How To Adapt To Change In 3 Easy Steps
If you haven’t learned to adapt to change, life will only get harder for you
2020 is a year of change. If you thought 2020 was supposed to be a new year with a lot of hope and promises, so far it has been far from that. This year has brought a lot of heartache and pain. You’ve probably experienced many significant events that you never imagined before.
The coronavirus has closed businesses for good. Students made the abrupt change from in person lessons to virtual classes from home. Restaurants closed down temporarily and some became permanent. Millions of people filed for unemployment as they were released from their job. When Disney Land closes down, you know something is seriously wrong in the world.
This list goes on and on. The effects of the virus are not over yet. Many people saw the stock market crash in March and fears were this could be a rough year for the market and many retirement accounts.
The debate over wearing a mask to not wearing a mask really angered some people as they said their civil rights were violated. Seven months later the coronavirus is still wreaking everyday routines in many lives as well as businesses.
Then it’s election season and the government is playing hardball in Congress as many families are still hurting from the effects of the virus. With no sure sign of a vaccine anytime soon, the next few months will be interesting as holidays may be a little quieter than normal.
War made me adjust to life faster than I want it to
As for me, I made some adjustments like others but I’m used to this. When I was in Kuwait with my team getting ready to go into Iraq in 2008, that year was a year of change for me. No official orders on where to go, Iraqi law changing every few weeks, this kept me on my toes.
You can compare this year to life in general. You can’t be stuck in your ways and need to adjust when needed. You can’t expect every day to be picture perfect. The world around you is constantly changing.
Just as phone speed changes every year or so, you need to adapt with it. You can stick with 3G technology as the world moves on to 5G and fast speeds. When this happens, you can upgrade and buy a new phone or face your phone moving a couple of seconds slower.
Life is constantly changing and the world seems to be moving faster and faster every single day. It may feel like when you take a nap and wake up, you wonder if you’re living in a different world with all of the changes you’re seeing. If you’re not a techie and trying to keep up with the latest in technology, it always seems like you’re behind and catching up.
Let me give you three tips you need to have if you want to get through 2020 and future years. Life is going to keep changing whether you like it or not. If you want to keep up you need to do three things:
Be Teachable
Be Adaptable
Be Flexible
Be Teachable
You stay teachable most by reading books. By reading what other people went through.
James Mattis, former US Secretary of Defense
Even though you may have finished high school, college, or a graduate-level degree, you still need to keep learning. I bet your guidance counselor never mentioned that you have to keep learning after you left school for good. You need to learn something new every day.
- How to write better
- How to market your blog
- Finding time to write more
There are so many things you need to learn. You have to look at life as you have 70 or 80 years to learn. In 80 years, so much has changed.
- In 1896, Henry Ford made the first gasoline-powered car.
- In 1943, the first computer was made and it weighed 50 tons (100,000 pounds).
- In 1973, the first cellphone was created by Motorola and weighed 2 ½ pounds.
Technology continues to advance and this makes life easier when you accept it or harder when you try to ignore it. For years, I had the Blackberry phone because I liked the keypad. It took me years before I gave it up to move on to a smartphone. I only gave up the phone because I cracked the screen when I dropped it one day.
You have to be open to change and be teachable if you want to survive the many transformations you have yet to experience. Technology will continue to make advances until one day there will be people like you and me taking trips to outer space on a Virgin Galactic aircraft. People like Richard Branson have huge goals to make changes in the world you live in.
Be Flexible
Be flexible but stick to your principles.
Eleanor Roosevelt
You need to have an open mind and not stuck in your ways. Change happens whether you like it or not. When you try to ignore change, it will come back to hurt you. Everything around you is changing.
Over the past few years, you have seen many prominent businesses go out of business. From Blockbusters to Toys R Us to Payless Shoe Source and a few others. Technology can be blamed for these stores going away.
New industries came out and toppled these giants. Today many people watch their movies at home on their television or their smartphone. Amazon decimated a lot of retail stores since many people prefer to buy things they want online. Online shopping only increased this year as many people stayed at home due to the coronavirus. The virus only sped this transition faster and had more online buyers than in the past.
You have to be flexible with the changes. The world is changing as you have to change with it. Complaining about the changes won’t help. You need to catch up and get on board with the changes.
Be Adaptable
All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.
Bruce Lee
Ten months into 2020 and you should have gotten used to wearing a mask. I first saw people wearing a mask in 1995 when I went to Korea on a student exchange program. There weren’t a lot of people wearing a mask but every once in awhile I would see someone wearing a white mask. So if you think people look strange today, imagine seeing someone wear a mask over 20 years ago.
Back then, people wore a mask as the smog was getting worse in some parts of Korea. Now when Koreas were told to wear masks, it was second nature for many of them.
In Korea as in other countries, the virus has started to spread again in the late summer months. Were people getting tired of self-distancing and wearing the mask? That could be a possibility. I’m not a medical expert, but people were tired of these new rules and some may have let their guard down.
Adapting to a new change once or twice is easy. Continuing to adapt to change for a long period of time is a lot harder. Production of a vaccine has companies working overtime trying to find a cure.
Can you handle these changes? Of course.
Will it be hard to adapt to change? Yes, it will.
Take some of the steps outlined above and you’ll get through this. You always do. This little setback is temporary and will not last forever. Make the proper adjustments and this will be a small memory in your life that you survived the coronavirus of 2020.
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Tom Handy is a top writer on Medium, former Quora writer, and father of two kids. He retired from the Army and sits on several non-profit boards. You can find him on Twitter @tomhandy1 and his publication Life is Like a Game.
