Here is the full transcript of Jennifer Jones’ talk titled “How Adaptability Will Help You Deal With Change” at Jennifer Jones conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Fascination with Change
Change has always fascinated me. We go through so much of it in our lives, me included. My parents divorced, I was widowed in my twenties, I’ve been a single parent, and my whole career has been built around helping others deal with change. Why do we respond to it differently?
How can some people just adapt while others clearly struggle? Let’s face it, the pace of change is not slowing down. Eighty percent of the jobs which will exist in 2025 do not exist today. The average amount of jobs in someone’s lifetime is now six in six different companies.
That’s a lot of change, and given that one-third of the UK workforce is at this moment dealing with an anxiety, well-being, or mental health issue, the data suggests that we’re not coping very well with what’s going on. I believe that we’re going to have to do better at change. I believe that we’re losing the ability to adapt proactively because we’re not taking the time and attention to prepare and develop ourselves. We’re constantly jumping from change to change, acting on impulse, not acting on strategy.
So that’s why I’m on this stage today. My purpose is to help you respond to change how you want to and be the person that you want to be while you do. It all started with a little project to see what made some people adaptable and others not. I researched into theory and academic literature, launched a full-scale review at work of thousands of stories of lives and careers and breakthroughs and insecurities.
The Challenges of Adapting to Change
Naively, I thought it might be easy to begin with, but it wasn’t, and my little project became ten years worth of work. But now I can share with you a formula for success which will help you both in work and out of it. But first of all, let me share with you a couple of insights. During this time, I was working in Australia and I was travelling back and to every couple of months, and I was a single parent at the time, so it required a lot of organisation and planning but also brought with it a lot of tiredness and guilt.
And on this particular trip, my children were really struggling with me being away this time, and I was in a meeting with my colleagues and I was checking my phone occasionally to make sure that they were okay and that they didn’t need me. And my colleague called me on it and he said, “Jen, you keep looking at your phone. Are you bored? I’m finding it really distracting. You have to stop.” Now, I’d like to say that I responded to his request to change my behaviour with gratitude and thanked him and put my phone neatly into my bag, but I didn’t.
I stood up and I raised my voice and I launched into a justification of my behaviour, telling him how only a couple of hours before I’d FaceTimed my sons and they were so upset, they were so emotional with me not being there that they couldn’t even say my name. And if it’s okay with him, I’d just like to check that they’re okay. I’m not proud of it. It wasn’t my finest moment, but it isn’t always easy to respond to change how we want to.
And my tiredness and guilt had worn down my adaptability, and I was less able to control my response. We all struggle to adapt sometimes, and quite often the coping mechanisms that we’ve had in the past don’t necessarily work in the future. As we progress into leaders and parents and mature human beings most of the time, we need to be even more aware of how we respond to change so that we don’t cause ourselves anxiety or regret because we’re just acting incongruously with who we are. Also, we don’t unconsciously also teach others how to struggle.
The Importance of Preparing for Change
It reminds me of a lady I worked with called Jane, and Jane had been recently promoted and she was overcome by the amount of change that this new role brought with it. Her response to change was quite aggressive and perfectionistic. She liked to control everything, and with this new role, it just wasn’t possible anymore. The role was too big for her to get her arms around in the same way.
Since she’d taken the post, she’d had two team members go off with stress. She had another two who’d just become yes men, they were obviously out of fear, and her peers saw her as inconsistent and they just didn’t know which Jane was going to turn up. We were in the middle of a coaching session and she put her head in her hands and said, “Jen, there’s just too much change. We’re going to have to stop. We’ll work on me when all of this has died down,” just at the time when she needed it most.
Luckily, she did reverse her decision a couple of weeks later, but it brought home to me the importance of this project of mine because this is how we live our lives, isn’t it? In the midst of so much change and urgency that we respond, we react instinctively and we react to what’s in front of us because we have to, but we don’t take the time to prepare ourselves in advance of the change. I responded to just a colleague’s perception of my behaviour. Jane responded to another change on her plate.
Neither response was planned, they were automatic and instinctive, but they were inconsistent with who we are and where we want to be. We can’t always control the change that happens to us, but we can manage our response to it, and this is what I found out about how to do that.
I found that those people who were able to be adaptable, who could respond to change how they wanted, they had this certain adaptability, and it meant that they had certain characteristics in common. In those who struggled to adapt, these characteristics were minimal or missing, and I call it the adaptability equation: purpose, inquisitiveness, resilience, and threat.
Developing your capability in these areas will help you to be more adaptable. Let’s take purpose. Winston Churchill once said, “You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.” He was talking about purpose.
Those with a strong purpose know that it’s actually their purpose that will help them to weather the storms without getting distracted or demotivated, and it helps them to be more adaptable because it’s their purpose that guides them to make the right choices in the face of change. Take Elon Musk as an example. Some people think he’s set up an electric car company, but his purpose is to rid the world of carbon emissions. Today he chooses electric cars, tomorrow it’s solar power or the hyperloop.
The power of purpose is so strong. Why do you think Tesla is worth more than the Ford Motor Company even though it’s never made a profit? Do you know your purpose and whether your everyday habits and choices take you closer to it or further away? Inquisitiveness is the inner child that asks a hundred questions a day. It requires space and headroom and a certain mindset to constantly learn and grow.
Dr. Carol Dweck would call it the growth mindset. These people are able to constantly scan the environment looking for the need to adapt in the future. This makes them more adaptable because all the powerful thinking and insight has happened before the change hits them or before they decide to make a change. Think about it.
Resilience and Threat Response
The more questions you ask, the more you learn. The more you learn, the more questions you think of to ask. It’s a reinforcing cycle. Think about a problem in a different way.
Try a new solution. Ask the stupid question. Then I found a characteristic which involved overcoming setbacks and reducing stress both for the individual and for those around them. This I call resilience.
It’s been proven that the formation of a habit is not affected by falling off the wagon every now and then. That cake you ate while you were on your diet or that outburst you had while you were working on your self-control, they’re normal. They’re to be expected. It’s actually overcoming these setbacks and learning from them which will help you to be more adaptable.
Be honest with yourselves. Have the setbacks and changes that you’ve experienced, have they made you settle for being off course or are you still on track to being who you want to be? These first three characteristics had a positive correlation with adaptability. Developing a high capability in these areas will help you to be more adaptable.
But then I found a characteristic which had a negative correlation with adaptability. A high level of threat will actually hurt your adaptability overall. The aim here is to reduce it. We all have a threat response when we’re faced with a real or perceived danger.
This can be as subtle as aggressive body language or a different point of view or a threat of looking stupid. The effect on the brain is the same as being followed down a dark alley. In Australia, I was in a high state of threat. My children needed me.
I wasn’t there for them, and my colleague, well-intentioned, was keeping me from the only partial responsibility that I could take which was checking my phone. To be highly adaptable, you need to have a strong awareness of your threat response, what it looks like, what it feels like, what triggers it, and how best to manage it. So here’s the equation: Adaptability equals purpose plus inquisitiveness plus resilience divided by threat.
Learning to be Adaptable
To be highly adaptable and be able to respond to change how you want to, develop your PIR, reduce your T. Now what’s interesting about all these characteristics is they’re non-fixed characteristics. They’re not genetic. They can be learned and developed over time.
This is quite a breakthrough for me because I realised that all these people I’d studied and worked with who were adaptable had not just been adaptable. They had learned how to be adaptable. You see, historically it was thought that the brain was a physiologically static organ. It’s created in childhood and now we’re just stuck with what we’ve got.
And while it is true that the brain is much more plastic in the early years, plasticity happens throughout life. We just may need a little bit more focus and persistence as we get older. We are meant to adapt. But the brain is also highly efficient, and this means that it will look for patterns to avoid us having to consciously think about the same things over and over again.
So just like a river flowing down a well-worn river bed, the brain will take the easy route, encouraging us to think in the same way, react in the same way, and creating automatic thinking habits and blind spots. It’s much easier to continue doing something we’ve always done than it is to stop. Unless we know this and we make a conscious commitment to change, we all have the capacity to learn and we all have the capacity to learn how to adapt. We just have to start.
The Challenge to Adapt
So today I challenge you. Research shows it takes 66 days for a new habit on average to form. From today that takes to just past New Year’s Day. Start today to being the person you want to be in the face of change.
Don’t wait for a resolution to be someone new next year. Look at the adaptability equation. Which areas do you need to focus on so that you can respond to change how you want to and be the person that you want to be while you do? Develop your PIR. Reduce your T and encourage others to do the same. Thank you.