#2 Adaptability: How to Navigate Change with Grace
No individual, community, or organization can be resilient without adaptability. Over the course of years of research on the qualities of resilience, adaptability has shone through as essential. So, how do we define adaptability, and how do we nurture this quality in ourselves and others?
Defining Adaptability: The Art of Navigating Change
When we are adaptable, we can sense complex influences, be flexible, and pivot beneficially in changing situations.
Being able to adapt and flow with life and the unexpected is essential to thriving. When we’re adaptable we’re flexible; we are open to options rather than rigid or locked into a certain way of thinking or being. When confronted with change, we are able to pause before reacting out of habit. We also build skills that support us in adapting gracefully. Adaptability is one part knowing, one part being, and one part acting.
Why Sensing Matters
Accurately sensing ourselves, others, and our environment is essential for adaptation. When we can pause and feel into the influences, constraints, or energy in a given circumstance we gift ourselves the opportunity to positively shift our choices or responses, while also tracking whether we’re maintaining our own alignment. It is essential to pause with intention, and to ground ourselves so that the pause is valuable.
As we move towards mastery of accurate sensing, we develop foresight around the dynamics at play in a given situation, and are able to anticipate needed changes. This skill set prepares us to generate diverse options and grows our capacity for both discomfort and alignment.
So how can we tune in and hone our spidey senses? The process is different for everyone based on how we want to grow our capacity, but all of us can use the following tools to increase our ability to sense: slowing down, regulating our nervous system, tuning in instead of tuning out, and being with what is.
The list goes on in terms of ways to cultivate our sensing, and of course there are times when we need to turn off or take a break. As we practice and cultivate accurate sensing, we will each find our own unique balance.
If we aren’t sensing the dynamics around us, we are more likely to be surprised when things suddenly take a turn. Additionally, we aren’t able to intervene; we can be left feeling powerless and unable to take action.
Sensing can allow us to make real-time adjustments within ourselves, in relationships, and beyond to create healthy connections so we can thrive. Further, sensing goes beyond our relationship with ourselves and others; it can be a beneficial tool to understand complexities within our communities and broader society. We can also sense the good stuff and therefore step into fully celebrating ourselves and others.
Building Our Capacity for Joy
Humans can tend towards an aversion to joy, and adapting isn’t solely about seeing challenges. Something wonderful happens and we are waiting for the other shoe to drop. Have you ever experienced this? Our personal ecosystems may not be used to regularly experiencing and staying with joy, so when it comes we may not know what to do with it beyond those initial moments of excitement.
I work with my clients to build the capacity for joy: to be with their complex feelings, to invite and process the shadow side that wants to come through, and to enable them to ground into their joy more fully. Many times it's a process of empowering my clients to sit with duality, as both joy and pain can be present at once. We are such complex beings and joy is one feeling I personally love to invite in and soak up.
What if we were more able to shift into joy and stay there longer? Can we adapt to live with joy as normal? Can success be something we experience regularly? Adaptability helps us infuse our lives more deeply with the magic we receive.
Adaptation towards joy is possible. Once we are tapped into the happenings in and around us and develop our skills, we can begin to shift into and stay with joy longer.
Taking Action: The Importance Acting in Alignment
There have been times in my life, especially when I was younger, when I sensed something was off, but I didn’t act to shift it. Why? Partly, I didn’t trust my intuition. But more importantly, I wasn’t brave enough to take action. My lack of courage was rooted in my fear that rocking the boat or speaking up would lead to a lack of belonging. Humans are wired for connection. Sometimes we think addressing an issue will lead to disconnection or discord, when in fact revealing and resolving it is the path to deeper connection.
Sometimes we attempt to address an issue and it doesn’t get resolved, or even seems to get worse. This outcome happens when we don’t have the appropriate skillset, or because the others involved simply don’t have the capacity for resolution. Conflict may appear to get worse when we don’t resolve it. However, sometimes cutting a connection with a person or situation allows us to come into deeper alignment with ourselves.
It’s necessary to develop self-trust and courage so that we can take aligned action in whatever issue we encounter, be it in ourselves, our relationships, or our community.
Can we trust ourselves enough to take action when we sense something is off? Can we find the openness and grace to bring adaptability to our actions and let go of expectations?
When we hone these capacities, we can take the steps necessary to stay aligned with our truth and not abandon ourselves when we feel outside pressures. I believe one of the deepest pains we can feel as humans comes from abandoning ourselves. But sometimes, when we don’t have the skill set to adapt to inner and outer change, we feel we have no other choice. If we build the capacity to adapt with trust and courage, we can stay aligned with our core selves and thrive.
Adaptability in Times of Change
Change can be scary. We can resist it and spend a lot of energy trying to keep things the same. This fear keeps us rigid and inflexible in the midst of inevitable or needed shifts.
Sometimes, life throws us an unforeseeable challenge, like the COVID-19 pandemic, and we must adapt on the fly. In the case of COVID, we had to sense and adapt simultaneously; we were thrown into massive change that required most of us to radically shift our lives. The more we can practice sensing and adapting in our everyday life, the more gracefully we can do so in crisis. When it comes to the action of adapting, a state of BEING flexible and having diverse thinking is essential.
Can we be open to change and allow ourselves to lean into it? And when we are feeling rigid and afraid, how can we shift into flexibility? There are many skills and tools that I use when working with my clients.
Pattern interrupters can help us practice flexibility. Simple changes like choosing to sit in a different chair at dinner, walking your morning walk counterclockwise, or changing your breakfast routine, can allow our brain to shift from ingrained patterns and open up to new thoughts and ways of being. New activities, even when small, disrupt our habitual patterns so we can create new neural pathways, and catalyze greater mental and emotional flexibility.
The Other Side of Fear: What’s Truly Possible
Increasing our neuroplasticity through cognitive shifts, combined with regulating our nervous system, enables us to get out of fear and explore what’s possible. Rigidity is often caused by fear-based patterning. Being flexible opens us up to the unknown so we’re able to work with our fear; simultaneously, it opens us up to possibility. I help my clients address and process fears with both cognitive and somatic tools, like visualization and Qi Gong.
Once we are sensing, embracing flexibility, and releasing fear, we’re open to adapting, and ideas and thoughts that inform our adaptation begin to flow. When we create openness and give up forcing, solutions come.
Can we be in a solution state of mind versus a problem state of mind? If we sit around ruminating on our problems, we block ourselves from imagining positive solutions. Assessing and understanding the problem is important and, let’s not sit in it too long. Understand, feel, and move forward. While working through our problems isn’t always linear, if challenging feelings arise, we can process them and keep going.
By sensing and processing feelings before we engage our worried minds, we are able to access more conscious and productive thinking. Otherwise, our brains are working from a place of fear and misunderstanding. Many times our openness attracts solutions to us and we don’t have to “work” so hard!
Adapting with Grace, Courage, and Trust
Can we cultivate sensing, feel our feelings, gain understanding, ground ourselves, and then have the bravery to make a change? When we commit to this challenging and transformative process, we start to see incredibly positive shifts in our lives.This is adapting – a journey of self-trust, courage, and embracing life with grace and alignment.
Share your thoughts or experiences on becoming more adaptable in the comments below. Let's inspire each other to embrace change and evolve together.