The Six Adaptation Skills We Need
This week on my ongoing quest to learn more about adaptability after realizing how central it has been to the success of my life and my guests on the podcast, I read psychologist Andrew Martin’s 2013 study on adaptability this week.
One thing I found was that they used a set of 9 criteria to determine how adaptable someone is. As I was reading through them I realized that they made sense as a set of definable skills we can work on improving, not just a matrix to be judged on.
I’ve distilled them into six key skills we need to become more adaptable:
- Visualize multiple options: See more than one path forward when things shift.
- Change the way you think: Reframe how you interpret a situation so you can move through it more effectively.
- Seek support from others: Draw on people, information, and resources instead of trying to handle everything alone.
- Try new ways of doing things: Be willing to experiment when the old approach no longer works.
- Minimize negative emotions: Manage fear, frustration, or stress so they don’t take over.
- Elevate positive emotions: Find optimism, curiosity, or joy in uncertainty.
We often think of adaptability as something static, but together, these subskills form the foundation of adaptability as a competency we can practice and strengthen over time.
Adaptability isn’t about reacting faster, it’s about responding smarter. These six skills form the base of what I now think of as an adaptability practice: something we can notice, reflect on, and refine with intention.
If you liked this, you might also enjoy:
- Stories of Adaptation — six real-life examples of people adapting through major change.
- Adaptability Glossary — clear definitions of the key ideas behind adaptability and growth.