How Change Comes In Our Lives, How To Adapt And Become Super Comfortable With Uncertainty

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How Does Change Come?

The different ways change can come. There’s one in which we, ourselves, are the proponents of change.

1. You’re simply not OK with status quo and you want out.
2. You’ve redefined what success means to you.
3. Your sense of personal fulfillment has changed.
4. Your ideas of making an impact have evolved.
5. The reality of your circumstances have changed. Ex: You became a father.
6. Your priorities have changed.
7. Your short term goals and your long term aspirations have changed.
8. New opportunities have opened up that give you a chance for larger impact.
9. You’ve new insights as you grow yourself each day and want to put them into use.
10. You’ve acquired new skills that want to be put into use.
11. Your current job feels irrelevant to your new personal ambitions.

There’s a second way, when things out of our control begin to rapidly evolve around us. Thereby, bringing in change in a forceful way.

Here are a few examples.

1. An invisible, deadly virus has overtaken your world.
2. Unforeseen adversity at work or sudden personal health crisis.
3. The ecosystem that you’re part of as a team member is changing, leaving you with no choice but to seek out other opportunities.
4. The company you work for has adopted a new vision that doesn’t match your personal philosophy.

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The Essential Skill Of Adaptability: 

An essential life skill called adaptability is what we can use to navigate change and uncertainty. It’s our determination to build a broad database of knowledge and backup plans. Adaptability is our planning that helps us visualize all possible scenarios and outcomes. It’s our understanding that we can use other people’s experience as a foundation for our knowledge.

Adaptability is a mindset because we can choose to tell ourselves that it’s okay to:

1. Get started without knowing everything
2. Not practice for all possible scenarios
3. Not know what’s next
4. Slow down
5. Change course
6. Seek help
7. Say no
8. Redefine success
9. Change our mind

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Suffering and Happiness By Pema Chödrön:

We look for happiness in all the wrong places. The Buddha called this habit “mistaking suffering for happiness.” We become habituated to reaching for something to ease the edginess of the moment. Thus, we become less and less able to reside with even the most fleeting uneasiness or discomfort. What begins as a slight shift of energy—a minor tightening of our stomach, a vague indefinable feeling that something bad is about to happen—escalates into addiction. This is our way of trying to make life predictable. Because we mistake what always results in suffering to be what will bring us happiness, we remain stuck in the repetitious habit of escalating our dissatisfaction. ~ From 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion By Pema Chödrön

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