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How to Become More Adaptable in Challenging Situations

面对挑战，如何修炼适应能力

In unfamiliar, high-stakes situations, it can be difficult to remain calm and open-minded.Our instinctive reaction is to stick with what has worked for us in the past.That’s normal, and it can work well in familiar situations.But defaulting to old habits in new situations that call for new solutions is usually a recipe for failure.The challenge is that new, high-pressure situations often create a level of anxiety that triggers the very reactions that tend to limit us, stifling innovation.

This is the adaptability paradox: When we most need to learn, change, and adapt, we are most likely to react with old approaches that aren’t suited to our new situation, leading to poorer decisions and ineffective solutions.

Navigating periods of turbulence successfully requires leaders to adopt a sophisticated form of self-mastery that we call Deliberate Calm.“Deliberate” refers to the awareness that you have a choice in how you experience and respond to a situation.“Calm” refers to rationally considering how best to respond, without being governed by old habits.

“Deliberate Calm” is a solution to the adaptability paradox.It enables leaders to act with intention, creativity, and objectivity, even in the most challenging circumstances, and it helps us to learn and adapt to novel challenges when the stakes are highest.The practice of Deliberate Calm — and it is a practice — changes our relationship with uncertainty.

Does the practice of Deliberate Calm actually work?Yes.We designed a Deliberate Calm leadership program for a global pharmaceutical company that put 1,450 leaders through weekly practice sessions for approximately 30 minutes per week for 12 weeks, and then measured changes in their behavior and their performance (including self-assessments and assessments by their boss, teammates, and other colleagues).

The results were striking.Compared to a control group (those who were asked to try to improve the same behaviors and outcomes, but who did not participate in the program), participants in the capability program showed three times more improvement in the targeted behaviors and outcomes, including overall leadership performance, adaptation to unplanned circumstances, optimism, relational effectiveness (e.g., empathy, compassion), collaboration and teaming (e.g., fostering psychological safety), and the acquisition of new knowledge and skills.

Additionally, their sense of well-being improved 7.5 times more than that of the control group.Open-ended comments from the participants suggested that they experienced as much benefit in their personal lives as they did at work.

Three skills to develop to become more adaptable

Learning agility is about learning from experience, experimenting with new tactics, approaching new situations with a growth mindset, seeking and learning from feedback, and applying these lessons in real time to new situations.

You can build this muscle by, for example, setting your intention each day for how you want to show up for challenging situations.Doing this helps you remain open to feedback, learn, and adjust your response that otherwise may have been an unhelpful default reaction.
Emotional self-regulation is the ability to recognize, understand, and manage emotions, and to channel those emotions into productive ways of thinking and acting.

Try to keep a diary for a couple of days, writing down moments where you feel emotionally triggered, and describe your thoughts, bodily sensations, and actions in that situation.The more you do this, the easier it becomes to be aware in the midst of an emotional response.That’s when you can start regulating, learning not only to process the unhelpful emotions but also to become comfortable with the discomfort they bring.

Dual awareness is the integration of internal circumstances (experiences, thoughts, emotions, and responses) and external ones (an objective reading of the situation and what it calls for).We are integrating two important things — the awareness of our own emotions, assumptions, and reactive habits, especially under pressure, and the nature of the situation we are facing.

By taking a moment to take stock of ourselves and the situation, we better understand not only our true motivations and intentions, but also what the situation calls for, and how our habits and tendencies will serve us in this moment.