Adaptation: the Process

Adaptation: it’s a process

Adaptation: it’s a process innate in nature

Stepping back and watching the little aspects of this process in your life and career requires practice. Nonetheless, it’s a useful skill to build. Seeing when it impacts you, puts you in the driver’s seat for your career. It’s when the process is in high gear that you want to be making very conscious decisions. It’s a key component in being a resilient person.

I attended a great event this week; the focus was on the  willingness to “boycott what you thought”. In other words, the speakers were challenging us to broaden our perspective and open our minds. I came away thinking about adaptation. Perhaps partly because it’s the lens I’ve chosen to be looking through this week, but I’m believing it’s because the concepts are connected.

I’m working on a different approach in my practice. The process is pushing my beliefs about who I am – my capabilities and what’s scaring me. When I first left my executive position, one of the bits of feedback I was receiving frequently was that I sound too corporate.  Additionally, in response to a fresh marketing campaign this week, I received feedback that I’m sounding too assumptive; it’s “coming off as self-serving and inauthentic”. Yikes! I’m adapting and pushing myself; this feedback was painful to hear but very useful. My learning about Instagram may equally shed light on  how I’m working to adapt my approach. One of my new clients, in my work with people 30-35 year’s old, implored me to post daily on IG. A month or two later she started suggesting I try adding some video and you may be noticing I’m posting a weekly Wednesday story on my theme. WOW – getting to the point in 1 minute has proven a stretch for me! Pushing me to adapt! But I suppose it’s just one of the recent examples of how the digital age is requiring many of us to adapt.

Adaptation: One of the BIG ones that impacts us all

Malleability – An  Adaptation Gone Awry

You’ll see in my newsletter the brain adaptation of malleability was key to survival when the human species was young but it’s also what limits our scope in ways we sometimes refer to as “tribal”. Professor Nisbett of University of Michigan was surprised to see it play out in him, limiting his thinking. Nisbett was describing himself as a “lifelong universalist concerning the nature of thought” (2003, p.xiii “The Geography of Thought: how Asians and Westerners think differently…and why“), assuming what he had found to be true about thinking, applied equally to everyone. THEN, he was challenged by a graduate student one day who, expressing delight about an insight to his professor, observing that while he saw the world as a circle, the professor saw it as a line. Nisbett, to his credit, acceptied the challenge, ultimately proving his student’s observation about the differences in thinking to be correct. Nisbett had fallen prey to his brain’s malleability that had socialized him to see his perspective as the universal perspective. What if you started paying attention to when this adaptation is limiting your thinking?

Adaptation: It’s a Choice

All failure is failure to adapt

1. exercise self-compassion;
2. look for the essence of your goal or project;
3. establish a metric to improve and keep pressing on.

Making every step you’re taking bring you closer to the change you’ve chosen, is hard work AND it’s worth every bit of energy you expend.