Adaptability, Why I think it’s important.

“Adaptability” a word that we hear all too often, but what does it really mean when we apply it to our everyday lives?  

The Oxford definition of the word adaptability is, "the quality of being able to adjust to new conditions."

Adaptability is a word that I use a lot when I find myself in job interviews. I always emphasize to the interviewer that one of my strongest work traits are "adapting to my environments" like I'm a chameleon. This is also coming from someone who has been in the workforce for about three years now, which doesn't really sound like a long time at all. But throughout the last three years, I've totaled about seven different jobs and that's minus all the little side jobs I did in terms of my makeup artistry. You're probably thinking to yourself, "wow, this girl can't hold down a job" and you'd be semi-correct. But the truth is, is that I always thought about who I was and who I wanted to be. 

Let me tell you about my very first job at 18. I was a hostess at a restaurant that doubled as a sports bar. But what made this first-job-experience interesting was that it was in 2021, in the midst of a global pandemic. The job description for a hostess would change drastically when the government of Ontario would imply a dine-in regulation where all guests needed to be double vaccinated. Those who wanted to dine in needed to show up with a Covid passport (a document showing that they were vaccinated) and a copy of their ID. And who would be the one to meet them face-to-face to check these documents and ID's? You guessed it, me. 

I hated it. I absolutely hated it. Of course there were many people who made my job a lot smoother (shoutout to them, thank you!). Some people had folders with their QR codes, documents, and ID's all-in-one, so there was no fuss at the door. But at the time, all I could think of was how this wasn't the job I applied for. I didn't want to be the COVID-passport-security-lady, I just wanted to seat people, buss some tables, then after 7 hours of doing that with a smile on my face, go home to my rabbits and sleep. But no, I felt like I was thrown into the deep end of customer service. If customer service means being patient with people, then that would be amplified for the 18 year old girl who just graduated from a sad high school experience, and is now having to deal with angry, anti-vaccine, customers at the doors of a restaurant. It was hard and I'd often complained to myself how stressful it was because I just wanted to make my money and go home. Nonetheless, I learned that I just needed to show up and know that there were ways that I could make this experience better for myself. One of the things I realized was that, I didn't make these rules, the government did. And no, I'm not the type to blame the government for the situations I'm in all the time, but I understood that I could only blame myself for how I reacted in positions where I needed to control the situation and failed to do so. After dealing with so many different customers in different scenarios, I learned that having an upbeat, happy-go-lucky, kind of "that girl" attitude would be the attitude I needed to channel most. You know when they say "fake it till you make it" well this was that coming into play. Maybe I wasn't the happiest working there at the time, but I had a big decision to make every time I showed up and it was, "am I going to be the hostess who visibly hates her job or the one who keeps it light and positive despite the ruthless and impatient customers who bark at her for not seating them because of the rules she didn't make?" And I feel reluctant to use the work 'bark' because I feel like it has a rude tone to it, but because I can write openly and truthfully, that's really what it was like. Nonetheless, that was my first job where I realized how crucial it was to adapt to a situation. If I chose to not care about my job, I wouldn't be who I am today. 

My work ethic changed when my thinking towards difficult situations changed. That is what adapting would begin to look like for me.  Eventually, I decided that I needed to get out and experience something new; in a different environment, where I could learn something different whilst applying this new founded skill and way of thinking. I had only been a hostess there for 9 months or so, until I found an opportunity to work in Downtown, Toronto. I was ready to get out of that restaurant, but I knew that I had learned a lot by working there because looking back, I realize how crucial it is to reframe a problem so that finding a solution will be easier. 

I wanted to write about the importance of adaptability because I currently find myself in a situation where I feel like some things are at a holt and I don't know where to go from here. But through practicing adaptability and adopting that new way of thinking, the way I see difficult situations aren't so bad at all. Of course it's easy for terrible and unforeseen situations to consume us and all of the sudden we're in a pit of despair and confusion. Because another thing that's easy to do is to criticize ourselves and others and pick apart ourselves and others, for situations that we can't control. But truthfully, what we can control is our thinking and our response. 

As an Industrial Design student, a part of the design process is asking ourselves 'how might we...' questions. For example "how might we design this to fit this person’s needs? How might we use this idea to reach a larger audience? How might we redesign this to fit the climate crisis that we're facing globally?" I ask myself these questions because I need to understand my audience, my users, and the world that I live in. But take that into a completely different context, for example my personal life (lol), and now I'm working on how I can understand myself better. It's important that we are aware of ourselves and how we act in scenarios we can't control because our response can trigger two types of energies: positive or negative. It's easy to act irresponsibly when the world doesn't seem fair. It would've been easier for my 18 year old self to do the bare minimum and even just quit altogether and look for a job elsewhere. Forget being there for 9 months, I could've cut my stay short and been there for 4. But through adaptive thinking, you not only reframe the problem, you change the world around you. That reminds me of a quote from Wayne Dyer which reads,  

“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” 

When we actively choose to change the way we think to understand situations better, we choose for the world to see us better too. Everything we do affects everyone else around us and it takes an adaptive mind to understand that. You may not be a big influential figure, or a public speaker, or a celebrity with a large following. You may just consider yourself to be a normal everyday person, but no matter who you are, you play a vital role in the healing of our world. Every day, regardless of if you are sinking in loads of debt, or you lost a loved one, or you had just been broken up with, or you have invested your time in something that felt like a waste, you must challenge these with empathy and adaptability for yourself. Be kind to yourself in tricky situations because kindness understands and from there you grow to adapt. It is not easy to choose this way of thinking and it takes a strong heart to choose to adapt.