Because our life is full of small adaptations, we don’t stop to think about them a lot. When you plan to order something on a menu, but find out they are out of it, you are forced to adapt. When you’re about to walk out the door, but your child throws a tantrum, you adapt. Since these are so commonplace and we often adapt without stopping to think about it, we don’t develop the self-reflection to understand these small adaptations. But each of these is practice to understand our adaptability skill better. You don’t have to do a debrief after each one, but recognizing you are making even a small adaptation will start to prepare you for the bigger ones.
The opposite problem happens when we have to make big adaptations. If you get laid off from your job, you probably don’t sit down and think about the steps you need to adapt, you just start applying for jobs. Same thing if you go through a divorce or bad breakup, you aren’t thinking about adapting to your single life, you’re just trying to survive emotionally. But these big adaptations are make or break periods, and if you are actively reflecting on your progress and state during them, you’ll get through them a lot easier.
Sometimes the adaptations we need to make have a clear ending: you secure a new job, you survive a crisis, meet a deadline. But other times, it isn’t easy to tell if we still need to adapt more, or we can move into maintenance mode. Or sometimes you just feel you are in a funk, something’s not right and you make efforts to turn that around, taking regular walks, connecting with friends, eating healthier. Was your adaptation successful the second you start to feel better?
When I reflected on the most successful adaptations I’ve made in my life, I realized the biggest indicator of success was the feeling of reaching a new normal. For example, when I transitioned my life in China from being a student to teaching English full-time, there were a lot of milestones along the way. It is tempting to point out the first job I landed or my positive performance review. But none of those were the best indicator I had successfully adapted. I had successfully adapted the day I felt comfortable and confident in front of my students. I had become a teacher and successfully adapted to this new normal.
Another example is when my daughter was born and I became a father. But the milestone to focus on isn’t the day she was born or when I changed my first diaper. It is the day when being a father, holding and playing with her, getting up to comfort her in the middle of the night felt natural and didn’t require conscious effort. At a new job it wasn’t the day I met my boss, signed the contract, or sat in my first meeting. The adaptation was successful when the job became my new normal: I didn’t overthink before speaking up in a meeting, I easily shared our product with a prospect at an event, or wrote a social media post without reviewing tens of examples.
Adapting successfully isn’t about hitting a specific metric, it’s about reaching the point that everything feels normal again. You don’t need to proactively think about what is happening, you can just be. If we don’t learn to recognize this shift, we won’t get better at adapting the next time. So keep in touch with yourself, and when you get to that point, congratulate yourself on an adaptation well done.