How to get back on track when your life feels out of your control
The world is full of surprises – some amazing, and some, sadly, brutal.
Pandemics happen. Jobs are lost. Relationships break. You didn’t get the job you wanted.
You may feel like all of this is happening to you, and you can’t control a single ounce of it. While it is true you can’t prevent everything that happens to you, don’t for a second believe you are powerless. You always have power. In fact, one of the biggest superpowers you have available to you at all times is the ability to adapt.
Why adapt?
Because it allows you to take back your personal power from the external event that is causing you stress and angst.
What adapting can do for you
Adapting allows you to move from the place of being at the mercy of what’s happening around you, to being the cause of what’s happening around you. Adapting allows you to reclaim and create the future that you want to live into. You can either pivot or adapt to your circumstances, but either allows you to take control of any situation.
Have the courage to adapt.
Look at things going on in your life and ask yourself, is this still working for me or is this not working?
How to learn to adapt
Look at nature’s ability to adapt. Did you know the okapi (the strange-looking part zebra, part giraffe) adapted to its environment by developing infrasonic calls, allowing them to communicate with their babies so predators wouldn’t hear their call?
Take inspiration and knowledge from those who have faced challenges and obstacles and not only survived them, but thrived.
- Change up your routine, at your own pace and your own speed. Walk home in a different direction – literally and metaphorically!
- Don’t sit and wait for something to come your way to disrupt your world for you, figure out how to create this disruption for yourself.
- Try new flavors and tastes in your meals, just to prove to yourself you aren’t stuck.
- Read a book you’d never thought you’d read before. Open your mind.
- Adjust your creativity. Try new creative outputs. Write a poem, or draw a sketch of how you want your life to change.
The more you experiment with doing things differently, just outside your comfort zone, the more skill and ease you’ll have to adapt when the time is necessary.
Adaptability allows you to transform yourself and your life to the vision of how you want it to be, no matter what.
As Bruce Lee said:
“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it.”
