PeopleSmart in Business eBook - The Platinum Rule

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Four: Creating Personal Power Through Behavioral Adaptability
Everyone can become more adaptable
So the good news is you can, in fact, become more adaptable. Th e
accompanying bad news is that it doesn’t happen overnight, by wishing
for it, or without occasional regressions back to the old behaviors
you felt more comfortable with. Since adaptability involves learning
techniques of mind over matter, you can speed up the process and
increase your probability for success by focusing once again on the
matter of who you are. Coming full circle, this means dealing with
who you are. It also means personally committing to work toward
overcoming these easier, more natural behaviors you will occasionally
slip back into. Aft er all, you’ve done them thousands of times more
than these newer, competing behaviors.
Just as you consult a map when you swerve off course, you can remind
yourself to stay on the road to adaptability when you fall back
into your old habits. Th e Road Map to Personal Adaptability will help
you increase your own fl exibility and versatility. You can also use it to
coach and assist your friends, family, co-workers, and others through
the same learning process. Again, this process begins with who you
are. From there, you can work on either those appropriate attitude
changes or aptitude changes to develop the potentials related to your
own unique behavioral tendencies.
Here’s how to use your own road map. First identify your strongest
behavioral tendency (“D”, “I”, “S”, or “C”). Select just one goal—either
fl exibility or versatility—not both at once. Th en look across the appropriate
row and under the corresponding column to fi nd what you
can do to further develop yourself.
Since we don’t behave in a vacuum, these general self-adaptations
can obviously be further refi ned for greater success when used more
selectively with some types of individuals, and less so with others.
Here, then, is a brief to do list for ready reference use in deciding what