Cover image: Collage by Forest Co. Illustrations licensed from Vectorstock.com

Everything you need to learn one of the most important skills of this century

Last week I published a complete guide on how to be self-aware. Self-awareness was voted the most important skill to learn by many expert coaches on LinkedIn. But here’s one thing I think a lot of people missed: most people who are self-aware don’t have what it takes to change their lives. As such, my opinion is that self-awareness isn’t the most important skill, but rather the first step.

In this article, I’ll cover 25 micro-skills to learn to make you more adaptable. I’ve divided them into six categories: Preparation, Taking Action, People, Mindset, Communication, and Pushing Through. There is no particular order, all of them are important and will help you in different ways.

Why is Adaptability so important?

The skill I consider the most important is Adaptability. Charles Darwin said:

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” — Charles Darwin

We have thrived as a species because we’ve adapted faster than other species. The 21st century is testing our adaptability like never before and only those who can adapt to the rapid changes can truly thrive.

At the moment of writing this, we’re in the middle of a global pandemic. All over the world, people are losing their jobs. Specialists have an especially hard time. The school system’s diploma is showing signs of weakness. Those who have mastered a branch of skills at school and can’t work because of the pandemic are struggling to find ways to make money.

Polymaths, and even jack-of-all-trades, adapted and found new ways to generate revenues. But it’s certainly not all about money.

Those who can adapt do not panic when their situation changes. They can analyze the situation and try something different. They don’t sit around and mope. They find solutions.

The 21st century is going to throw curveballs like never before. Job disruptions will happen on all fronts. According to a study by two Oxford researchers, Carl Benedict Frey and Michael A. Osborne, by 2033, 47 percent of US jobs will be at high risk of disruption by computer algorithms.

Those who can’t adapt will be left behind.

The knowledge gap between “classes” of people will be wider than it ever was. According to Yuval Noah Harari in his book Homo Deus, it will even come to create a new “unworking” class. Here’s an excerpt from the book:

In the twenty-first century, we might witness the creation of a massive new unworking class: people devoid of any economic, political or even artistic value, who contribute nothing to the prosperity, power, and glory of society. This “useless” class will not be merely unemployed — it will be unemployable.

Your hard skills of today will not save you from this harsh reality. Even the soft skills I and other experts promote might become irrelevant, but one thing won’t: being adaptable.

Here’s how you learn to become more adaptable based on the six categories above. See Appendix A at the bottom for the full tree of sub-skills.

1. Preparations

Illustration licensed from VectorStock.com

Contingency Planning

Being adaptable isn’t about knowing exactly what to do in every situation, it’s about being prepared for a wide variety of possible scenarios. A contingency plan is a plan designed to take a possible future event or circumstance into account.

An adaptable person has given thought about what these possible future events might be and know how to proceed if they happen. No one can (arguably) predict a natural disaster, for example, but they can predict a situation where they won’t be able to live where they currently live or that they’ll lose their main source of income.

Let me ask you these questions right now:

What would you do if you had to move out of your home tomorrow?
What would you do if you lost your main source of income today?
What would you do you if you had to take care of another person by yourself all of a sudden?
What would you do if you had to flee your country with less than 24 hours’ notice?

These are real situations that are happening to real people every day. Most of these people are not prepared for it but are forced to act right away. I mentioned that at the time of writing this, we’re in the middle of a global pandemic. It forced everyone to be adaptable, including schools, hospitals, and the government.

I urge you to have at least an idea of what your action steps would be in any of the situations above. Let me guide you a little.

How to prepare for losing your home:

Know who would be able to host you for free until the situation changes.
Always remain aware of the market in other areas you’d be interested in living in.
Be aware of the moving companies that are within your budget or of other means of moving.
Have a good idea of what are your most important belongings.

How to prepare for losing your main source of income:

Always try to find ways to have at least three sources of revenue.
Skill up! Learn new valuable skills that will allow you to find new employment.
Diversify your skill set.
Know who’s hiring where you have a good chance of getting hired.

How to prepare for taking care of someone else by yourself:

Don’t split tasks, always know everything you need to know to take care of that person.
Regularly do every task you’d need to do if you were by yourself.
Figure out other people who could help and ask them in advance if they’d be willing to help.

How to prepare for having to flee your country:

Know which countries are most welcoming to refugees.
Of these countries, figure out which ones will give you the highest chance of thriving (or surviving).
Of these countries, know the resources you’d use to help you adjust to your new life (Canada is amazing for that).
Know in advance what you’d need to bring with you. Have it in a quick-to-access place.

These are only four scenarios. There are many others. The idea is to know what you’d do if you didn’t have your basic needs covered, like food, health, and shelter.

Here are some key steps you want to consider when writing down a contingency plan (inspiration: projectmanager.com):

Note where there are resources that can be used in an emergency. Also, note where in your contingency plan these resources might be applied.
Identify dates that if missed will negatively impact your plan.
Know your contingency plan. Check for any weak links and strengthen them. Identify any slack that you can find in it.
See if you can find points in your plan where alternative routes can be taken, and think through each one’s scenario to add flexibility to your plan.
Use your experience to help you see patterns in your project’s ebb and flow of activity to sharpen your plan.

Raising your self-awareness

As I mentioned above, experts say that self-awareness is the most important skill to learn. But it’s a very broad skill and figuring out how to learn it can be tedious. Lucky for you, that’s the first complete guide I did, so everything you need to know about how to learn to be self-aware is in this guide:

How to Be Self-Aware — The Complete Guide

And here’s the full list of sub-skills so you can pick and choose what makes the most sense for you:

It’s not by accident that experts agree on the importance of self-awareness, especially in this decade. We’ve been educated to study to get a job. Our purpose, given by the education system, has always been very clear: find a job.

I find that (1) very boring and (2) not adequate for the 21st century.

Today, more than ever, we need to find a real purpose in life. With the accelerated pace of change, we’re getting thrown curveballs every second. We have to take action faster with no time to think about the consequences of our actions.

Only a truly self-aware person can make quick and informed decisions that yield a positive impact on their lives and that of others.

2. Taking Action

We have to take action faster than ever with no time to think about the consequences of our actions. Only a truly self-aware and adaptable person can make quick and informed decisions that yield a positive impact in their life and that of others.

This will be the topic of another complete guide, but for now, I want to touch on seven sub-skills you can learn today to help you take action faster and better. These will help you fight procrastination, but more importantly, raise your adaptability.

Setting time aside for non-urgent tasks

If you’re like most people, everything you do always feel urgent. You wake up in the morning in a rush, do your main activity, get back home, relax, and go to bed. You rarely take time for yourself. I call that “non-urgent but important” activities. They’re activities that are beneficial to your own well-being.

This means a different thing for everyone, but for the most part, it includes any wellness activities, like working out, sports, meditation, journaling, learning new skills, reading a book, etc. They’re things that if you skipped doing today, it wouldn’t have a big impact tomorrow.

What people miss, however, is that it has an impact in the long term, mostly on your physical and mental health.

To become more adaptable, one thing you can do is set aside time to do things you wouldn’t normally be doing.

For example, since October 2017, I’ve set aside 1.5 hours per day to focus on learning new skills. I learn a variety of skills that work different parts of my brain. Whereas I used to be an almost purely logical person, I can now switch back and forth between being more creative or more logical, depending on the context.

When learning new skills, try to divide your time between these kinds of skills:

Introvert skills and extrovert skills
Assertive skills and listening skills
Right-brain skills and left-brain skills
Doing skills and being skills
Visionary skills and detail-oriented skills
Rational skills and emotional skills
Design skills and engineering skills
Product development skills and sales skills
Art skills and business skills
Personal skills and professional skills
Goal-making skills and negative-outcome-avoiding skills

In SkillUp Academy, we support over 450 skills. You can get inspiration from our list to figure out what is a good fit for you.

The important thing to note here is that it doesn’t matter how much time you set aside as long as you do set some aside and focus on yourself. The new things you’ll learn will teach you valuable lessons and make you more adaptable.

Attending events out of your comfort zone

A few months back, I signed up for a meetup.com event to draw life art. There’s really nothing else that could have been more outside my comfort zone. I had never really drawn on paper, let alone nude models. I wrote about my experience here.

After I signed up, I wondered why the heck did I do that for. I thought I’d embarrass myself and be disrespectful to the model. When it came time to go, I tried coming up with a bunch of reasons not to go. Somehow, I pushed through. And I’m glad I did. I had a great experience in the end.

There’s also this one time when I was travelling the world and decided to volunteer in India. I was helping at a skill development centre — that’s before I was even that interested in the topic. One day, the project manager told me that all the teachers were going into training and that they wanted me to take charge of the centre and classes for a week.

I was completely taken aback. I was a software engineer, not a teacher. And especially not a school director. But I took on the challenge. And again, the experience turned out great.

Due to these types of experiences, I became more adaptable. The more I allowed myself to do things outside my comfort zone, the more I realized that it’s okay to not be the best all the time.

Start small. Browse events that make you slightly uneasy. Sign up for them and attend them. Don’t let your pity excuses win. Involve someone else to attend with you as needed. Gradually, you want to try things that are even less comfortable.

When you make being uncomfortable a habit, you start to increase your adaptability.

Taking action on things you’re not comfortable doing

When someone is asking you for help with something you’re not comfortable doing, what do you say? Ask yourself this very simple question:

“What’s the worst that can happen?”

Unless it’s something dangerous for yourself and for others, do it. There’s no such thing as a static personality. Because you’re not an intellectual person today, for example, it doesn’t mean you can’t become one. Who you are today doesn’t have to be who you are tomorrow.

But the only true way to change is through consistent action, especially on things you are not used to or uncomfortable doing. I won’t go into the neuroscience of how that works in this article, but let it be known that your actions are responsible for the making of connections in your brain. The more you perform an action, the stronger the connection.

The brain is an organ that behaves like a muscle. You’re likely familiar with the saying: “no pain, no gain.” It’s used in bodybuilding mostly. It means that without depleting your muscle strength, your muscles won’t grow stronger. The same is true with what’s happening in the brain.

The higher number of stronger connections you make in your brain, the bigger the “library” of actions and knowledge you can pick from when reacting to a situation.

Analyze the following illustration:

Left-brain vs Right-brain. Illustration licensed from VectorStock.com

What are your strengths?

What are your weaknesses?
What actions can you take towards your weaknesses?

Once you’ve brainstormed the list of actions. Put them in your calendar. When exactly are you going to do it? For most people, if they don’t schedule things, they simply won’t do it.

Keeping learning

No matter what you do, always think about what it is you’re learning from it. The more you view your actions as learning experiments, the more you’ll be willing to try new things. The more new things you try, the more adaptable you become.

In the SkillUp Academy app, you can specify what skills you commit to practicing/studying/teaching every day. In there, I typically commit to things I’m already doing, intentionally or not. One example is writing. I commit to practicing writing daily for at least one hour. While my growth in the skill of writing might not be as fast as it used to be, simply acting on it counts towards me getting better at it.

What’s even better, however, is being deliberate in your practice or study. What I mean by that is that you plan what you will be learning, take action, and record your progress. These three actions are crucial to greatly improving in any skill you set out to learn.

Learning doesn’t end after school. In fact, I’d argue that it STARTS after school.

Schools feed you information to memorize and try to prepare you for the real world. But when you get into the real world, you realize that you memorized things yet know nothing. That’s why a good percentage of people who sign up for SkillUp Academy are graduate students who are looking to learn new skills to become more employable.

Adults who keep learning every day are the ones who thrive and adapt to any situation.

For more information about how to learn new skills, check out:

Your Comprehensive Step-by-Step Guide On How To Learn Any Skill

And try this approach:

Use Skill Trees to Learn New Skills In a Fun and Painless Way

Solving problems

This is one I’ve experienced for many years because of my training in computer science and software engineering. I’ve always taken it for granted and thought everyone could solve different types of logical problems. However, the more I spoke to people, the more I realized this is a very left-brained skill.

Thinking logically is a surprisingly good way to become more adaptable. It helps you figure out everything that’s implied in a situation and figure out a solution to the problem. And the more you can analyze a problem and its variables, the more you can think creatively about a solution.

A truly adaptable person can use left-brained logic to come up with right-brained creative solutions. And a great way to get better at it is to try to solve logic puzzles like what’s found here: http://brainden.com/logic-puzzles.htm.

If this is not something you do regularly for work, you can try to solve one logic puzzle every day for a month. Spend 30 minutes doing that daily and after a month, you’ll already be a lot better. The next time a real-world situation happens, you’ll already notice that you’re more adaptable and you find solutions faster and better.

Making decisions quickly

This will be the object of another complete guide I’ll do in the coming weeks. I consider Quick-Decision Making to be one of the top 10 skills you can learn today.

This is one of these skills I’ve trained for my entire life and strongly relates to productivity. I started working in strawberry fields when I was only eight years old. I was paid by how many baskets I would fill during the day. The more I filled, the more money I made. I’ve learned that to make more, I had to be more productive.

This fast-paced life early on taught me that I’d need to make decisions fast in life. My mom raised my three brothers and me by herself. She had many setbacks and survived because of the good decisions she had to take quickly. I’m lucky I learned that from her very early in life.

Over the years, I’ve had to make decisions quickly. One approach I’ve been doing more and more in the past few years is what I call the 1–50 rule. Essentially, it’s a more extreme version of the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule). The 1–50 rule is about asking you the following question:

“What can I do in one day that will yield fifty percent of the results I’m hoping to get.”

We tend to overcomplicate things. We design large projects that seem impossible to do. And because we do that, we tend to procrastinate and scrap these projects altogether. In reality, you almost always can get fifty percent of the results you’re hoping to get with a single day’s worth of the right actions.

In a previous article, I talked about someone I met who wanted to start a shoe business. He thought it would take him about 6 months to put it together. He told me about his plan, and it was sound, just terribly slow.

I showed him that he could have his business running in a single day.

He obviously didn’t believe me at first. But when we did it together, his mindset shifted. Suddenly he saw the possibilities and started making decisions faster.

I detailed the full process of using the 1–50 rule here:

Use The 1–50 Rule and Get Results You Want Within the Next 24 Hours

3. People

One of my favourite quotes is by Jim Rohn:

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” — Jim Rohn

Looking back at the different “personas” I’ve been in my life, I can attest to how true that is.

I didn’t grow up going to a nice school. I’m not aware of the ranking of the high school I went to, but I know today that it was terrible. We’d have new teachers in the middle of the school year because they’d burn out. In my hometown, kids were mean and smoked anything from the age of 12. The people around me were a terrible influence.

When I met my wife and moved near her hometown to go to college, I had a fresh start. She was a lot smarter than I was. I started hanging with the smartest kid and the most popular kid. My life post high-school was very different. I went from being a C-student to being an A-student.

After that, with every environment I was in, I’d adapt and “take” traits from the people I spent the most time with. It’s with that very concept that you can become more adaptable — when you choose who you spend the most time with, you can increase your adaptability.

Spending time with people not working in the same field

So much of your adult life is spent around people you work with. You become very good at your jargon. You have a repertoire of jokes and memes that relate to your industry. You attend events and all speak the same language.

All that is at the detriment of adaptability.

Growing up, I knew two things: farming and programming. If you and I were to have a conversation, these were pretty much the only two topics I could contribute to. After I stopped farming at 19 years old, I only hung out with programmers. I became very geeky.

While there’s nothing wrong with that, I had a hard time adapting to people who “didn’t speak my language”. It took me many years before I realized that I’d rather be able to be relatable for other people.

So, I started learning three new skills every month to try different things. In less than a year, I was able to have conversations with people across a wide variety of fields.

Here are some ideas to help you with this:

Learn new skills that are very different from the ones from your field.
Attend events not in your profession and ask questions.
Join multi-disciplinary groups (online groups are great for that).
Join book clubs that don’t focus on a specific type of book.
Strike conversations with people all over the world (more on that below).
Connect with people you admire on LinkedIn.

Spending time with people from other parts of the world

Last night, my wife shared on Facebook that we’re having a baby. It took us seven months to post about it. An average post usually gets about five likes and one comment. This one blew up to 300+ likes and 110+ comments.

What I find most impressive isn’t these numbers though, it’s the origins of people who interacted with the post. We have travelled the world and lived abroad for years. We have friends in all corners of the world. There’s nothing more amazing than getting congratulatory messages from probably over 40 countries.

These people shaped our lives. We learned about their culture and ways of living. For the most part, we lived that with them. This made us both a lot more adaptable.

When you live a sheltered life, you have one perspective. You think that everyone is like you or should be like you. I learned otherwise. What I think is true is considered false in other parts of the world. My opinion is just that: an opinion. There is no truth.

When you spend time with people from different cultures, you start to accept that your view of the world is really is just one lens. You realize that there are many lenses — an infinite amount in fact.

Here are a few ideas on how to spend more time with people from other parts of the world:

If you live in a city that accepts refugees, do your part and help them and have conversations with them.
Spend time in a multi-cultural city like Montreal, Toronto, New York or London.
Join international online groups.
Join online language exchange groups.
Find yourself a pen pal from another country.

Spending time with people who have different beliefs and values

Chances are, if you’re spending time with people from other parts of the world, you’re already spending time with people who have different beliefs and values. But that’s not always the case.

You can travel the world and only spend time with people of the same religion. You can travel the world and only spend time with people of the same social class. In fact, I’d say this is very frequent. Some people who do religious missions only hang out with people of the same religion, for example.

I’m not a very spiritual person, but I made it a point during my travels to expose myself to people from all religions. There’s so much to learn from knowing diverse points of view. And also opposite to that, you learn that you are not so different from many of them and that all values converge. Deep down, we’re all fundamentally the same.

To spend more time with people with different beliefs and values, follow the tips from the previous section. On top of that, most spiritual leaders would be more than happy to give you more information about their religion. Ask them.

Teaching things you don’t yet fully know

This one may not immediately be obvious, but here’s why it works: it forces you to be curious about what you’re learning. Most of us don’t want to teach things that aren’t true to others. At least, not intentionally.

When you force yourself to teach someone else about a topic you don’t fully know, you’re more inquisitive and keep an open mind — two very important aspects of adaptability.

And when I say “teaching”, I don’t necessarily mean going in front of a classroom and give your knowledge to students. I mean letting other people know about your findings. You can do that in writing, on videos, or even just telling your peers about it.

When you teach people who know nothing about the topic, you try your best to learn the most pertinent information. When you teach people who know some parts of the topic, it’s a good test for yourself to see if you learned well. Their ideas may complement yours. When you teach an expert, they may prove you wrong. That’s good, that way you adapt your learning and teaching and get better at it.

4. Mindset

Adaptability is very much about mindset. Here’s a quote I like from Henry Ford:

“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” — Henry Ford

The first step in becoming adaptable is to accept and believe that things can change. Many people think they can’t. Experts call this having a fixed mindset. People who believe that things can change have a growth mindset.

Here’s a great infographic made by Nigel Holmes based on the concepts from Carol Dweck in her book: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.

As Ford said, both are right. But when it comes to becoming more adaptable, the only model you should follow is the growth mindset. Below are six sub-skills that will help you foster it.

Stopping negative self-talk

How often do you start sentences with “I can’t”? Your answer is probably “not too frequently”, but I’d argue that you’re wrong. We all say it without realizing it. If you catch yourself saying it, here’s a little trick to turn the situation around: add “yet” or “currently” after.

“I can’t play the guitar … yet.”

There might be a day when I’ll be able to play if I choose it to be a priority for me to learn it.

If you only focus on the present moment, you teach your brain to think that everything is static. The more you repeat to your brain that you can’t do something, the more it believes it. This is basic neuroscience.

What else do you tell yourself that’s negative?

There’s value in acknowledging something negative about yourself, yet there’s no point reinforcing it. So, there’s x that’s negative about you currently. Good. What can you do about it now? Or, do you even need to do anything about it? No one’s perfect. Accepting you have flaws is very powerful.

But if you do want to change something, drop “I can’t”, say “How can I…”

Whenever you say something negative about yourself, promise to do something that will prevent you from doing it the next time. Here are some ideas:

Put money in a jar. If you haven’t said anything negative about yourself for a month, you can use the money any way you want.
Use a habit-breaking device like the Pavlok 2 whenever you use negative words about yourself.
Give to an anti-charity using something like StickK.com.

Dropping negative words from your vocabulary

Check out this comprehensive list of negative words in the English vocabulary. It’s quite intense to realize how many negative words are in a single language.

I remember hosting a Japanese guy through Couchsurfing, Satoshi, back when I lived in Toronto. He never said no to anything, even if I could tell he didn’t really want to say yes. I asked him about it. He told me, in his culture, you don’t use the word “no”. You instead say that you prefer something else.

I’m not sure if this is entirely true, but it’s interesting nonetheless. He didn’t have the habit of using negative words. Instead, he chose to do things in order of preference. He didn’t dislike chicken, he just preferred beef.

What I find interesting here is that it made me realize that using negative words is a habit. We’re accustomed to them from a very young age. We’ve been exposed to them and using them since our childhood. It’s a tough habit to break. But realizing that it’s a habit is a good first step.

A lot of times, this has to do with your environment. Sometimes it’s your immediate environment, but sometimes it’s the culture of where you live. I’ve lived in 6 countries and saw massive differences in the words being used in each of them. Even in my home country, Canada, I see very different patterns between Ontario and Quebec, two provinces I spent years in.

As for methods of dropping negative vocabulary, you can try the same ones as in the previous section. The first step, again, is to realize you are doing it. Involve someone to point it out to you when you do it.

Stopping needless apologies

“I’m sorry.”

These three words mean well but only contribute to your negative self-talk when used all the time. Don’t get me wrong, there are times to apologize, but in most cases, the right approach isn’t to apologize to someone, but rather to thank that person.

Say:

“Thank you for your help.” or
“Thanks for understanding.”

Everyone makes mistakes. Saying “thank you” over “I’m sorry” both achieve the goal of taking responsibility for that mistake. The former has the benefit of praising the other person at the same time.

Improving your coping mechanism

Improving your coping mechanism is entirely doable.

Here are some tips from VeryWellMind.com:

I use exercising, taking a bath, meditating, asking for support, establishing healthy boundaries, and creating lists very frequently.

Whether you’re feeling lonely, nervous, sad, or angry, emotion-focused coping skills can help you deal with your feelings in a healthy way.

In an article called Healthy Coping Skills for Uncomfortable Emotions, where the above graphic and quote is from, the author also mentions a list of 34 emotion-focused coping skills. From their list, I found these to be the most helpful for me:

Write in a journal;
Listen to music;
Spend time in nature;
Read a book;
Engaging in a hobby (video games for me);
List the things you feel grateful for;
Smile; and
Go for a walk.

On the flip side, you may be doing unproductive things for your coping abilities. As much as possible, drop overeating, sleeping too much, venting to others, overspending, and avoidance.

Telling yourself positive mantras

If you read other articles from me, you may have noticed that I end pretty much all my articles with “You can do this!”. This is a saying I’ve been using since the first day I was in a leadership position. Going back to the Henry Ford quote, you CAN do this, and truly believing it is the first step.

A positive mantra is about telling yourself a short phrase many times so that you start to believe it. And when I say you, I mean your brain. Your brain is a pattern recognition machine. The more your senses are exposed to something, the more it takes it as truth. That’s how you create good and bad habits.

That last part is important. If you expose your brain to bad stuff, it will start to think that’s what you need. That’s how addictions are created.

But this is also good news because it works for positive things as well. When you tell yourself “I can do this” over and over, your brain starts to believe it. The more it believes it, the more it will show you ways you can do it.

That is one positive mantra. You can come up with anything that works for you. For inspiration, check out LemonadeBrain.com. Here are some I like from that website:

My strength is greater than any struggle.
I’m fearless.
I’m getting stronger every day.
I can do this.
I was not made to give up.
I am who I want to be.
No one can make me feel inferior.
I inspire others.
I choose what I become.
I’ve decided that I’m good enough.
I wink at challenge.
I have the power to change my story.
It’s not their job to like me, it’s mine.
I use failure as a stepping stone.
I have the courage to say no.

Dropping blaming habits

Who or what do you blame when something doesn’t go right?

There’s only one thing to blame: a situation.

It’s okay to acknowledge parties involved in the mistake, but there’s no point in blaming anyone. It’s a learning experience for everyone involved. Know your role and adjust accordingly for future situations.

One of my favourite methods to prevent me from blaming myself or others is to use a failure journal. I wrote about it here:

Why You Need a ‘Failure Journal’

The process is simple, for each “failure” you record the following things:

What is the “failure?”
What caused the failure?
What would “success” have looked like?
What is the lesson in this failure?

5. Communication

Many communication skills can help you become more adaptable. In this article, we’ll look at four that have had the biggest impact on my life.

Asking more questions than others

Surely you know people around you who talk a lot more than they ask questions. You probably also know people who like to give advice without being asked. These are okay behaviours, but when you’re trying to become more adaptable, you have to put your inquisitive hat on.

When you have conversations with people, ask them about their life. Most people like to talk about themselves and will open up. Ask them questions that make them go deeper with their answer.

What you want to avoid doing, however, is these two things:

Making it feel like an interview; and
Making it feel like you’re trying to get secrets out of them.

You need to ask questions that work within the flow of the conversation. If you ask an off-topic question the conversation won’t flow as well.

If they switch topics, you should ask questions on that new topic. You could try to steer the conversation back to whatever topic you started with that way, but don’t try too hard, it may send the wrong message.

Don’t just exchange hard facts, express feelings and simply pass the time. Anytime you try to force an issue it will look unnatural and will break the other person’s flow of thought. You have to guide that flow.

Jumping back to this topic they feel is taboo might upset them. You have to respect other people’s interests too, not just your own.

Practicing active listening

Asking questions is good, provided you are receptive to the answers and practice active listening. When you practice active listening, you are fully concentrated on what is being said. You listen with all of your senses and give your full attention to the person speaking.

Here are some signs of active listening:

Neutral and nonjudgmental.
Patient (periods of silence are not “filled”).
Verbal and nonverbal feedback to show signs of listening (e.g., smiling, eye contact, leaning in, mirroring).
Asking questions.
Reflecting back what is said.
Asking for clarification.
Summarizing.

This infographic by MindTools.com summarizes the things to do to become better at active listening:

I’d argue the most difficult point from the graphic above is (4) Defer Judgment. It’s hard not to make up our minds right away on something you’re being told. We’re used to having to make quick judgment calls, but when it comes to listening, that’s detrimental to the conversation. If you find yourself judging too quickly, try the following things:

Look for the positive;
Put yourself in their shoes;
Monitor your thoughts;
Avoid stereotyping; and
Remember how it feels to be judged.

Learning new languages

I was born and raised in a French-speaking environment. When I tried to read my video game magazines as a kid, I remember thinking that it was a curse that my first language was not English. Everything I liked was in English, but I didn’t understand anything.

Ultimately, I started to become much better in English when I moved to Toronto (I was 23 years old at the time), where English is the main spoken language.

Today, I’m fluent in English and speak decent Spanish. And contrary to my beliefs when I was younger, I’m glad I was raised in a French-speaking environment. It’s much easier for me to learn romance languages, and I have an incentive to want to learn new languages.

When you’re born speaking English, you don’t really need to speak another language. People all want to learn your language anyway. But learning new languages makes you more adaptable. People are more receptive to your ideas when you convey them in their own language.

Learning new languages forces you to go back to square one and put you at the beginner level once again. As with anything, the more you do that, the more adaptable you become. You start to recognize more patterns. You start to realize that not all languages work the same way. And when you realize that, you also realize that if language works that way, maybe other ones of your beliefs are also not as universal as you thought they were.

My friend Joshua Galinato wrote this fantastic piece for SkillUp Ed about how to learn any language:

The Comprehensive Guide to Learning a New Language

I strongly recommend you check it out if you want to become more adaptable through learning a new language.

Immerse yourself in multiple languages

A lot of people learn new languages without speaking it. No wonder, you need someone to practice with! And depending on your geographical location, it might be hard to immerse yourself in the language you want to learn.

I learned a good chunk of what I know in Spanish while studying it online from Cambodia, of all places. I learned Software Engineering vocabulary, and the past and future tenses. When I moved to Spain a few months later, I could have simple conversations with people already. They asked me how long I had been speaking Spanish for. The answer was: two days! :)

While the learning I did in Cambodia proved very useful, it doesn’t compare to being immersed in the language while living in Spain. When I was there, my whole world was in Spanish. If I wanted to order at the restaurant, I had to do it in Spanish. My landlord didn’t speak much English at all.

I had to adapt, if only not to be miserable.

I’ve repeated that experience living in India and Thailand. Each time, I felt more and more capable and less stressed with the idea of being left in a country where I didn’t speak the language.

If you can’t travel, there are other ways to immerse yourself in a language. We’re connected online like never before. If you want to learn Turkish, you can just jump on a language exchange site and start hanging out with people living in Turkey.

You can:

Get tons of free content on Youtube;
Use Duolingo or Memrise;
Search “language exchange online” on Google;
Search “language tutors online” on Google; or
Use resources from this article: The 30 Best Online Language Courses for Any Budget or Level (FluentU.com)

6. Pushing Through

There’s a difference between someone adaptable and a dabbler. A dabbler will shift gears for kicks. An adaptable person will shift gears because it’s time to shift gears. They will persist and adapt when needed.

Improving persistence

Persistence improves your adaptability by becoming good at different skills so that if your situation changes, you’re skilled enough to adapt to it. It’s hard to adapt if you are not equipped with strong enough skills to match your new situation.

I used to be a dabbler. I’d start projects and never finish them, moving on to shiny new ones. Also, when it comes to learning, I strive to learn 3 new skills every month. For a lot of them, I don’t reach past the dabbling phase.

While I still learn as many skills and start new projects, I learned to figure out what’s worth pursuing and what’s not. That’s a key skill: persist when persistence is the answer. Seth Godin wrote The Dip, where he talks about figuring out if something is a *dip* or a *cul-de-sac*. If it’s a dip, you can not only get out of it, but you can become stronger. You should move away from a cul-de-sac.

An adaptable person knows to identify dips and push through them.

Persistence is a pretty big skill in-of-itself. It would take a full guide like this one to explain all the ways you can become persistent. Because of that, I’ll simply list a few ideas to get you started:

Know your why, be self-aware.
Always outline your definite action steps with deadlines.
Makes your actions steps small and achievable.
Have SMART goals.
Find ways to measure your progress.
Join mastermind or accountability groups.
Build a support team.
Cooperate with other people.
Develop strong positive habits.
Have a personal coach.
Teach others.
Raise the stakes.
Read biographies of highly persistent people.
Lower your expectations of easiness.
Visualize what success would feel like.
Focus on small improvements, not large successes.
Gradually learn to take more risks.
Raise your energy levels.

Improving resilience

Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. “Recover” being the keyword here and differentiator from persistence. How do you recover from a bad circumstance?

To become highly adaptable, you’ll face many challenges. You’ll have to “fail” a lot. More people don’t cope well with failure because of how we were educated. Failure was seen as a negative experience, but as we’ve seen in the “Dropping blaming habits” section of this article, it’s not. It’s simply an experiment that didn’t work.

As mentioned above, my three brothers and I were raised by a single mom. We were dirt poor by Canadian standards. My mom faced a lot of adversity but always pushed through. She was resilient. When I was a kid I thought it was a curse to not live in a rich family who had things easy, today I’m glad I was raised in that environment because I cope well with tough situations.

As mentioned in the intro, at the time of writing this, we’re in the middle of a global pandemic. Improving your resilience is not only nice, but it’s also a necessity. Until they find a vaccine, things won’t change that much. We have a lot more months to cope with the situation.

As with persistence, I could write a whole guide on it. For that reason, I’ll simply list some ideas on how to improve your resilience:

Make the uncomfortable a habit.
Set yourself up for failure in a safe environment.
Drop negative self-talk.
Develop your problem-solving skills.
Be optimistic.
Practice self-compassion.
Practice gratitude and forgiveness.
Increase your sense of humour.
Smile more.
Have a strong support network.
Take care of your physical and mental health.
Raise your self-awareness.
Accept change.
Learn from the past, live for today, aspire for the future.
Don’t be afraid of asking for help.
Skill up!

Conclusion

If you don’t cope, you won’t adapt to the new reality and be left behind. It’s a tough world, and it’s not getting any easier with the passing years. Tomorrow’s problems will be different from today’s, so the only way to thrive in every situation is to become more adaptable.

The good news is that there are many ways to adapt to the new realities of this world. I’ve shown you 25 sub-skills you can learn to get better at it. You don’t have to learn them all to be adaptable enough.

Start with those you are most motivated to do and feel like you can more easily achieve. Some will take longer to learn, but that’s okay. The important thing is that you keep working on your adaptability. You deserve to thrive in every situation. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.

You can do this!

Appendix A. Full List of Sub-Skills

*Created using an Alpha version of Ember.ly.

How to Be Adaptable — The Complete Guide