How to turn a threat to life into an opportunity to live

Here’s a proposition that - if true - could change everything for you:

Raise your Adaptability Intelligence, and you’ll be able to see change - even negative change - as the best chance you’re ever going to get to find out what you’re really capable of achieving.

Some claim. But does it stand up to scrutiny when change doesn’t just threaten to disrupt your life, but to end it? Well unfortunately, I can answer that question – twice.

The downside of having your tonsils out as an adult is that nobody offers you ice-cream. All I was given instead was the news that I had cancer. Happily, tonsil cancer put me at the lucky end of the unlucky spectrum, as it only has junior off-peak entry-level membership of the TheBigC Club. That said, there were some dark days during radiotherapy.

To keep your head perfectly still when they’re zapping your neck with X-rays, you have to wear a rigid mask (think Silence of the Lambs) that is so tight you can’t open your eyes. And when they bolt it to the MRI table you’re lying on, it sounds like shots being fired. It’s bad enough that the radiotherapy makes you throw up, but the mask only has a breathing hole for your nose.

A few weeks after the all-clear, I was out running when I felt a heavy pain in my chest. ‘These,’ said Cardio-man, pointing on the video to the many places where the motorways around my heart had been reduced to footpaths ‘will be your demise - quite possibly, quite soon’. I wondered how much training they receive on giving bad news to people who are in no fit state to receive bad news.

Four weeks ago, and four months after my triple bypass, I ran a 5km race. Well, when I say ‘ran’, I mean ‘shuffled’ - but it’s a start. I’ve finally woken up to the fact that I’m not immortal (who knew?), and I’m determined to ‘live better’.

One of my biggest findings in researching the High Performance Change Programme was the discovery that fear and anxiety are different. And key amongst those differences is that fear makes you act without thinking, and anxiety makes you think without acting. And that means we need to treat them differently, like this for example:

When I was told I had cancer, it was a sudden shock. Despite that, I managed to switch into Discovery mode - one of the antidotes to fear - that says run towards the source of your fear, not away from it. So whilst the amazing NHS machine sprung to life around me, I really tried to remember everything I was being told. (Luckily my wife was with me and she’s got the kind of memory that makes her difficult to win arguments against.) Had I given in to my primal fight or flight response, I’d probably have missed the bit where they said I had an 80% chance of survival.

But the angina was different. In the months between ‘ooh, that feels a bit odd’ and ‘demise…quite soon’, I wasn’t sure if I had anything to worry about. So obviously I worried about that. But rather than bottle it up inside, I self-administered the anxiety antidote of Openness. Sharing my worries helped me feel like this wasn’t a journey I was making alone. And I can tell you, that really makes a difference. The energy of others helps pull you out of the hole that your vivid imagination is digging for you as it tries to bury your future.

I developed the High Performance Change Programme to help people enjoy change as much as I do. But it hadn’t really occurred to me that I myself would need it. The bad news is that all of us will face unplanned, unwanted and unavoidable change at some point – from health issues at home to the imposition of a new IT system at work. The good news is that you can mentally prepare for that, so you’re ‘already ready’ for whatever happens next.

You can, for example, just give in to your primal instincts to fight the cause of your fear, which requires no thought whatsoever. Or you can learn how to fight your fear itself, giving you the ability to think at the very moment you need to most.

Any change is a challenge that will make you either stronger or weaker. The difference depends on the level of your Adaptability Intelligence. My mind is already stronger because of what my body has been through, and I’m looking after both more consciously and carefully now.

And that validates the proposition. Whereas resilience is defined as having the ability to bounce back, Adaptability Intelligence is about developing the skills to bounce higher.

If you’d like to become more adaptable to change, we should talk. The HPC Programme is delivered both as an e-learning course for individuals, and in-person to corporate leadership teams. Either way, check us out at www.highperformancechange.com and I look forward to connecting with you soon!