Experts consider adaptability to be a “skill for success.” At the same time, we also hear messages to be consistent and persistent. Constantly changing your mind or acting on new ideas is deemed flaky and unreliable. So what exactly is the difference between being adaptable and being flaky?

The first step is having a clear objective in mind. The specifics of the objective may change over time.  You may have to alter your expectations around what that objective looks like or when that objective will be achieved. But the general idea of that objective has to remain the same. For instance, you may have the objective of having a family, learning a language, or selling a business for $100 million. The objective may change in the following ways: 

• You decide that you want a family, and you imagine it in a specific way (two kids, in the same neighbourhood you grew up in) but you realize that that family may not look the way you expected (4 kids, a completely new country).
• You decide that you want to learn a language, so you can impress people with your German language skills, but you realize that you’re only interested in learning German, so you can read German philosophy in their original languages. 
• You decide that you want to sell a business for $100 million, but you realize that while you want to own a multi-million-dollar company, you don’t necessarily just want to make a profit. 

When your objective is clear, your actions make sense to the people around you and your environment, allowing people to help you along the way, even if the specifics of your goals also change along the way. 

Flakiness, on the other hand, is saying you want a family one minute and then saying you don’t want kids or responsibilities the next minute. You have every right to change your mind, but it makes it harder to identify the things you want, and for the things you want to identify you. Flakiness would be saying that you want to learn German and then telling everyone you’d prefer to learn Cantonese. It would be saying you want to build and sell a business for $100 million and then saying you don’t care to be an entrepreneur and would like a stable 9 to 5. 

When you understand this essential difference between adaptability and flakiness, it’s easier to understand the key components of Adaptability, which are: 

• Component 1: Demonstrate responsibility
• Component 2: Persist and persevere
• Component 3: Regulate your emotions when appropriate
• Component 4: Set or adjust your goals and expectations
• Component 5: Plan and prioritize
• Component 6: Seek self-improvement

Consider Component 1: Demonstrate responsibility. You can demonstrate responsibility by deciding that only you have the power to learn what it takes to be a good parent and partner, despite the uncertainty of life, your kids’ temperament, and the future, since you will be the one interacting with your family day in and day out. You can demonstrate responsibility by deciding that only you have the power to put in a certain amount of practice towards your language goals every day, even when your brain isn’t retaining the information as quickly as you would like. You can demonstrate responsibility by recognizing that if you want the legal rights that come with owning a company (like money), you’ll also have to deal with the hassle of not always knowing what to do, putting in extra work when you don’t get back as much as you’d anticipated, dealing with unreasonable customers, and putting systems in place to regulate your employees’ activities. 

Once you start to take responsibility, you start to measure reality based on an honest assessment of your skills, abilities, emotions, past experiences, and triggers. For instance, the more you practice patience in your effort to become a parent, the more you’ll know your limits, and what will push you to the point of acting in a way that you don’t want to act. Understanding this will help you recognize the need to build community or the need to find a partner who can communicate openly, so you both can take over for each other once you’re getting close to the limits that you have identified within yourself. Once you start to take responsibility, you’ll know how long it actually takes you to memorize 10 vocabulary words and then recall them easily. This familiarity with your own body and mind will make your own body and mind less frightening or overwhelming the next time you have to sit down to memorize 10 vocabulary words. Demonstrating responsibility means that once you deal with your first difficult customer, you’ll either know your limits for the next customer or you’ll realize that it’s not as bad or as scary as you thought. 

If you’re uncertain what your actual abilities are, and you want to understand them before committing to something, I would suggest using the Pomodoro Method to help you out.