“Houston, we’ve had a problem.”
Jack Swigert, Astronaut, Apollo 13
On April 14, 1970, the lives of three American astronauts hung in the balance when an explosion took place aboard their spacecraft, 200,000 miles from Earth. As Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert scrambled to stop a massive oxygen leak, the team at Mission Control began to assess the damage and figure out a way to adapt to the new circumstances.
Ironically, despite the chaos swirling around, when you listen to the original recording of the moments just after the explosion, you hear calm voices. Even faced with dire and immediate peril, the astronauts and those supporting them are already directing their energy toward what has abruptly become their new mission: working together against the clock to develop a solution that will bring them back safely.
Most of us will never experience a crisis of that magnitude, one in which lives depend on our ability to make split-second judgments. But we will face a moment of difficulty and challenge. It may be an unexpected shift in the environment, a quickly escalating organizational problem, even an inexplicable loss of personal confidence.
It’s not a question of if, but when. And that’s when adaptive energy becomes a critical resource.
Adaptive energy is what gives us the courage to persist in the face of failure, the resilience to bring our best effort at the worst of times, the strength to stay focused on our goals even through pangs of fear or clouds of uncertainty.
Cultivating adaptive energy means practicing the self-awareness to understand that we can never control all the circumstances around us or have the answer to every situation, listening to and assessing multiple sources, and learning to bring those sources together effectively to develop creative solutions.
The unexpected is already moving toward you. You can’t prevent it, but you can prepare for it—by beginning now to build your capacity for adaptive energy.
