Experts in mind-body medicine have shown that people who are master adapters live longer and healthier lives than others.
- How come? Because they counter-balance the stress hormones (that wither down our bodies) with positive attitudes and behaviors that release the feel good hormones (that restore the balance of our cells, organs, and tissues).
Many health experts define health itself as adaptability
In the past, changed happened much more slowly and our need to adapt was much less
- One example of the acceleration of change
- Starting at 1 AD it took 1500 years for the amount of information in the world to double
- It is now doubling at the rate of once in every two years
No wonder we are scrambling to keep up.
Re-source: Reassessment
Companies all know that their employee’s capacity to change is one of the key factors in business success.
- According to the strategic management research
center – the failure rate of mergers and acquisitions is as much as 60-70%
- Not because it isn’t a good idea to bring to organization together to create efficiencies and synergy, but because the people in them fail to adapt to the change circumstances.
- Many time it failed because employees kept using the old system they knew rather than learn the new one.
Examples happen every day in our lives
- Many people are looking for help adapting to new positions or circumstances where they must drive results in a different way than they have before.
- The behaviors that have gotten them where they are simply not working now
- Those without work need even more support in learning new skills and attitudes
Resisting these kind of changes wear down our bodies, tax our minds and deflates our spirits.
- We keep doing the things that have always worked before with depressingly, diminishing results.
- We expend precious energy looking for someone to blame (ourselves, another person, or the world)
- We worry obsessively, we get stuck in the past, get lost in bitterness and anger, or we fall into denial. “Everything is fine. I don’t have to do anything different.”
- We also get stuck in magical thinking that someone or something will rescue us from having to change
- We don’t want to have to leave the cozy comfort of the known and familiar for the crazy wilderness of that which we have never experienced.
craving and resource from “AdaptAbility” – How to survive change you didn’t ask for – by M.J. Ryan
