Category: Adaptability

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.

The world is changing faster than ever, but our ability to adapt isn’t keeping up. To stay competitive in the job market, or even to just be happy and fulfilled, we need to get better at adapting. We can’t stop change, but we can get better at handling it.

The pace of change is accelerating

After the first iPhone launched in 2007, it took 4 years to reach 100 million users¹, but after ChatGPT launched in late 2022, they reached that mark in just two months². The World Economic Forum reported in 2023, that 44% of workers’ core skills will change by 2027³. And it isn’t only individuals, Innosight reported that the average lifespan of S&P 500 companies dropped from 61 years in 1958, to just 18 years in 2021⁴. This pace of change isn’t going to slow down any time soon.

We have to get better at keeping up with changes in business, technology, and even our societies. While the generations before us could take their time adapting to changes, or even choose not to adapt at all. We don’t have that luxury. Changes are coming too quickly for us to ignore them. We have to adapt if we want to remain relevant. While there are people who have opted out of participating in our modern society like hikikomori in Japan, or the lying flat movement in China, for most of us that isn’t a sustainable or desirable option. Our only choice is to get better at adapting.

How it affects us

Rapid change isn’t just affecting our job skills and career paths, it has a direct effect on our quality of life. Researchers have found that lower adaptability correlates with higher stress, reduced motivation, and decreased life satisfaction⁵. In 2023, the American Psychological Association found that there were rising levels of chronic stress tied to uncertainty about work, technology, and global instability⁶. The answer isn’t to disengage with life, it’s to get better at adapting.

The thing is, change is good in small doses. It keeps us engaged, challenged, and growing. But too many changes, too quickly, become overwhelming and make us anxious and stressed. A 2024 study found a ‘Goldilocks Zone’ of stress reactivity, moderate stress helps us grow, but too much, too fast burns us out⁷. Ideally, it wouldn’t be too little, or too much, but just the right amount. But we can’t control how many changes we have to adapt to. However, we can work on getting better at those adaptations.

What we can do about it

Adaptability is a skill that can be trained and practiced just like any other. We don’t have to wait for something major to happen to us to practice adapting, we have plenty of opportunities to improve at it all the time. The first step is to put frameworks in place to help us structure how we react when we go through a sudden change. In this post, I distilled the work of Martin’s 2013 study on adaptability in students into 6 key sub-skills that we need to improve our adaptability⁸. These include things like visualizing your options, changing perspective, and trying new ways of doing things. Working on these skills equips us with tools to use next time we are forced into a sudden change, so we don’t end up stressed, anxious, and overwhelmed.

In her book, AdaptAbility, MJ Ryan shared that what we often fear when going through a sudden shift isn’t the change itself, it’s the loss of control⁹. So I advise the first step when you realize you’re going through a situation like this is to pause and ask yourself the question ‘What can I still control right now?” This reframes your thinking and gives you a concrete next step. Every change in our plans or unexpected challenge is a chance to build our adaptation toolkit and be more prepared for the next time.

Why adaptability matters more than ever

Adaptability isn’t a skill we’ll need someday when we’ve reached our breaking point. It’s what we need now to keep up with the pace of change and be prepared for the future. I’ve seen how much adaptability matters in my own life. Like when I was unexpectedly laid off, when my baby was born early, or when I suddenly was offered a promotion with new responsibilities. I’m sure you’ve seen it in your life as well, in fact, we all went through some of the most challenging period of needing to adapt when COVID arrived, and almost everywhere in the world was changed from it. We don’t always know when and how we will need to use adaptation, but we can work on how prepared we are.

Now is the time to start improving your adaptability and prepare for the next change you will need to go through. An Oxford study in 2017 predicted that 47% of jobs could be automated in the next 20 years¹⁰. Whether you are more concerned about AI taking your job (or taking over the world), climate change, societal unrest, or the next transition in your life. You will be better prepared to get through those situations if you’ve been building the skills before you need to.

Conclusion

Adaptability has turned into a meta-skill that we need to be successful and happy in work and life. Without it we run the risk of anxiety, stress, and burnout. With it, we grow and thrive through new challenges. Change isn’t the danger; not being adaptable enough is. Start building your adaptation toolkit today.

1. Statista (2011). Global smartphone subscriptions 2007–2011. https://www.statista.com/statistics/330695/number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide/
2. Reuters (2023). ChatGPT sets record for fastest-growing user base. https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-sets-record-fastest-growing-user-base-analyst-note-2023-02-01/
3. World Economic Forum (2023). The Future of Jobs Report 2023. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2023/
4. Innosight (2021). Corporate Longevity: Turbulence Ahead for Large Organizations. https://www.innosight.com/insight/creative-destruction/
5. Martin, A. J., & Marsh, H. W. (2006). Academic resilience and its psychological and educational correlates. Psychology in the Schools, 43(3), 267–281. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229630563_Academic_resilience_and_its_psychological_and_educational_correlates_A_construct_validity_approach
6. American Psychological Association (2023). Stress in America 2023: A nation recovering but anxious about the future. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2023/11/psychological-impacts-collective-trauma
7. Rush, J. et al. (2024). Exploring the “Goldilocks Zone” of Daily Stress Reactivity. Frontiers in Psychology. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38330327/
8. Martin, A. J. (2013). Improving the achievement, motivation, and engagement of students with high-intensity learning needs: The role of adaptability. Learning and Individual Differences, 26, 177–184. researchgate.net/profile/Andrew-Martin-22/publication/259432567_Improving_the_Achievement_Motivation_and_Engagement_of_Students_With_ADHD_The_Role_of_Personal_Best_Goals_and_Other_Growth-Based_Approaches/links/5859dcb008aeffd7c4fd100b/Improving-the-Achievement-Motivation-and-Engagement-of-Students-With-ADHD-The-Role-of-Personal-Best-Goals-and-Other-Growth-Based-Approaches.pdf
9. Ryan, M. J. (2009). AdaptAbility: How to Survive Change You Didn’t Ask For. Broadway Books. https://books.google.com.sg/books/about/How_to_Survive_Change_You_Didn_t_Ask_For.html?id=PfC_DwAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y
10. Frey, C. B., & Osborne, M. A. (2017). The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation? University of Oxford. https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/the-future-of-employment

I wrote this reflection after realizing how much being laid off taught me about adaptability. Two years ago, I got laid off out of the blue. It taught me something important: resilience helps you survive, but adaptability helps you thrive. We often hear about how important resilience is, and while it’s true that resilience helps you keep going during tough times, if you aren’t adapting at the same time, you could get stuck in survival mode and find it impossible to break out of the situation. 

Our team was doing well and hitting our targets, so the news was a complete shock. I was lucky that many of my colleagues were going through the same thing, and we supported each other through messages and coffee meetups. But as the days passed and my application tracker got longer, I realized applying for jobs didn’t feel like enough. I needed to do more than just find a replacement for what I lost. I wouldn’t have called it that at the time, but looking back, I can see I was reframing the situation, putting adaptability into action by changing my perspective and not getting stuck in my thinking. 

I started not only applying for jobs, but putting my experience and skills to work writing articles, reaching out to my network, and growing my personal brand. I wasn’t just surviving the tough time by trying to get back to employment; I was proactively adapting to the situation and using my new free time to start building something for the future. If I had focused on resilience, I would have been bogged down in the day-to-day of job applications, waiting for interviews, and stretching my savings. But because I had this feeling of needing to do more, I was able to adapt to the situation and grow.

I was fortunate to be hired at an amazing company for a position with more growth opportunities than my previous job. But through this experience and by adapting to the situation and moving beyond survival mode, I gained more than my new role. By writing articles about marketing, I clarified my own thinking about my field and got better at articulating what I do and why I do it. By publishing more on LinkedIn and Medium, I took steps that built confidence in expressing myself publicly and sharing my views with the world. By starting this newsletter, I built a habit and audience that has been growing until now. Without this new confidence and openness to being more public with my life, it isn’t likely I would have started my podcast, which has almost 7,000 listeners in the last year.

None of this was pre-planned, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what the end result, or even the goal was back then. But with hindsight, there’s a clear chain of events that led to where I am today.

Adaptation isn’t always clear-cut; it can be messy. You don’t need to know exactly where you’re going to get moving. The important thing is to shift beyond resilience to growth. So next time you’re in a tough situation, try to remember to change your perspective, reframe the situation, and adapt to grow.

If you liked this, you might also enjoy:

• The Six Adaptation Skills We Need — practical ways to strengthen adaptability after major life changes.
• Stories of Adaptation — six real examples of people who rebuilt after unexpected shifts.

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:

1. Visualize multiple options: See more than one path forward when things shift.
2. Change the way you think: Reframe how you interpret a situation so you can move through it more effectively.
3. Seek support from others: Draw on people, information, and resources instead of trying to handle everything alone.
4. Try new ways of doing things: Be willing to experiment when the old approach no longer works.
5. Minimize negative emotions: Manage fear, frustration, or stress so they don’t take over.
6. 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.

Of all the skills that shape how we grow, adaptation might be the one we notice least. We praise resilience after things go wrong and innovation when things go right, but adaptability is what makes both possible.

After 30 episodes of Before We Get There Podcast, there’s one clear theme that runs through each guest’s story that helped them get to where they are today, adaptation. I believe that adaptability is the key skill in life that people aren’t thinking about improving enough. Studies show that the ability to adapt is directly correlated with overall life satisfaction and mental well being, but we don’t usually think about how skilled we are at it, and how we can get better.

For example, Opera Tang was working a 9-5 corporate job and just dabbling in the world of drag when she suddenly got retrenched. Instead of doing what many of us would, frantically scramble to send out applications and land another role as quickly as possible. She paused and reframed the situation into an opportunity instead of a setback. She decided to try to make a living by being a drag artist and quickly built out her influence, even getting collaborations with companies like Netflix and Carlsberg. When external factors force us to adapt, we too often rush into what we think the best path is instead of pausing, stepping back, and assessing if this opens opportunities we might not have ever taken on our own.

On episode 27, I dug into the strategy and thought process Anthony Yeoh goes through at his restaurant Summer Hill. He shared that his adaptations, to a new location, different type of customers, and the food he is serving, starts with his sales numbers – but goes beyond that into envisioning the dining experience he wants his guests to have. When he realized that customers who didn’t come in large parties often wouldn’t try his signature chicken dishes, he started thinking about how to facilitate the opportunity for guests to try a larger variety of food in one sitting. This led to him adapting a “dim sum style” brunch, where diners get small portions of many dishes instead of one plate or just a few things to share. That adaptation took creativity and courage, to not just make small optimizations, but to develop a whole new format of the dining experience.

After reflecting on my guest’s journeys and my own life, I realized how important our ability to adapt is. The American Psychological Association defines adaptability as “The capacity to make appropriate responses to changed or changing situations; the ability to modify or adjust one’s behavior in meeting different circumstances or different people.” In our daily lives we have to adapt all the time, from external factors like the people or situation around us changing, and internal factors like not being happy where we are in life or the feeling of wanting to do something. But most of the time, we just push through without stopping to notice how we’re adapting, or how we might get better at it.

What if we treated adaptability like EQ, leadership, or public speaking, a skill worth training deliberately? I believe the payoff is huge: less stress, more opportunity, and a better chance of building a life that actually fits.

Adaptation doesn’t make change easy, but it makes growth possible. It’s the skill that holds everything else together, and the one we need to practice most intentionally.

If you liked this, you might also enjoy:

• The Six Adaptation Skills We Need — a breakdown of six research-backed subskills behind adaptability.
• What My Layoff Taught Me About Adaptability — a personal story about rebuilding through uncertainty.