Have you ever envied those who, no matter what emergencies they encounter, can deal with them quickly and solve the problem appropriately?
Or do you want to be someone who has the ability to adapt to changes in objective circumstances and know how to solve problems?
I believe anyone wants to be such a great person. Because this is a manifestation of one's own ability.
When I watched Jackie Chan's movies when I was a child, I always felt that Jackie Chan's role in the movie was omnipotent; no matter what difficulties he fell into, he always had a way to solve it.
And the tools to solve the problem are simply "within reach". An umbrella and a coat can be played tricks by him to help him achieve his goals.
I wonder, in real life, is there really such a powerful person?
Of course.
According to psychologist and professional researcher Anders Eriksen, people with strong adaptive thinking skills can identify unexpected situations, quickly consider various possible outcomes, and do the best possible response.
While most people with enough skills and abilities can generally excel in everyday environments, they can also maintain high levels of performance in unpredictable or stressful situations, which will make them stand out from the crowd.
Think of neurosurgeons, firefighters or soldiers, who can quickly adapt to accidental cerebral hemorrhage during surgery, and they will make adjustments and complete tasks according to the changes in the current situation.
To excel at the highest level, you need to be good at thinking, but you also need to think flexibly and quickly – in other words, you need to be able to think adaptively.
According to relevant research in psychology, the 3 main components or elements of adaptive thinking are:
Effective planning
Carefully monitor progress
The ability to flexibly change thinking and behavior to adapt to changes in the environment
Adaptive thinking isn't just for people in high-risk industries.
In fact, anyone can learn to harness the power of adaptive thinking to improve their performance in any important field.
Whether you want to be more proficient at playing the guitar, completing sales, investing in a startup, or communicating with the people you love, exercising your adaptive thinking skills will help you go from average or ordinary to great and excellent.
So how do you do that? Here are three useful exercises.
Each of these exercises is based on one of the three elements of adaptive thinking – effective planning, monitoring, and cognitive flexibility.
If you can keep practicing them, your improvisational abilities will get stronger and stronger.
Visualization and guided image practice has long been an important part of the training programs of good athletes.
The basic practice is to imagine and rehearse the performance you want in as much detail as possible before actually trying it, especially by introducing as much sensory detail as possible.
One of the main benefits of positive visualization exercises is that they solidify and clarify your mental representation of the skills you need.
Having a more detailed, clearer mental picture of what your performance should look like can help you notice when you deviate from it and adjust faster.
These positive imaginative exercises are great, but building a negative visualization program — imagining potential obstacles or setbacks that may arise during a performance — will make you more resilient.
The negative visualization routine has two parts:
1. List potential obstacles or unexpected setbacks that may occur during the performance;
2. Learn to visualize and rehearse your performance in your head, and then during each practice, imagine working in one of these obstacles and see how you react to it and the actions you would ideally take.
Suppose you are going to give a PPT presentation at the company tomorrow.
Normally, of course, you want to have an ideal performance, so you're well prepared for it.
But this preparation is best to include "unexpected situations", such as unusual questions from others, challenging comments, answering certain technical difficulties, etc.
This "negative hypothesis" is good, and when obstacles arise, you can use the methods you have practiced to solve the problem.
For example, many readers ask me what I am talking about when dating girls.
If you can prepare in advance, what you can talk about, what you can't talk about; how to talk will create a pleasant atmosphere, how to talk will make the other party angry, etc., these are all well conceived, there is a visual practice preparation, then you will be much easier.
If you want to achieve negative visualization behavior, then get into the habit of practicing negative visualization before some low-risk work.
For example, in a daily company meeting, imagine what will happen if you take the initiative to speak, and then be prepared to respond.
After having experience, go to high-risk things to practice.
The second element of adaptive thinking is the ability to carefully monitor your progress during performances or practices.
As discussed above, this skill depends in part on a good mental representation you possess. But perhaps the most critical part of monitoring your performance is your ability to concentrate.
Because high-performance tasks require high cognitive requirements, there is almost no idle mental bandwidth.
Without the strong ability to focus during a duration, it's nearly impossible to monitor your performance while performing a task.
And the best way to develop this ability to focus intensely and consistently is to "work deeply."
"Deep work" is defined as "professional activity in a state of undisturbed concentration that pushes your cognitive abilities to the limit." ”
The key phrase is "push your cognitive abilities to the limits."
To really improve your ability to focus, you have to work at a high enough level so that your focus can really be challenged and forced to grow to accommodate higher levels of achievement.
In order to do this, I recommend starting with the so-called deep work sprint, which is to do some short exercises continuously in deep work.
For example, the PPT speech mentioned above in the debriefing work is a matter that requires your in-depth work.
In order for yourself to perform better on this matter, you must be able to fully exert your focus. Therefore, practice a small part of the PPT manuscript in a short period of time, with maximum attention.
For example, you can take two or three slides out of a PowerPoint document and try to focus all your attention on what rhetoric you use to transition to the next slide.
You can exercise yourself to transition like, "After talking about this, let's see the next one," or "The next sharing is the highlight, such as the following slide..." and so on.
It's important to choose a relatively short activity to exercise your ability to work deeply, because in the beginning, your ability to focus is difficult to develop.
Repeat this "sprint" until it is no longer challenging to stay focused for a long time. Then select another part of the presentation and use it to practice the deep work sprint.
In this way, you can build the ability to stay highly focused and focused, which is invaluable for your ability to effectively monitor your performance and make adjustments as needed.
The third and final element or skill of adaptive thinking is the ability to flexibly transform thinking and behavior to accommodate unexpected changes in the environment.
Unfortunately, most of us have a hard time doing this. Because from childhood to adulthood, very few of us have been trained in this aspect of thinking.
Over decades of school and job training, most of us have been taught how to think in a specific way called convergent thinking (convergent thinking).
That is, when we are faced with a problem, we must think of the correct answer according to the laws of logic:
How to convince customers to buy the company's products?
On a rainy day, how to keep yourself from getting wet by the rain?
What are the best ways to increase your income?
All of these questions are reflections on a single answer or outcome. While this skill is certainly important, we often forget that its twin brother is divergent thinking.
Divergent thinking is the mental muscle that is considered the foundation of creativity. It involves generating multiple solutions or possibilities based on a single data point or idea:
Draw a picture that you think is interesting;
Write an essay about your views on life;
What can I do to make girls happy?
For these questions, we all use divergent thinking to some extent. But for most of us, this "use" is not enough to be a skill.
Divergent thinking is exactly the psychological muscle needed to quickly adapt to unexpected changes in high-performance activities, because we will face many situations without standard answers in our daily lives, such as:
How do you respond during the pitching process when a potential customer asks a question you haven't considered?
When the other person changes his design, what kind of response will you take?
Given the unexpected evidence, how will the thrust of the lawyer's closing statement change?
In order to develop our divergent thinking muscles, we need to follow specific exercises:
Multi-purpose exercises
That is, in the case of limited time, to say as much as possible for the purpose of ordinary objects. Classic examples are the use of paper clips, the use of bricks, etc.
10 new ideas
Let yourself develop the habit of generating new ideas every day, for example, writing an essay and thinking about what new ideas and topics you can use to write an essay.
News Conclusion Reflections
It's a fun exercise to think about the likely outcome of things while reading the news, or to infer reasonable conclusions so that you can exercise both divergent and aggregate thinking skills.
Critical reading
This technique will kick your brain up, spot the strengths and weaknesses in the text, and produce alternative arguments or rebuttal ideas.
Automatically transform your mind
Our language habits are closely related to our habits of thinking. If you say something negative, negative every day, it's hard to generate positive thoughts. That is, learn to change your inner habit of talking to yourself.
If you want to improve your "adaptive thinking", through clear training, you can improve at the highest level of any activity, exert your ability to adapt, and thus become a great person.