It seems people don’t actually know how to adapt, at least not actively. Instead, most of us only passively drift along. If you are thinking about adaptation, you can follow the following three steps.
Acknowledgement
The first step shockingly, is not any action, rather it’s a self awareness that you say to yourself, something is not going great, and you want to accept that as a fact.
Trust me, this is not an easy step. It takes a lot of frustration, self beating, others kicking and as much as luck you can get.
But you have to do it. Because unless the acknowledgement is on paper, some of our body parts will not be aligned, and worst part, they might be even going different directions. Do you know tumor, before it can hurt you, it actually deforms heavily until it becomes unstable.
You can’t let it happen.
You have to formulate a strategy to contain the damage while keeping calm. This is called acknowledgement.
Action for the change
If you are some professional, it’s not surprising to see sometimes the best person who can change in your team is the one who isn’t good at his profession at that time, or at least he doesn’t believe he knows much. Why? Just like a college student who can absorb anything you throw at him.
If you are humble enough, and are willing to make a change based on your guts feeling or whatever the idea that is throw at you, you can be more willing to take it and try it.
You might think this requires some bravery, but to be honest, whoever is doing that most of time don’t think that way. He may be just curious, or he might just really want to get out of his current situation. If you have done the acknowledgement part enough, it can be relatively easy for you to take an action for the change.
Tune until you are there
The action, most of time turns out to not work the way you wanted. So don’t bet on it to work at all. Think of this way, if you are really that smart, you probably won’t get to where you are now.
So take a step, and along the way, make some adjustment. The magnitude of the adjustment only depends on your heart capacity. If you don’t run into any heart attack for you and your family, go for it. Kill yourself, and if you don’t die, then you’ll be in much better shape tomorrow. That’s the idea, but don’t kill yourself.
In general, go slow, do things in small portion, make lots of mistakes, so you can survive a bit longer, because the end game is that you can get out alive. No way you will know if you are doing it correctly that quickly either.
It takes time to do it, but might takes a lot longer to wait for the result. Patience is not nice-to-have here, it’s must-have.
Summary
If you want to make a change, practice the following: acknowledge, act and adjust. Along each step, wait as usual.
