Adaptability ~ Coping vs Winning

Adaptability is about the powerful difference between adapting to cope and adapting to win." ~ Max McKeown

There's an old joke that goes like this: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. It's meant to illustrate that even the biggest, most daunting challenges can be tackled by breaking them down into manageable chunks and taking it step-by-step. I think this joke also captures the essence of one style of adaptability - adapting just to cope.

When life pelts you with elephant-sized problems, sometimes the best you can do is open wide and start gnawing away bit-by-bit, adapting however you need to just make it through. Maybe your dream job disappeared and you have to grudgingly take any work you can find to pay the bills. Maybe an injury forces you to relearn basic tasks in new, awkward ways. In situations like these, you don't have the luxury of holding out for the perfect, winning solution. You make the mental pivot to put one foot in front of the other, no matter how slow or inelegant. Survival first, ambition can come later.

This kind of coping adaptability is better than the alternative of sticking your head in the sand and refusing to adapt at all. At least you're making incremental progress, even if that elephant is taking forever to eat. And who knows, those baby steps today could gradually lead to bigger changes tomorrow once you've regained your footing.

The downside, however, is that a pure cope-and-survive mindset can start to feel like you're stuck in a rut, always settling for the bare minimum instead of striving for something better. It can breed complacency. There's a humor piece that shows Where this could eventually lead - the tombstone epitaph: "He survived." Not exactly an inspiring legacy!

This is where Max McKeown's quote pushes us toward a more ambitious, entrepreneurial approach to adaptability. He's saying don't just adapt enough to chew that elephant bit-by-bit and cope. Think bigger! Adapt in a way that actually allows you to win, to conquer that beast and end up the victor.

Winning adaptability starts with mindset. It's about looking at even the most daunting circumstances and asking "How can I use this to my advantage?" Instead of just playing defense and guarding against threats, you get proactive and creative. You shift your perspective to capitalize on opportunities within the change you're facing.

For example, maybe that job loss turned into your catalyst to finally pursue entrepreneurship. Or the injury led you to discover a new sport you're passionate about. It's about flipping the script and using the disruption as a launchpad rather than an anchor weighing you down.

To pull this off, you really have to lean into the core skills of adaptability:

First, ruthless objectivity about your starting point. You can't stick your head in the sand about the new reality you face, whether that's a job ending, a move to a new city, or anything else that shakes up your status quo. You have to stare it square in the eyes and absorb the facts, no sugar-coating.

Next, an ability to shed what's no longer relevant. The good ol' saying "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade" only works if you're willing to ditch the original lemon-free plan. You can't cling to your former assumptions or ways of operating. Winning adaptability means letting go of the outdated mindsets, skills, or processes that no longer apply in this new situation.

Then, a drive to rapidly study, skill up, and rebuild from the ground up. You become a perpetual student, willing to humble yourself and re-learn like a beginner all the knowledge or capabilities necessary for this new arena, even if it's unfamiliar territory.

Lastly, calculated risk-taking and a comfort with uncertainty. When you switch from coping to winning mode, there's no clear roadmap laid out. You have to be comfortable winging it for awhile, running experiments and seeing what unexpected paths emerge from this new uncharted landscape you're navigating.

That all may sound exhausting...and it is! Resetting your life is hard work. But whether you pick the coping or winning route, you'll face hard work either way. On the coping path, your hard labor is basically treading water, spending decades just maintaining an uninspiring status quo. At least if you choose winning adaptability, all that blood, sweat, and tears gets invested into reinventing yourself into something more fun and fulfilling.

The awesome side benefit of developing extreme adaptability for winning is that it makes you incredibly resilient in the face of change. You basically become undauntable. Nothing can throw you for too long because you've mastered the skill of rapidly rebooting your life when needed.

Bring on those curveballs - job losses, relocations, disruptions to your industry, you name it. You stop freaking out because a big part of your identity becomes the personal challenge of turning these disruptions into growth opportunities. You get a weird sort of excited buzz from it, like "Hmm, life just got interesting again! Let me break this down and capitalize!" Rather than avoiding change, you start actively courting it and putting yourself in turbulent waters on purpose. Because by now, you know adaptability gives you the power to ride those waves instead of being crushed by them.

I should pause here to clarify that I'm not saying coping itself is bad or to feel ashamed if you go through phases where survival really does need to take precedence. We all face periods of hurt, anger, grief, exhaustion or crisis where coping is the wise short-term move. My grandma used to say "You can't keep remodeling a burning building." If you're in the middle of that metaphorical house fire, of course you aren't going to be focused on your dream reno just yet. You need to get the blaze under control first.

The key is having the awareness to recognize when you've stabilized enough to make the psychological pivot toward a winning, ambition-driven adaptability. Stay in pure coping mode too long and it becomes a self-imposed prison, welding your mind shut to opportunities. So give yourself the grace to cope when truly needed. But then make the conscious choice to graduate from coping to winning. To open your mind to the exciting new possibilities that could arise from your latest life renovation.

Here's an analogy to illustrate the difference: Let's say you go to the doctor because you've been having crazy stress and headaches lately. In the cope scenario, the doctor gives you a medication to dull the pain and you go home feeling a little better. Crisis averted - you're coping. But you didn't solve the root cause so those symptoms could easily return. In the win scenario, you dig deeper for lifestyle changes to permanently fix those headaches. Maybe that means changing jobs, exercising more, meditating each morning. Whatever it takes to not just temporarily mask the pain, but eliminate it by transitioning to a healthier overall lifestyle. That's adapting to win.

There's a quirky little phenomena in nature that I think personifies these two styles of adaptability - the domestic house cat versus its wild big cat cousins. When life gets tough for a house cat, it'll hunker down and start coping. It may hide under the bed, stop grooming, mask its fear by appearing lazy. A defense mechanism, but not doing much to truly change its circumstances or position itself for thriving. Contrast that to big cats like tigers or lions. When their situation shifts in an undesirable way, they get proactive, strategic, and channel that powerhouse energy into orchestrating a full-on environmental reset. Expanding territory, migrating to new hunting grounds, staking their claim over more resources. Actively putting themselves in the most winning position possible, not passively reacting.

To be fair, it's a lot easier for the big cats to make these power adaptations. As the alphas of their domain, they aren't encumbered by confines like leashes, fences, traffic laws or landlords. We poor domesticated humans are often more constrained in our response flexibility. Financial obligations, legal regulations, family commitments - we often can't just pick up and conquer new territory as

smoothly as a lion pride can.

But I actually think that heightened constraint makes our adaptability for winning even more critical and impressive when we pull it off. Big cats are just doing what comes naturally. But for us, breaking cycles of coping and remaking ourselves against all odds is an act of incredible mental resilience.

Here's an example to illustrate: Let's say you have a traumatic accident that leaves you with permanent disabilities like being wheelchair-bound. Whoa, major life disruption! A coping response would be feeling sorry for yourself, withdrawing from the world out of shame or hopelessness, and just resigning yourself to a diminished life of getting by.

But let's look at the winning adaptability path...

First, radical acceptance of your new circumstances and an ability to grieve what's been lost while still maintaining hope. Denial or excessive wallowing won't serve you.

Want to learn more about the power of adaptability?

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