What is adaptability of a muscle?

How do some people stay remarkably calm under pressure? How do some people keep coming up with answers when everything appears stuck?

How do some people keep reinventing themselves regardless of their age or condition?

The answer lies in a trait called adaptability.

What is Adaptability?

It’s the ability to learn flexibly and efficiently and apply that knowledge across situations.

Adaptability is a meta-skill — a foundational trait that activates and magnifies other skills. The trait doesn’t just help you progress in your career. It impacts your relationships, goals, and even daily activities like commuting.

For instance, if we get caught in traffic, the obvious reaction would be to get angry or stressed. But an adaptable person would ask, “How can I make use of this time?” She could finish her pending work calls, answer her emails, or figure out how to solve a problem she’s currently grappling with.

When she gets home, she doesn’t have to worry about work. Her productivity increases and stress reduces. It’s a double whammy!

The Benefits of Becoming Adaptable

The world is evolving at an unprecedented pace. Each decade ends up miles ahead of the previous one.

Think about this. Previous vaccines for pandemics took up to 10 years to develop. But during COVID-19, multiple vaccines were developed and even administered in a few countries within one year.

Here’s another example. In 2010, many of us were still trying to figure out how touchscreen phones worked. In 2020, we can’t go a day without them, or WhatsApp or Facebook messenger.

It’s natural to adopt the technology and tools that let us keep up with the times. At the same time, it’s important to adopt the behavior and habits that improve our lives and let us keep up with the times.

Being adaptable gives you the below superpowers:

1. Control over uncertainty: You can’t know what tomorrow will bring. But you can prepare yourself better for unexpected events.
2. An upward career path: You improve your earnings as well as your earnings trajectory because you keep building the skills needed to thrive in the future.
3. A balanced mind: You remain calm under pressure because you trust yourself to figure a way out. As a result, you feel less stressed and can think clearly.
4. Turning into a learning machine: According to research, adaptability improves your levels of learning, performance, confidence, and creative output.
5. A happier life: Improved mental and physical well-being lead to higher levels of social support and overall satisfaction.

Adaptability equips you to handle uncertainty and turmoil. It empowers you to turn adversity into opportunity. And it makes you the person you want to become in the short and the long term. If you want to thrive in today’s dynamic world, it’s an essential skill.

Adaptability is one of the key reasons for the survival and evolution of our species. During the earliest stages, Homo Sapiens were among the weakest species on the planet. But we made up for it by making tools, weapons, and money out of wood, stones, and metal. Our cities, organizations, communities, and information networks are all results of adaptation.

But over the centuries, we lost this crucial skill. Adaptability has become something like flossing — we know it’s important, but we cannot motivate ourselves to do it. In fact, right at the time when we need to learn and change, we revert to the behaviors and habits that landed us in a soup in the first place.

This is known as the ‘adaptability paradox.’ The conditions that make adapting important can also trigger fear, making people default to familiar patterns or solutions that worked the last time.

As Jennifer Jones said in her insightful TEDx Talk:

“We’re losing the ability to adapt because we’re not taking the time and attention to prepare and develop ourselves. We’re jumping from change to change, acting on impulse, not acting on strategy.”

Adaptability is not reacting impulsively to what happens at the moment. It’s not the same as resilience. Resilience means to “bounce back” from adversity while adaptability means to “bounce forward” into new realms. The two might feed into each other, but they’re not one and the same.

Finally, it’s not a trait you build once and forget. Like your physical muscles, it atrophies with lack of use or exercise.

How to Strengthen Your Adaptability Muscle

Here are five steps that will help you sharpen your AQ and build a better quality of life:

1. Invest in Self-Care

In our forever-busy lives, we’re always multitasking, hustling, and even helping out friends or family members. But the person we should take care of the most — ourselves — comes last.

Eventually, we get exhausted and burn out. And an exhausted brain succumbs to the scarcity mindset. We think about what we don’t have or what we could lose. In this state of mind, the very thought of adapting is almost impossible. The mind fusses over problems and challenges and turns blind to opportunities.

It’s not selfish to take care of yourself. In fact, this enables you to give your best to your work and relationships. You recover from exhaustion, take stock of what you’re doing, and achieve better results in less time.

One of the simplest self-care techniques is to take tiny breaks throughout your day. This reduces stress and improves learning. A study of violin prodigies revealed that the students who took significant breaks — including naps between sessions — were the quickest to master the instrument, even faster than those who played for hours on end.

Breaks don’t just include naps. They also include meditation, exercise, reflection, nutrition, indulging in hobbies, or having a casual conversation with a friend. (You can browse social media, but in moderation — its toxicity does nothing to make you feel better.)

Winston Churchill said, “You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.” He was actually talking about a purpose.

You can’t reach your destination if you take every turn on the road. Likewise, you can’t achieve your goal if you react to every situation or get distracted by every new shiny object. If you ‘go with the flow’ all the time, the river will take you where it wants. But that often won’t be the same as where you want to go.

A purpose keeps you on the path towards your destination. Even if you diverge, you find ways to return to it. If you go wrong, you course-correct. You tweak the actions that are not paying off instead of switching to easier things that actually create bigger messes in the long term.

Lay down a clear purpose that will make you happy, not one that’s based on others’ definition of happiness. Examples include being healthy, making wealth by doing what you love, and being a great family person.

With a purpose, you can focus. You can make better decisions and adapt to situations. And you can become more productive in that you can get more from what you do.

Adaptability stems from the ability to learn which, in turn, stems from curiosity. Sadly, people place too much emphasis on certainty and too little on curiosity.

Without the latter, the mind continues seeing things the way it always. And in a world that’s changing at an unprecedented pace, this is a recipe for disaster.

Our default view of the world might protect us in the moment. But it impacts our ability to respond to new situations that arise almost daily. And by the time most people figure this out, the damage is beyond repair.

Imbibing curiosity in your life is not a difficult task. It involves two simple steps:

1. Stop saying “This is how it’s always done.”
2. Start asking “Why” and “What If” questions.

Observe your personal life and surroundings and ask yourself “why” and “what if” based on what you see. For instance, if you’re feeling low, you could ask, “Why am I feeling low right now? What if I went for a run? Will that improve my mood?” Or you could notice a street junction that’s always congested and ask, “Why is this junction always chock-a-block? What if they opened up a street by the side? Could vehicles that want to drive straight use it and avoid this junction?”

When you ask yourself these questions, your brain switches into “play” mode. It opens up to exploring perspectives instead of staying stuck in a tunnel. Once you get comfortable, you can apply such curiosity to larger areas like your relationships, career, and side hustles.

Certainty makes us rigid and keeps us in place. Curiosity forces us to explore and broadens our perspectives. And the only experts today are the ones who explore and keep learning.

“The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions,” Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote. To stretch itself, your mind must step outside its comfort zone.

The quickest and most effective way to do this is to learn from people who are already doing what you want to do. Connect with them on LinkedIn, Twitter, or other social media platforms. Engage in meaningful conversations. They’ll help you if you get stuck, teach you the skills you need in order to succeed, and expose you to new opportunities.

Books are another excellent source to expand your thinking, especially the ones that have stood the test of time.

Jennifer Jones’ insightful formula to gauge how adaptable you are is as follows: The sum of your purpose, inquisitiveness (or curiosity), and resilience divided by the level of threat.

You cannot learn in an environment where you feel threatened. If you’re afraid of appearing foolish or losing what you have, or if the consequences of failure are high, you will revert to old behaviors and habits that landed you in trouble in the first place.

For instance, the investor who loses a lot of money in the stock market buys more premium reports and analyses. But when he has to buy stocks, he sticks to his old philosophies because he feels safe with them in the face of the threat of losing more money.

The overweight person who needs to lose weight to avoid terminal illness buys an expensive gym membership. But he sticks to his old eating habits because the fear of failure doesn’t let his mind step outside its comfort zone.

A better approach is to learn in a safe environment where the stakes are low. The investor can keep learning while he’s making money. A person can build a fitness routine even when his weight seems under control. A feeling of safety while taking up challenges allows you to process your experiences, draw lessons, and keep learning.

Instead of being really good at something, become really good at learning how to do new things. You’ll spot red flags early and take action. That’s what adaptability is all about.

Most of our failures occur because we cannot let go of old behaviors. We stick to what worked in the past instead of exploring what will work now, even when the challenges are unlike anything we’ve faced in the past.

In a constantly changing world, only those who adapt can thrive.

Adaptability is not a fixed trait. With deliberate practice, it can be honed and sharpened. Five steps to build it are:

1. Take care of yourself. This helps you think clearly, invest more resources in what you do, and get better results for your effort.
2. Define your purpose. This helps you stay on the path, do more of what works, and remove what doesn’t.
3. Be curious. View the world through curious eyes instead of fixating on the status quo.
4. Build a diverse network. There’s no better way to learn than learning from the pros. Do this by connecting with people who are already doing what you want to and by reading books.
5. Make it safe to learn. Learn even when you don’t need to. When you learn in a safe environment, it’s easier to apply those lessons to your life.

You cannot predict what tomorrow will bring. But when you know how to adapt, you can be better prepared for those challenges. You can adjust the sails in the direction of the wind. And you can experience the true beauty of life rather than getting bogged down by it.

You can subscribe to my weekly newsletter and get a free ebook on 10 bite-sized yet powerful lessons that will guide you to become the best version of yourself.