Adaptability: The Skill That Keeps Consistency Alive

A lot of advice regarding your growth and personal development is centred around consistency, myself included.

It’s building discipline, becoming consistent, practising delayed gratification, and compounding your investment.

And although all of this is true and is vital to improving yourself or working towards a specific goal, it can lead to a very specific problem.

A by-product of focusing so furiously on consistency is being too dependent on certain conditions and slipping into rigid routines. Even though routines by themselves aren’t necessarily the problem, they can cause a lot of dependence.

Life is messy, there’s always a problem, an event or an unplanned side-quest waiting to send our routines to temporary smithereens. Getting sick, family problems, or work stress are always lurking, waiting to cause havoc.

And considering our routines were created for consistency, letting these curveballs stop us from putting in the required work isn’t exactly going to help.

That’s what routines can do. You’re disciplined, yet fragile. You’re consistent when conditions are ideal, yet non-existent when conditions change.

Again, I’m not saying routines are bad, I’m saying that there’s a missing piece of the puzzle.

Adaptability

Adaptability is the ability to change your approach without changing your destination. It’s working when plans get disrupted. It’s a river that, despite rocks, fallen trees and other unexpected obstacles, always finds its way to the sea.

As we’ve covered, life doesn’t always go our way, and trying to mitigate this would be a waste of time and energy, as there are simply some things we cannot prevent.

Instead, we’d be much better off placing our energy into becoming capable of handling these obstacles efficiently and preventing them from disrupting our progress.

When we plan our journeys, we always plan them for our best selves. We plan for our well-rested, fully fed and highly motivated selves. But on a tired Tuesday afternoon, after poor sleep and a stressful day, do you show up?

When things you can’t control start negatively affecting your growth, is it the event itself that stops you from putting in reps, or is it your frustration and anger that really stops you?

Without being adaptable, we allow ourselves to be vulnerable to things that we can’t control.

And if we want to continue growing, we can’t let these things break our consistency.

Being adaptable allows us to navigate life’s challenges and disrupted routines while still putting in the work and keeping consistency alive. Which is why it’s so important.

So how do you build it? 

How To Be Adaptable

Planning the journey toward success is fine, under one condition: You stay flexible.

When planning, remind yourself that things won’t always go your way. But as long as the destination stays the same, the route you take is irrelevant, what’s important is racking up miles.

If your progress is so rigidly attached to your plan, it’s your lack of flexibility that’ll stop you, not the obstacles themselves, so keep an open mind, and be willing to adjust your approach when needed.

Another aspect of being adaptable is embracing challenges. 

When things get hard, when things you didn’t directly cause start getting in the way, stop wishing them away and instead see them as opportunities to grow.

You don’t have a time machine, but you do have the ability to decide how to react to your problems. You can either get annoyed by them, avoid them as best you can and wait for them to go away, or you can squeeze out as much growth from them as you can.

Because it’s the person who gets them to their goals, not their perfectly planned-out route, and the stronger and more resilient the person, the higher the chance that they get there.

However, above all else, being adaptable comes down to time.

With enough skin in the game, you tend to experience your fair share of obstacles, and eventually, you stop treating them as anomalies and instead view them as a natural consequence of chasing goals.

Not only does experiencing more challenges improve your ability to overcome them, but it also stops you from even paying attention to them.

The same way that driving used to be a massive challenge and took a lot of conscious effort, but now we do it without even really thinking about it. After experiencing enough of life's weird little disruptions, you just get a hold of the wheel, change gear and switch direction without giving it much thought.

That’s experience, that’s time. So if all else fails, just stay in the game long enough, and you’ll stop reacting so negatively to broken routines, change your approach, and keep that precious consistency alive.

There’s a lot that a person needs to do to grow and reach their goals, but without being adaptable, they become susceptible to disruption from the one thing they can’t control: Life.