Ryan - Adaptability: how to survive change you didnt ask for

If you're struggling and think that one more book can't possibly make a difference, think again. M.J. Ryan has the rare gift of breaking things down into clear pieces that can be tackled.

Laura Berman Fortgang, author of Now What?: 90 Days to a New Life Direction

You are always more resilient than you think. In her motivational and optimistic book, M.J. Ryan shows you how to face the unexpected and use what you've learned to be happier in life, in love, and at work.

Nell Merlino, leader of Make Mine a Million $ Business and author of Stepping Out of Line

The change you didn't ask for has a way of smacking you between the eyes. M.J. Ryan's book teaches us how we can get through the pain more quickly and extract greater meaning from the nonnegotiable events of life.

Ellyn Spragins, author of What I Know Now: Letters to My Younger Self

How to Survive Change...You Didn't Ask For is not only M.J. Ryan's best book, but the most accessible and practical book yet on the subject of change to date. It contains a compendium of best practices from cross-sector disciplines and research regarding transition and change in our lives. Nowhere will you find a more inspirational, realistic, comforting and accessible book that reduces fear and reopens possibility, curiosity, and creative solutions unimagined during the most challenging of times!

Angeles Arrien, Ph.D., cultural anthropologist and author of The Second Half of Life and Living in Gratitude

First published in 2014 by Conari Press, an imprint of

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

With offices at:

665 Third Street, Suite 400

San Francisco, CA 94107

www.redwheelweiser.com

Copyright 2009, 2014 by M.J. Ryan

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages. This is a paperback edition of AdaptAbility, first published in hardcover in 2009, ISBN: 978-0-7679-3262-2.

ISBN: 978-1-57324-600-2

The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge and credit the following for the right to reprint material in this book:

Stephen Levine for excerpt from Guided Meditations, Explorations and Healings, 1991 by Stephen Levine. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

Cover design by Jim Warner

Cover image Westend61 / SuperStock

Interior by Frame25 Productions

Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro and Gotham

Printed in the United States of America.

EBM

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Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.

Dorothy Allison

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

Charles Darwin

THESE ARE CHALLENGING TIMES. If you're reading this, chances are you're confronting some change you never asked forperhaps a loss of job. Or some dream. Maybe you have to learn to work in new ways or find a new place to live. I'm sorry if it's difficult. I'm hoping that within these pages you'll find the support and the practices you need to successfully ride the wave of this change, whatever it may be.

Take comfort that you're not alone. In my work as a thinking partner, I spend a lot of time speaking to people in all walks of life, from the CEO of a joint venture in Saudi Arabia to a stay-at-home mom who needs to enter the workforce. From where I sit, whether they are searching for a job, looking for funding for a startup, trying to stay relevant at age sixty in a large corporation, dealing with lost savings, coping with a big new job that has one hundred direct reports, struggling to get donations for a nonprofit, or fearing losing their home due to unemployment, people of all ages and walks of life are scrambling to deal with vast changes happening today in every part of the world.

Take the publishing industry, where I've spent thirty years, first as an editor of a weekly newspaper, then as an editor of monthly magazines, a book publisher, and now, for the past seven years, an author. None of the companies I worked for are still in existence. Neither are the distributors. One of my dear friends, a top writer at the Washington Post, just took a buyout because the newspaper can't afford to pay top talenteven the most prestigious papers are drowning in red ink. How we create, distribute, market, and promote media products is completely different from even a few years ago. Where it is all heading we truly have no idea. Phil Bronstein, former publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle, declared recently, Anybody who professes to be able to tell you what things will be like in ten years is on some kind of drug.

And that's only one corner of the evolving big picture. In 2006, creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson, speaking at the TED conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design) stated, We have no idea of what's going to happen in the future. No one has a clue about what the world will be like in even five years.

The only thing any of us can know for certain is that life will continue to change at a rapid pace because the world has gotten more complex and interdependent. Organizational consultant Peter Vail calls this permanent white water, referring to a time of ongoing uncertainty and turbulence. We can't see exactly where these changes are headed or where the submerged rocks are, yet when we're tossed out of the boat, we want to make sure to swim, not sink. Experienced rafters know they're going to get dumped out at some point. The difference between them and the rest of us is that they're prepared to get bounced out and to recover swiftly. They expect the white water. And so should we.

Have you ever encountered that life stress list that rates changes such as moving, death of a spouse, getting married, etc.? The folks who created that list in the 1960s estimate that life is 44 percent more stressful now than it was fifty years ago, and they came up with that estimateI have no idea howbefore the 2008 global meltdown. I'm not sure we even want to know the new number!

We find ourselves in uncharted waters. How do you cope with the falloff in business of your tiling company due to the implosion of the housing industry, as an acquaintance was telling me about yesterday? Or what should my twenty-three-year-old client do about not being able to drive to work because she can't afford the gas because she gets paid a pittance at her wonderful social services job? What should my husband's fifty-five-year-old friend do now that his job has been rendered obsolete because people aren't buying CDs anymore thanks to the proliferation of downloadable music? What should a sixty-year-old friend of mine do about being upside down on her house? What should a dentist I know do about the huge debt he's carrying from paying for rehab for his son? Which is the more stable situationthe job that my client has had for fifteen years with a company that has just been sold to a conglomerate and is experiencing a shrinking profit margin, or the opportunity with a start-up with seemingly greater risks and rewards?

When people present me with such dilemmas, I don't pretend to know the answers. I'm not a crystal ball reader. Nor do I understand every industry trend. Or how a given company should be positioning itself. What I do know a lot about and what I can help you to do, too, is to develop the necessary mind-sets and actions to adapt well to whatever changes come your way. Knowing that you need to change, or even wanting to change, isn't enough. Without rewiring your thinking and knowing what actions to take, all you get is wish and want and, often, stuckness. I want to help you