nicholasbraman.com

Tag: Self-improvement

  • Feeling the Wrong Way

    Feeling the Wrong Way

    This holiday season, I’ve been thinking about how often we make ourselves feel bad for not feeling the way we think we’re supposed to. Times when you’re supposed to feel happy, but just don’t. Or others when you feel guilty for being happier than you think you should be. When that happens, we often end up making ourselves feel even worse, creating a vicious cycle. We would all enjoy ourselves more if we learned to shut out those expectations and let ourselves be.

    For years after my mom died, I would catch myself feeling guilty if I was in a good mood. Especially if it was something she would have enjoyed, or something we had done together before. I would be enjoying it, and then all of a sudden, the thought of her would pop into my head, and I would feel bad for feeling good. Logically, I knew that’s not what she would have wanted, but it didn’t stop it from happening for a long time. I’m not sure I learned how to fix it so much as that feeling slowly faded over time.

    Over the years, I’ve also caught myself feeling bad on special occasions like birthdays or holidays, simply because I put so much pressure on myself to enjoy them. I’d prepare for days or weeks beforehand, making sure all the elements were in place to live up to my expectations. But when the time came and I didn’t feel as happy as I thought I should, instead of relaxing and letting things be, I’d make myself feel even worse. Disappointment, guilt, and frustration would come crashing down, and instead of having a good, but not perfect time, I’d end up having a bad time and not enjoying it at all.

    I only started to turn this around after I recognized that I needed to be more flexible and adaptable to what was happening and how I was feeling in the moment. Anticipation of joy can be just as fulfilling as the moment itself. But I had to learn how to balance expectations with reality, and not let everything fall apart when they don’t match.

    It isn’t always easy. We build up scenarios in our minds, and when things miss, it’s natural to feel disappointment and loss. It’s something I’m still working on, and something I’m getting a lot of practice with as a parent. Just recently, I cooked one of my favorite meals, and when we sat down to eat, my daughter barely touched it. This time, instead of forcing her to eat or holding onto my disappointment, I was able to let it go.

    I hope this holiday season, we’re able to put some of our expectations aside and meet the moment as it is, whatever that turns out to be. Maybe we won’t feel the way we think we should, and that’s okay. Let’s give ourselves permission to feel what we actually feel, and find some peace in that.

  • What Successful Adaptation Feels Like

    What Successful Adaptation Feels Like

    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.

  • Learning How to Play Again

    Learning How to Play Again

    I’ve realised over the years how easily adulthood squeezes the play out of us. What I didn’t expect was how much play affects the way we handle change. Jiujitsu brought that part back into my life, and with it came more looseness, creativity, and adaptability than I had before.

    One of the most important things I learned from jiujitsu is how beneficial it is for adults to continue to engage in play, and how much it is lacking from our modern lives. Last week, I tried a new sweep and got immediately countered. My training partner laughed, I laughed, and we reset. Those thirty seconds reminded me why I keep showing up. I had no idea I was missing this element of life before I took up jiujitsu, but once I got in the gym, I realized how much freedom there is in the kind of play that grappling is. And soon I realized the freedom of playing more in the gym was showing up outside of it as well. It was easier to tap into my creative side, I was more relaxed and playful, and I felt more connected to the people around me.

    If you haven’t tried it before, you might think jiujitsu is all about fighting, or aggressive cuddling as we jokingly call it. But after you’ve practiced it for a while, you realize that you aren’t really fighting most of the time. Often, you are sparring with people smaller, less skilled, or just a friend that you’ve trained with a hundred times before, and you aren’t going 100% and trying to crush them. That’s where the play comes in. An upper belt rolling with me might let me get to the same position five times in a roll, just because they want to practice from that position, that’s play. When I try new things that I don’t know how to do at a high level yet, and get shut down, that’s play. If there’s a new person who I’ve never trained with before and we slap hands and start grappling, that’s an intense form of play that engages all your senses. When you are having a good training session, the play is built in; you’re automatically engaging in creativity, imagination, and connectedness.

    This wasn’t just my experience; it turns out there’s science behind why play matters. Research shows that play is not childish. It is a biological need. Stuart Brown, who has spent decades studying play, found that adults who make space for unstructured play are more adaptable, more resilient, and less rigid under stress. Other studies go further. Playfulness is linked to cognitive flexibility, the ability to shift strategies quickly when things change, and to higher creativity because the stakes are low enough for experimentation to happen. Play also improves social connection and reduces stress hormones. In other words, the things most of us say we want, such as clarity, resilience, and creativity, do not come from trying harder. They come from giving ourselves permission to play.

    There’s a common phrase that jiujitsu is for everyone, and while I think that’s true, I’m not saying everyone needs to try it. But we all could use more play in our lives. More impromptu moments, more trying something without knowing the outcome, more taking the ball from a partner and going with the flow, more using our creativity in an unstructured way. We spend hours studying how to be more organized and efficient, when sometimes what we need is exactly the opposite. Play is not a break from real life. It is what keeps real life from hardening into something we can’t grow in.

  • Learning From the People Ahead of Us

    Learning From the People Ahead of Us

    I wrote this in a season where I was obsessing over podcast downloads and social media numbers, watching other people’s projects race ahead of mine. I kept trying to stop comparing myself to them, but that never really worked. So I started asking a different question instead: what if comparison could be useful?

    I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase “Comparison is the thief of joy”. As I’ve been spending more time working on my podcast and social media, it’s easy to get caught up in the numbers and worrying about what other people are doing. But when I started to really follow other creators and examine the work they are putting out, I realized that comparison could be a tool for me to learn from, rather than a discouragement. Everyone can teach us something, so rather than focusing on feeling jealous of the people ahead of me, I started to see what I could learn from them. I didn’t stop comparing myself, but I started framing it differently.

    Research helped me make sense of what I was experiencing. Comparison happens automatically: we size ourselves up without thinking. Sometimes it shows up as pride when we’re doing well, sometimes as admiration for what others have achieved, and sometimes as envy (Crusius & Lange, 2017; Smith, 2000; Steckler & Tracy, 2014). Recognizing these reactions as normal made it easier to separate the emotion from the information. That shift turned comparison from something discouraging into something useful, as long as I stayed grounded in who I am and what I’m actually trying to build.

    Most of us have thought about putting together the ultimate athlete or hero by taking the best attributes of different people and combining them into something unstoppable. As I compared myself to others, I realized I could do the same thing with them. One person is super good at speaking, another at editing, another at creating systems. All of these were areas I could take lessons from and apply to my own work. And as I did this more, I also found that I gained more actionable insights from comparing myself to people who aren’t too far ahead of me. It’s great to look up to a New York Times bestselling author or the top podcasts in the world, but they are playing in another league; the rules and lessons aren’t the same.

    Research supports this. Studies show that comparing ourselves to people who are similar to ourselves, in socio-economic background, status, age, etc., increases inspiration over discouragement (Andreeva, Irina & Kim, Youllee & Chung, Sungeun 2024). I’ve found it isn’t useful to look at people who are too far ahead of you in their journey. Look at those who are just a little further down your path. That will give you inspiration to achieve what they have instead of facing a seemingly insurmountable gap. You can identify with where they are and what they’ve done, and recognize the areas where they have progressed ahead of you. If you want to get better at basketball, don’t look to Michael Jordan as an example of where you want to get to; look at the guy in your neighborhood who outscores you in pick-up games. If someone slightly ahead of you can do it, then it feels possible for you.

    Comparison isn’t something we can switch off, and psychology shows it happens whether we want it to or not. So instead of fighting it, I try to use it with intention. I look for people whose next step could realistically be mine, and when I notice that familiar pang of envy or inadequacy, I’ve learned to pause and ask what I can learn from the moment. Now, when I compare myself to others, I’m looking for direction, not validation. Comparison hasn’t stopped being part of my experience, but it’s stopped stealing my joy.

  • The Parts of My Life I Used to Hide

    The Parts of My Life I Used to Hide

    I used to hate answering the question “Where are you from?”. It sounds simple, but it never was for me.

    The answer is, “I’m from Seattle.” But that always led to follow-up questions. As an Asian in the US, people asked about my ethnicity or where my parents were from. In China and Singapore, people assumed I was an American-born Chinese. So I’d end up explaining that I was adopted by caucasian parents when I was 4 months old, but was actually born in Korea. Then the usual questions: “No, I don’t speak Korean.” “No, I haven’t found my birth parents.” “Yes, I call my adoptive parents mom and dad.”

    For a long time, I kept these conversations short. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of who I am; it’s just complicated, and it was easier to downplay or simplify things. Over the past year, though, I’ve started to embrace my identity instead of minimizing it. I’ve been surprised how much it has helped me grow and connect with people. I’ve realized that the surprising things about my background are part of what I’m made from. And sharing more openly doesn’t complicate things; it helps people understand more of who I am.

    And there are surprising things about me that people wouldn’t expect by looking at me. I grew up as suburban Americana as it gets: bologna sandwiches and RC cola, tuna casseroles and minivans. I was a die-hard NASCAR fan and never missed a race from around ’93 to after Dale Earnhardt died. I threw thousands of pitches against a board in the backyard, listening to Dave Niehaus call Mariners games on the radio. I had a mullet for most of my teen years, and my first concert was Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. But that didn’t seem easy to share, even with friends I’d had for years. I didn’t think much about it for years, but at some point, I realized this wasn’t just my experience; most people do some version of the same thing. We share a simpler, safer version of ourselves with the world in an effort to protect ourselves.

    When I stopped editing my story down to the safest version and started sharing more, interesting things started happening. People opened up to me, too. Someone I knew was also adopted. Someone else had lost a parent. Another person felt conflicted about their heritage. These conversations built deeper relationships. It wasn’t that I was turning every conversation into an autobiography or listing my quirks as an ice-breaker. I was just being more open about who I am, and people responded to it. I didn’t know it at the time, but minimizing my identity wasn’t just about avoiding awkward conversations; it kept people from really knowing me.

    I also realized that I’d pushed parts of my past so far down that they barely felt connected to me anymore. I’d kept my story neat and short for so long that I stopped thinking about the details myself. When I started being more open, those old influences and memories resurfaced, not in a nostalgic way, but in a clearer “this is part of me” way. My tastes, preferences, and daily habits have changed a lot over the years, but that doesn’t mean those earlier versions of me weren’t real or meaningful. Growth doesn’t require erasing the past; it just requires putting it in context.

    As I’ve opened up more, I’ve realized something else: identity isn’t fixed, but silence can trap it. When you avoid telling certain parts of your story, those parts don’t disappear, they just go unexamined. And when pieces of your past stay unexamined for too long, they start to feel distant, almost like they happened to someone else. I didn’t understand that until I began sharing more and saw how much of myself I’d boxed away simply because it was easier.

    There was also a cost I never noticed. When you only share the polished version of who you are, people can’t form a real picture of you, they can only react to the mask you’ve curated. And when they respond positively to that version, it reinforces the temptation to stay small. Opening up isn’t about oversharing or forcing depth; it’s about giving people a fair chance to know the real you. I spent years thinking my story was too complicated, too unusual, or just irrelevant. It turns out it was the most human thing about me.

    A lot has changed since those mullet-and-country-music years, but that’s still a part of who I am. Those things shaped me. These days I can’t tell you who won the last Daytona 500 anymore, but as new chapters of my life unfold, I’m learning not to shrink the story. The more I share, the more I connect. I’m still learning how to tell the fuller version of who I am, but it starts with not hiding the parts I used to leave out. For now, that feels like real progress.

  • Living as a Work in Progress

    Living as a Work in Progress

    Change has always fascinated me, how we deal with it, resist it, or grow through it. After years of working in marketing, building teams, and talking to dozens of people about their journeys, I’ve realized that adaptability isn’t just a professional skill. It’s a life skill. The way we respond to change often determines not only our success, but also our sense of meaning and peace.

    Benjamin Franklin famously said that the only things certain in life are death and taxes. I’d add one more to that list: change.

    The world and our lives shift constantly, whether we want them to or not. Sometimes we move forward, sometimes we take two steps back, but whichever direction we’re heading, change never stops. Our lives will always be a work in progress, no matter how much we achieve. I used to think there was a finish line, some marker of success that would finally make me feel like I’d made it. Now I know that line just keeps moving further down the road.

    Over the past year, I’ve talked to more than 30 people on my podcast, and every one of them has had new challenges to overcome, no matter what stage they were in. From an entrepreneur with a successful startup looking to scale, to an artist with global shows seeking new ways to express herself, to a two-time Olympian building a new career, everyone, regardless of how far they’ve come, still faces change. Sometimes it’s internal, sometimes external. Sometimes it’s a challenge, sometimes an opportunity. But it’s always there.

    Researchers who study adaptability call this self-regulation through change, the ability to adjust our mindset, goals, or direction as our circumstances evolve. It’s what allows people to keep growing even when the path ahead isn’t clear. The opposite isn’t failure; it’s rigidity.

    Seeing life as a work in progress has been comforting. There’s no race to get anywhere; the progress comes from the work itself. I was a late bloomer, starting my corporate career when I was almost 30, but looking back, that didn’t hold me back. What mattered at every stage was how fast and how well I adapted to my situation at the time. The times I felt stagnant were when I wasn’t adapting or driving change. The times I grew fastest were when I was challenged, taking risks, and putting myself in new situations. Change forces us to evolve. We can resist it and be dragged forward, or we can embrace it and move with it.

    In jiu-jitsu, black belts often say that earning the highest rank is like starting over. After the ten or more years it takes to reach that level, thousands of hours of sweating, sparring, and drilling, they feel like beginners again. That mindset reframes the journey, from what’s been achieved to an open world of new possibilities. Our lives are like that too: not a game of levels and linear progress, but a river of currents and eddies where progress is measured by how well we flow, not how far we’ve come.

    Life keeps moving. We’re surrounded by people finding their own ways, shaping their own paths. Sometimes we feel ahead, sometimes behind, but that’s not what matters. There’s always another mountain to climb, another storm to endure. The story doesn’t end; we just keep writing new chapters.

    I keep coming back to this idea: change never stops, but growth is optional. The difference lies in how willing we are to adapt.

  • Closing The Adaptation Gap

    Closing The Adaptation Gap

    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
  • What My Layoff Taught Me About Adaptability

    What My Layoff Taught Me About Adaptability

    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.

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  • The Six Key Skills of Adaptation

    The Six Key Skills of Adaptation

    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:

  • Why Adaptation Is the Most Overlooked Skill for Growth

    Why Adaptation Is the Most Overlooked Skill for 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.

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