Ever been really committed to a goal, but found yourself facing unexpected hurdles, unrealistic deadlines and you’ve been seemingly ghosted by your collaborators? Or perhaps your senior leaders keep changing their mind so you’re stuck with a deliverable and a deadline that you see no way to meet?

How do you lean into adaptability in those moments of pressure and uncertainty, instead of just trying to work the problem harder at the expense of your own level of stress and confidence?

Cultivating adaptability skills so you can implement effective coping mechanisms is your lifeline through the battlefield that can be project management, group work and stretched resources.

Without figuring out how to grow from the challenges, you and your team face a few risks:

Challenge 1 – Disengagement

When work is perpetually frustrating or unclear, people’s sense of hopelessness and confusion grows. You don’t want “Why bother?” to be the response when you need innovation and collaboration from your team.

Challenge 2 – Negative Mindset

Working hard to reach a goal and never feeling like you get to cross the finish line and feel success can wear a person down. Self-doubt and questioning whether you’re even up for the challenge make it hard to bring your best self to the job at hand.

Challenge 3 – Frayed Relationships

Stress and uncertainty can cause relationships to suffer as well. Feeling a sense of trust and connection – at work and at home – helps you get through the tough times. But if you’re stuck in crunch time and it’s hard to find a way through together, stressed-out people may end up turning on one another instead.

Learning how to adapt to your current circumstances and respond from a place of intention can reveal the opportunities, and solutions, within the challenge. Here are 3 tips to help you and your team move out of “crunch time” and into productivity and results.

Tip 1 – Embrace Mental Flexibility

When confronted with overwhelming deadlines and complex issues, it is crucial to cultivate mental flexibility—an essential adaptability skill. Focus on what IS in your control, rather than fixate on what is not in your control.

Take your eye off the final outcome for a moment. Instead, look at what you can do now, in this moment, to advance your project even just a baby step forward. Cultivate a growth mindset that looks at challenges as a potential opportunity to uncover a new innovation or reveal a deeper issue that needs to be address to develop a sustainable solution.

Tip 2 – Unlearn and Reevaluate

Be willing to question your assumptions and unlearn some of your usual ways of solving tricky problems. Like solving a puzzle, you won’t make progress until you ensure you have all the pieces on the table. Perhaps the pieces you’ve got start to form a different picture than you had originally imagined.

Give yourself time to let things “land” and ensure you’ve gathered all the information and perspectives you need. Get curious and allow yourself to loosen the grip on what you initially thought “should happen” so you can stay present and respond to what actually is happening.

Tip 3 – Balance Action-Taking with Reflection

Assess your progress, acknowledge your achievements, and identify areas that might need some tweaking. This is a great discussion to have with your project team as well, as it can help weave together your connection as a team and remind people you’re not in this alone. It also helps ensure that you are continually learning and growing from the experience, which helps strengthen your adaptability muscles.

If you’re interested in helping your team or organization build its adaptive capacity, let’s connect!