Adapting Without Losing Yourself

Growth requires curiosity, not certainty.

I’ve noticed the people who grow the most aren’t necessarily the most confident, they’re the most curious.

They’re curious about their own behaviours, curious about the world, and curious about the impact their behaviours have on the world.

You don’t need confidence and certainty to grow. In fact, these things can get in the way. Certainty feels efficient, productive, reassuring, but it also closes the window for learning.

When we’re already certain about the situation and the way forward, there’s very little room left to grow.

I don’t think the problem is confidence itself. Plenty of confident people keep growing their whole lives. The problem is what the confidence is about.

There’s a difference between being confident in an outcome and being confident in your own capacity to adapt.

“I know this is going to work” is one kind of confidence. “I don’t know exactly how this will unfold, but I trust myself to be able to respond to whatever unfolds” is another.

In my experience coaching, it’s the second kind that holds up under pressure. The first kind is fragile, it only survives as long as you’re right.

So the trick isn’t to focus on being certain of what will unfold. It’s being certain that you can handle whatever unfolds, that you can adapt to the situation as it comes.

And adapting does not mean surrendering or sacrificing yourself, quite the opposite. It means bringing the core elements of what makes you you, and using them to meet the situation with curiosity and creativity. Your essence stays intact, only the expression of it changes.

We see this everywhere in nature. Plants, animals, ecosystems are in a constant state of adaptive growth, but they never lose what makes them what they are.

Take a tree growing near a footpath. It didn’t plan for a slab of pavement to show up in the middle of its root system. It just encountered one, the way we encounter things we didn’t see coming. The roots don’t stop growing because the plan changed, they find another way through. They explore what’s there and respond to it and they do this without becoming a different tree. The plant keeps its leaves, its branches, its flowers, its roots, but those roots now need to figure out how to grow around the pavement.

That’s what healthy adaptation looks like in human life too. We are, let’s not forget, actually nature too.

We don’t need to know exactly what’s coming, we need to know ourselves well enough to recognise what’s worth protecting, and stay curious enough to discover what needs to change.

Amelia Kruse is the founder of Sageform, a conscious leadership studio, and creator of the Sageform Method°, a framework for creatives, leaders, and founders ready to lead from the inside out. You can learn more about working together here.