tools you use, and it doesn't matter whether you do it by yourself or whether you do it with help. A frequent pause built into your schedule in which you say, "What new information is coming in that I need to respond to? What did I learn yesterday, and what do I want to do differently in the next 24 hours?" Those questions will keep you flexible and adaptable.

You already are adaptable. It's just a question of increasing the feedback cycle to increase your adaptability. You already are flexible and adaptable. You are a human being and you have gotten where you are today by constantly adapting to the circumstances that you found yourself in.

More disruptive times, it can feel easier to navigate them if you become a little more conscious in tapping into your flexibility, celebrating your adaptability, and putting some conscious thought into the question of, how can I best adapt right now to this situation with the resources that I have at hand?

You will always have incomplete information and you will always have limited resources, and the key to adaptability is to be real with yourself about what is available to me right now, what is going on right now, and what can I do right now that I think is going to be a reasonable response to the circumstances that are in play right now and the ones that I can predict?

And the thing about fast-changing circumstances is we don't do ourselves any favors if we try and predict too far in advance. The faster things are changing, the more focusing on what is going on now is the key to flexibility and adaptability.

Now, I know some people hate change and do not think of themselves as adaptable. And one thing that can be really valuable for people who hate change is, if you see that a big change needs to happen, if you look ahead, for instance, and you look at what's going on with the coronavirus and you think, "You know what? I know that the government is looking at things two weeks at a time because that's what they need to do to assess how things are working, but I need to think about where I want to be a year from now, two years from now, given that things have been so disrupted." Some people do better doing change all at once than they do in little tiny pieces. If that is you, and that used to be me, there are two things.

One is that you can set for a six-month, nine-month goal to be better at minute-to-minute adaptability. It's actually a skill set you can build by practicing the kind of reflection process that I discussed. The daily, what new information do I have? What have I learned in the last 24 hours that might be useful, and what do I want to do differently in the next 24 hours? That's actually a skill set that you can practice that can become habitual, and then that becomes the habit, and it becomes comfortable and not a place that feels like it's changing. Or you can make a prediction and you can say, "I want my schedule to look like this. I want to have this kind of level of interaction with my friends. I want to have this many exercise sessions a week," whatever it is that you feel like you want to have in place, and you can commit to making that all happen at once. Now, that will be a very, very hard transition, but it might be easier than doing lots of small transitions.

I'm reminded of when my eldest was having trouble sleeping through the night and I read a book called The No Cry Sleep Solution that was designed on the premise that if you make the increments of change small enough, you can help a baby sleep through the night without making them cry it out. And I desperately wanted my child to sleep through the night, and I desperately wanted my child not to have to cry it out.

I tried implementing the No Cry Sleep Solution, but it turned out that there was no increment that was small enough that it didn't feel like a distressful change to my child. And eventually, I realized that I was going to cause less distress to my child in the long run if I jumped all the way to where I wanted things to end and helped him transition to the new place, rather than asking him to make a hundred small transitions. For him, he was more adaptable in a big chunk than in little ones.

He was a baby then. He's now a teenager. And now, as a teenager, he is a lot more flexible. And now we do better with a combination of big changes and small changes depending on what's happening. Becoming comfortable with change is different than being flexible and adaptable. Whether you are comfortable with change or not, you are flexible and adaptable, and you have spent your entire life adapting to what's going on in front of you.

You can speed up adaptability when you become comfortable with change, but that is optional. That is a learnable practicable skill that is optional. Whether you decide you want to become comfortable with change or not, the truth is you are flexible, you are adaptable, and you will get through this, even if you don't do it consciously. Most of us spend most of our lives adapting to things without even noticing that that's what we're doing. And the danger of that is that then we get faced with something where we have to adapt, and we don't believe we can.

So, if there's only one thing that you take away from listening to me today, and it is that you have already demonstrated your adaptability by getting to where you are now, that will be enough. And if you take away two things, the second one I hope you'll take away is that when things are changing rapidly, to have a daily practice of checking in. What's new? What have I learned recently that I can use, and how am I going to use those to try something for the next day? You will speed up your adaptations by speeding up the feedback cycle that your brain instinctively uses to learn and adapt.

Flexibility is part of the human condition. You are a human being. You don't need to try to be adaptable.

You are adaptable. You have adapted to everything that has come before, and you will adapt to everything that comes in the future.

End Theme and Credits:
If you're enjoying Kate's Nuggets, please share it with your friends, and please write a review on iTunes so other people know what they would get if they listened too. Thank you.
To dig deeper into the topics I cover on the podcast, follow me at instagram.com/SignalFireKate or at facebook.com/katearmscoach.
To take this work deeper and learn how I can support you personally as your coach, email me at kate@signalfirecoaching.com to schedule a free consultation.
Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.