the most important skill to learn as you navigate business or life transitions
Navigating change through life or your business might be one of the biggest frustrations to ever exist.
You’re in this in-between phase of growth, but if you don’t know where you’re headed — you might be scratching your head, spiraling, or even considering burning it all down
Burning it all down has been this glamorized and glorified moment in the social media world. It gains a lot of praise, virality, “good for you, girl” commentary, but is it actually necessary?
I personally experienced significant change, what feels like multiple times, through my mid-20s to now, at age 30. There is a lot of uncertainty in so many different aspects, like career, relationships, finances, and health. Though the key skill, throughout every new season that I believe is the most important thing I’ve learned, (and that anyone can learn) is to adapt.
Learning to adapt to uncertainty, change, life transitions, or business evolution is what will help you cross the bridge from where you were and where you’re headed. Even if you don’t know where that is. I call this experience the Soft Pivot®.
What Happens When You Don’t Adapt
Soft Pivot®-ing isn’t a destination, it’s the philosophy you apply when the uncertainty is high. When there is uncertainty, your internal system can experience a lot of stress which then can cause it to explode. When the system explodes, it could look like compulsively reacting, burning everything down, self-sabotaging, negative self-talking, or cause even bigger issues that get added to your plate.
When you learn the skill of adapting, you can focus and work on regulating your emotions and nervous system, identifying what’s real in front of you vs. what’s not, and making intentional decisions moving forward.
One of the first steps to learning to adapt is to become more aware of your situation and how it makes you feel. When you identify what the threat is, you can then acknowledge the feelings that come up when you experience it. The point is to work on lowering your emotional defense mechanism, so you can reframe it.
The Two Ways We Adapt
Learning to adapt is through two main steps, assimilation and accommodation. And just a disclaimer, this isn’t an overnight skill. Just like going to the gym, you don’t see results until you’ve put in the reps for a sustainable period of time.
Assimilation is when you try to fit a new problem into rules or standards you already know. Accommodation is where you change the rules you already know, to fit a new reality. These are complementary cognitive processes coined by psychologist Jean Piaget to describe how humans learn and adapt.
What This Looks Like In Real Life
So let’s say you believe that success means working harder, billing hourly, and doing all of the client work yourself. When you apply it to assimilation, you sign a larger client and simply increase your daily working hours. You fit this type of growth into your existing hustle and grind mode. With accommodation, you burn out and realize that you can’t scale doing this alone or in this way. You change your mentality completely around success — stop selling hours, start selling value, maybe hire a team, and shift from doing the creative work to then manage it instead.
Another example would be if you’re an artist who believes art is an emotional, intuitive process driven purely by personal inspiration and aesthetic vision. The assimilation would be where the artist designs an apparel line based on your existing paintings. You treat the merchandise exactly like your painting work, but focus solely on the visual output. While the accommodation is where the artist realizes that no one is finding the website that sells the apparel, so you might have to force a cognitive shift to view your art as a commercial product, learn to balance the intuitive emotional process with more of a business-focused strategy.
Like I said before, learning to adapt might take time to learn. Or maybe you already have these skills. I think the key to adaptation is the awareness, pairing with smaller actions over time.
How to Actually Practice This
Take small risks by changing up your work environment or work hours. This could help train you to be okay with the unknown. Are you going to finish your work? Is the environment or time of day going to make you more productive or scattered?
Ask questions if plans change. Instead of asking yourself, “Why’s this happening to me?” start reframing it around “How does this work now?” or “How can I make this work now?”
Learn from mistakes or failures. Just because you fail, doesn’t mean you are doomed. Failing at something actually teaches you a lesson. You just have to build up the awareness to see it. So when something doesn’t work out, ask yourself those questions I mentioned above and see how you can change up the strategy to try again, just in a different way.
Let go of the past and stop using rules. Just because you used to do something one way doesn’t mean you can’t change how you do it moving forward. Just because you’ve always had coffee right after waking up at 7am every day, doesn’t mean you can’t eat a protein filled breakfast first and then have your coffee an hour later.
Lastly, manage the stress!! If you always put this off, set 2-3 timers in your phone or time block in your calendar to just sit in silence or take deep breaths or even go for a walk outside. This will help you think clearly and your body will thank you for it.
None of this actually makes the uncertainty just disappear. Though it makes you someone who can move through it instead of exploding under it all.
Ways to Work With Me:
Mentorship
Audit
Connect with me elsewhere: