Building your adaptability quotient
I came across this idea last week through a wonderful short TED talk by Natalie Fratto: 3 ways to measure your adaptability -- and how to improve it
The title stopped me dead in my tracks. If you have six and a half minutes to spare (or less if you tend to watch videos on 1.25x or 1.5x like me!), then I recommend watching it.
So, I’ve known about the idea of quotients and their application to human behaviour since I was a teenager. While I never had the dreaded IQ (Intelligence quotient) test forced upon me, it is something I played with in my teens and early twenties, as I wondered whether it’d be worth applying to join Mensa.
But every time I took one of their practice tests, I started to think that it was really a case of learning how to pass the test. There was a niggling doubt which held me back, something in me which felt that this wasn’t really testing my intelligence.
In 2003 I changed careers, moving from being a software developer (which was an unstable kind of a job, during the economic downturn which followed 9/11) to a secondary school teacher.
I sometimes wonder how different my outlook on life might be if I’d not decided to take that particular plunge. I’m pretty sure I would still have spend the intervening quarter of a century almost still reading many self-help books a year, but I do think that the training to be a teacher, as well as the practical application of what I learned really helped me to develop and grow as a person, as well as being able to use that knowledge to try to help my students.
It was during that teacher training that I first came across the idea of an EQ or Emotional Quotient. One of the books we were asked to read was The Brain's Behind it: New Knowledge About the Brain and Learning by Alastair Smith, which led me on in the spirit of my own enquiry to Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ by Daniel Goleman.
So, what is EQ/Emotional Intelligence?
When we started doing our teacher training, we learned a lot about the psychology of human behaviour. One of the things we learned about was the fight or flight response. Although we now know it’s more complicated than that (there are four components, neuroscientists now believe - fight, flight, freeze or fawn) it was very useful for us on a practical level to learn about how people can find themselves in a heightened state.
For example, we might think of a 13 year old pupil who hates maths and feels humiliated that they can’t get the answers right to the problems that are being set by their teacher. It wouldn’t take much in that kind of situation - a jokey comment from a fellow pupil, for example - to push them over into their fight state of mind. And people simply cannot effectively learn when they’re feeling this way out.
I came to believe, over the course of my almost decade-long teaching career that a lot of what we force children to learn in the UK educational system is a waste of time, and that we would be better served helping them to work on their emotional intelligence, instead, as well as other skills more suited to life in the twenty-first century.
Simply put, EI or EQ is our ability to choose a reaction to an emotion. We all know people who have ‘hair trigger tempers’, who lash out when they feel threatened, hurt or frightened. EI is being able to become an observer of those emotions and to say ‘hmm. I’m feeling upset by what just happened. Why?’ And then also being able to decide what action you want to take, based on that reflection. Rather than getting swept up in it, like a helpless passenger in a leaking dinghy.
Why is it so important? Because if you can choose your response to the events that befall you in your life, then your interactions with others will be what you choose them to be, rather than what your conditioning and your habits force them to be.
How do we develop EQ? Meditation helps. Breathing exercises. Practice. Counting to 10. Removing yourself from a situation which is likely to trigger you.
So, yeah. I’m a massive believer in EQ, and so AQ sounded like a fascinating, potentially-related concept.
If you’ve watched the video you’ll now know that Natalie Fratto’s concept of AQ or Adaptability Quotient is all about being able to roll with the punches, if you like. It’s linked to EQ, I think, but is slightly more advanced.
Perhaps IQ is the base layer, with EQ and then AQ on top, like a sandwich. Or three layers of a sponge cake. 😋
So I started to wonder, after watching the video, what’s my AQ like?
Happily for me, I think it’s pretty good. Sure, things happen in my life which I’m not happy about. My mum passed away in 2016. I’ve been made redundant from several jobs. I’ve had three long-term romantic relationships, all of which have ended, for one reason or another. I very definitely wanted the last one to continue, but it wasn’t to be. I’ve had a couple of medical issues which have necessitated lifesaving surgical intervention.
Hopefully I’ve now convinced you that your adaptability is something which is worth working on. I have some ideas for how we can all work to be more adaptable.
Reframing your thoughts
This is a big one in the CBT/NLP/self-help arena.
I’m not going to get too deep into the weeds with it all, but if you can harness this ability, then it’s going to make a massive difference to your life.
Hold on, what I’m about to say might be a bit triggering, for a lot of folks.
Ahem.
It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters. Epictetus
Now, hold your fire. For a start, it wasn’t even me that said it. Epictetus was a Greek Stoic philosopher, who was born into slavery and died in 135AD. So this isn’t a new idea, not at all.
You can imagine then, that Epictetus had plenty of reason to resent the hand that he’d been dealt in life. But he decided not to rail again his circumstances, and instead worked on his mindset.
If you think about the people you know, whether in person or people you know of who’re in the public eye, you can probably think of two people who’ve been through similarly traumatic events, whether it’s illness, the death of a loved one or some kind of financial issues.
Did they deal with it in the exact same way? Unlikely. Perhaps one of them seemed floored, totally knocked sideways by the experience, while the other seemed to meet the challenge head on and found a way not only to work through it, but perhaps even to flourish, to learn and to grow from it, somehow.
Sure, the circumstances weren’t exactly the same, I’m sure, but I hope you have two people in mind who’ve dealt with a similar experience but in very different ways.
How did they do that? It’s likely that they did it by reframing what the experience meant to them, and how they were going to deal with it.
Four years ago just as the pandemic was kicking off, I read the excellent book Loving What Is by Byron Katie. I recommend reading it, to help you with this idea of really analysing the meaning behind peoples’ actions and the things which happen in our lives.
Katie’s book contains a series of questions which you can ask yourself when facing a situation, but the biggest one of the lot is ‘is it true?’
I used it a lot towards the end of my last relationship, while trying to understand my ex’s motivations. As a person with ADHD, not bothering to clean the bathroom meant something very different in his case (a lack of executive function) than it would have if I’d done the same thing (resentment because it was always me? Laziness? Exhaustion? Take your pick).
(As a caveat, don’t use the above as I did as a reason to erode your own personal boundaries. Stick up for yourself, even as you seek to understand another’s motivations…)
Anyway. In every moment when faced with a decision about what an event means, we have a choice.
Lost your job? It’ll spur you on to find one you like better, forcing you out of the nest when you were wavering.
Suddenly single? If they weren’t all in on the relationship, then ‘see ya later’, and trust that you’ll find someone who is. And if they don’t come along for a while, it’s an opportunity to work on yourself, first.
You see the point, I hope. We always, always have a choice about how we’re going to frame things that happen to us, no matter how awful or earth-shattering they might seem at the time.
Even a terminal illness (Dame Deborah James) or the loss of a loved one (Candy Lightner, who set up Mothers Against Drink Driving) can be something you can use as a force for positive change.
Will it always be easy? Of course not. But will it be worth it? Absolutely.
Being an optimist
This one is definitely linked to the above. There’s an element of positivity in choosing to find something useful even in tragedy.
A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary. Lucius Annaeus Seneca
I’ve written before about how positivity (i.e. optimism) is a logical choice, so I won’t go too far into it here. Suffice it to say that I believe that optimism and positivity is a muscle which we can flex and strengthen, if we choose to.
We all have a genetic tendency to look on the negative side of things. You know it’s true. If you post something on a social media platform and get a hundred positive replies, and just one person says something negative, then THAT’S the one you’ll be lying in bed thinking about, at two in the morning.
Sadly, this is because throughout human history, those who’ve been fearful and had a tendency to assume the worst have often been the ones who’ve survived long enough to pass on their genes. I’ve said it before, but in case you’ve not read many of my articles yet (if not, why not?!) I’ll say it again: your cave person ancestor who saw a bush rustling and assumed it was because of a sabre tooth tiger rather than a fluffy bunny and legged it were the ones who didn’t get their faces ripped off.
This is why the prehistoric part of our brain starts to scream every time we even consider taking a step outside of our comfort zone, which can often lead to it becoming horrendously small, preventing us from being able to do anything we really want us to do, but which might push us out into a scary place, even for a few moments.
So, if it’s a very normal human tendency to think the worst, how do we become optimistic and positive?
Practice.
Every time you’re faced with a decision about how you’re going to process an event, stop and think ‘what are my options, here?’
Analysing the events of the past
Another daily practice which I’ve found truly transformative is journaling. It doesn’t have to be anything overly complex, just sitting down for a few minutes and talking to yourself about how your day is going. But as with many seemingly simple things, it can make a huge difference to your life.
Why?
Let me wind the clock back a few years. Like many people, I was an occasional drinker. That level really shot up during the pandemic, as I suspect it did for many people. Why? I was anxious to the extreme, which under the circumstances is totally understandable. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not judging people who drink alcohol, apart from anything else that would be hypocritical of me.
Anyway, when I came out of the pandemic, thankfully unscathed, unlike many people, I started to think more about why I was drinking.
I started to think that there had to be another way to deal with emotions, rather than drinking them away. Because after all, what we’re doing isn’t getting rid of those emotions, rather we’re just squashing them until the next morning, when we not only still have them to deal with, we also (increasingly so as we all get older) have a hangover to deal with! How is that helpful?
And then I came across the information that our emotions actually only last on average for 90 seconds. 🤯
Read that again. Ninety. Seconds. A mere minute and a half. And yet a lot of people use booze, food or other distraction tactics (TV, gaming, risky or unhealthy sexual encounters) to help us to turn our faces away from feelings which make us feel uncomfortable, don’t we?
And then we’re left dealing with the fallout from the thing we did to try to avoid the emotions, whether it’s a hangover, poor health, or just that crushing feeling that we’re not living our lives in the way we want to.
Isn’t it far better to just sit with those emotions, for the ninety seconds they last? And even better than that (thank you Fast Show!) is to choose to sit down and to really analyse where those feelings are coming from. What are our minds and our bodies actually trying to tell us, here?
As I’ve mentioned (to the point of being boring, I’m sure!) my relationship with my now ex broke up in October 2022. We spent almost six award months still living in the same house while we disentangled our finances and I sold the house to him, bought another one, and moved out.
When I moved into my own little place, I promised that I’d go for therapy if I felt stuck on any particular part of the grieving process. Because make no mistake, the end of a relationship can definitely be like a loved one dying. Even if things have become fraught and difficult with your ex-partner and you’re relieved on some level to be done with it all, you are still grieving the loss of the life you thought you were going to lead.
I heard someone on a podcast a while ago (apologies to whoever this is, I listen to a lot of self-help podcasts, and I can’t remember now who it was):
Grief is not a feeling of deep sadness, it’s a shift from one world view to another - we’re letting go of the life we *thought* we were leading and the person we *thought* we were when that other person was in our life, and moving onto another life, without them for whatever reason.
I’d been sober since June 2022, and I had (and still have) no intentions of starting to drink alcohol again. So I knew that as I struck out into a new solo life, I needed to do something to finally learn how to deal with my feelings, so I could work through them.
Which is where daily journaling came in. These days, I sit with my thoughts for an hour a day, and I make some notes on a paper pad. I don’t have any electronic devices to hand, although I might listen to Brain.fm on some headphones if I’m in the mood.
But when I first moved out, I used to just sit with a pad and a pen and ask myself questions. Especially if I was stuck on something.
I’d ask myself questions like:
Why do you want to send <name redacted> a text message?
I might use the 5 Whys technique to try to drill down into things. Or just keep asking myself questions (this is a version of The Socratic Method), until I got to what I felt was the root of the issue.
Meditation
Yep, I talk about this a lot as well. Meditation is closely linked to the ability to choose your reaction to things, which of course is a big part of both reframing and choosing to be an optimist. It also helps to give you the ability to sit down and analyse your feelings, i.e. to journal, rather than to react.
You can’t do any of those things if the moment an emotion hits you, you immediately react.
Before I carry on though, let’s talk about what meditation is and isn’t.
It isn’t emptying your mind and sitting in some kind of state where you have zero thoughts.
Your brain is made to create thoughts, to analyse the things going on around you and the events happening to you, and to problem solve and analyse stuff. It’s a fleshy computer, nestled between your ears. To simply tell it ‘stop thinking’ after however many years you’ve been on the planet would be a hiding to nothing.
Rather, the idea of meditation is to not allow yourself to get swept up in your thoughts, carried along on a tidal wave of analysis. Do you see now how practicing this and flexing that muscle would be helpful with reframing your thoughts, as well as deciding to be optimistic about things?
Meditation isn’t tied to a specific religion or world view. Some people might say that many forms of prayer are a form of meditation. Surely, while you’re communing with whatever higher power you believe in, you’re quietening your human worries and putting your faith into the hands of that power, that things will work out for you, aren’t you?
And it doesn’t have to be overly complicated.
You can just sit down, close your eyes, and count your inhalations. Try to get to 10. If a thought flashes across your mind and derails you or if you find yourself lost in thoughts of the past or imaginings of the future, just accept that, and refocus your thoughts on your breath.
Very, very simple.
You are allowing thoughts to exist, but you’re taking a step away and observing them, letting them flow past you and focusing on the breath, a thing which is happening right here and right now. I find it enormously freeing to let this constant stream of thoughts go for a while.
In the Bhagavad Gita, they call this ‘The Inner Witness’. It’s the idea that there are two beings coexisting in our heads. I like to think of this as our prehistoric, animalistic brain and our higher order human mind. The former is always trying to work out what things mean, how we can get what we want out of life, while the latter is thinking of lofty goals and ambitions. It’s possible for the higher order mind to just sit and observe the thoughts flowing through the animal brain and just… let them go.
There’s this guided meditation from Insight Timer which you can listen to for free (the app is also free) here if you want to explore this concept a little more.
Be warned, though. There’ll be a period of time during which it’s easy to assume that meditation is having very little effect on your day-to-day life, other than helping to lower your blood pressure and cortisol levels (and other stress hormones) while you’re doing it.
But one day, you’ll suddenly realise that a gap has formed between an emotion and your choice of reaction. Things which would have triggered you in the past, whether it’s your kids being annoying or an off-the-cuff comment by a friend, family member or co-worker, which would’ve instantly made you last out in annoyance, don’t seem to have as much of an effect on you. Instead of flaring up in anger, you’re able to take a breath and to choose your response.
And that gap is where reframing your thoughts, choosing to be optimistic and journaling can all sit.
So, what do you think? Do you think that thinking about and choosing to work on your adaptability/AQ might help you in your day-to-day life?
If you have hints and tips about how you choose to roll with the punches, rather than getting swept away, I’d love to hear them! ❤️