If you really want to find out where you’re going, get a flat tyre

The weekend before last, my wife Sarah, our teenage daughters and myself drove the short distance into Cambridge to wander the streets of the world-famous colleges and to do some clothes shopping (although not necessarily in that order). First stop was a coffee shop, of course, where I found myself laughing so hard at something a daughter had said that Sarah double-checked it wasn’t a paramedics’ strike day, and the lovely people on the next table passed me their napkins.

So last weekend we thought we’d tempt fate and do it all over again. This was a mistake. The journey got off to a Christmas card start, with white trees and frosty fields in minus 4 degrees. But given the icy conditions, as soon as a tyre pressure warning light came on, I stopped at the next petrol station for air.

Now either I turned into the Incredible Hulk or the temperature had made everything brittle, because somehow I managed to break the tyre valve. I then had about 10 seconds to come to terms with my new reality before the tyre looked like it had melted onto the icy forecourt.

At that point Sarah appeared at the back of the car, opened the boot and started searching for the jack. She swiftly despatched the children to the adjacent coffee shop and got out the manual. Now at this point I could bang on about how the tyre release mechanism under the car must have been designed by the creators of the Crystal Maze. And that when we did finally free up the spare we knew how Arthur must have felt when he removed the sword. But to cut to the chase, more than an hour later we were back on the road.

I try not to work at weekends, but of course the subject of Adaptability is never far from my mind. And here I was on a cold Sunday morning watching Sarah epitomising ‘the ability to adjust to new situations’. No ‘woe is me’ because her morning had been derailed. No giving up in the face of a novel and possibly impossible challenge, even when our hands started to freeze.

As our girls will both start learning to drive soon, it’s no harm for them to realise that cars aren’t always reliable. Sarah and I were quietly chuffed (ok not entirely quietly) that we’d figured out the whole thing together (of which the actual changing of the tyre was but the work of a moment). And we were lucky that our first tyre change on this car was on a sunny flat quiet petrol station forecourt, not the hard shoulder of a rainy motorway at night.

Veteran Craig Lundberg, who, when he lost his sight in the Iraq War, said ‘well that’s it then, let’s get on with this’. That was certainly the mindset Sarah displayed, and for the most part mine too (although we’ll conveniently forget that my knee-jerk response was to try to jam the air hose back into the broken valve a couple of times, despite the 110db hissing evidence it wasn’t working).

We’re all going to have our journeys side-swiped by flat tyres. The questions for you are, when that happens, do you have the curiosity to figure out what to do, the courage to have a go, and the velocity to get on with it?

In a world that’s changing fast, I can’t think of three better questions to predict your success, can you?

Rich Alderton specialises in Adaptability Intelligence, so to learn how to become more adaptable call us on 07873 823 800, email us or complete our enquiry form.

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