Train Your Mind to Adapt to Any Circumstance

What about when it gets actually tough? When something unexpected happens?

We have no clue how to react. We’re unable to cope. We get stressed. We panic.

Now the idea is this: Instead of learning how to react to a specific circumstance, what about we learn how to react to any circumstance?

I learned about this idea in Ryan Holiday’s fantastic book The Daily Stoic. From the book:

“In this way you must understand how laughable it is to say, ‘Tell me what to do!’ What advice could I possibly give? No, a far better request is, ‘Train my mind to adapt to any circumstance.’ … In this way, if circumstances take you off script … you won’t be desperate for a new prompting.” – Epictetus, Discourses, 2.2.20b; 24b-25a

It would be nice if someone could show us exactly what to do in every situation. Indeed, this is what we spend a good portion of our lives doing: preparing for this, studying for that. Saving for or anticipating some arbitrary point in the future. But plans, as the boxer Mike Tyson pointed out, last only until you’re punched in the face.

Stoics do not seek to have the answer for every question or a plan for every contingency. Yet they’re also not worried. Why? Because they have confidence that they’ll be able to adapt and change with the circumstances. Instead of looking for instruction, they cultivate skills like creativity, independence, self-confidence, ingenuity, and the ability to problem solve. In this way, they are resilient instead of rigid. We can practice the same.

Today, we will focus on the strategic rather than tactical. We’ll remind ourselves that it’s better to be taught than simply given, and better to be flexible than stick to a script.

Train your mind so you can adapt to any circumstance. This is probably the single best investment you can ever make.

In the end life is all about what you make of it. A well-trained mind will help you make the best of it.

Planning is great until you get punched in the face. Studying for an exam is helpful as long as you get asked the right questions. Leaving home on time for an interview is fine until your car breaks down.

There are things in life you won’t be prepared for.

And you don’t need to be. It’s alright, things happen as they will.

Flashback, remember school time?

I’m sure you can think of some school friends that used to be perfectly prepared for giving a speech in front of the class. They usually got the best grades. And they deserved it because they just worked the hardest for it. But I often thought about ‘what if they cannot prepare?’ Will they still be the best? Or will it show their real faces – the insecure and shy?

Who knows?

Look, in real life, you cannot prepare for everything. Things will go wrong, trains will be late, bosses will be mean, and the weather will be stormy.

And that’s all good.

Although we cannot prepare for every specific situation, we can prepare ourselves for any situation.

Let me explain.

How to Prepare For the Unpreparable?

That’s where Stoicism enters the game.

Holiday pointed it out, “Stoics do not seek to have the answer for every question or a plan for every contingency.” Instead they hold the inner confidence that they’ll be able to adapt and change with the circumstances. They’re not looking for instructions but for the right skill set – creativity, independence, self-confidence, ingenuity, and the ability to problem solve.

And we can do the same.

We don’t need to buy any tools, we need to work on ourselves so that we are the most adaptable tool there is. So that we can adapt to any life circumstance. No matter what happens, we can adapt, we can cope, we can stay calm, and we can use reasoned choice to (re)act wisely.

But how can we do that?

What You Control And What Not

Modern Stoic Ryan Holiday says it nicely:

“Today, you won’t control the external events that happen. Is that scary? A little, but it’s balanced when we see that we can control our opinion about those events. You decide whether they’re good or bad, whether they’re fair or unfair. You don’t control the situation, but you control what you think about it.”

Things happen. You can’t control that. But you can control your reaction to those things. You can control what you think and do about it.

And that’s basically what we’re trying to do here: Prepare ourselves to react well to whatever will happen. Outside events don’t matter. What matters are our interpretations and reactions to them.

We don’t wish for shit to happen, but when it will – and it certainly will – we’ll be ready.

Or that’s what we’re training for. Because, often, we are not ready. And we feel overwhelmed, stressed out, angry, frustrated, and harmed.

The causes for those feelings, though, are not the outside events, but what we make of them. It’s again Ryan Holiday who puts it best:

“Someone can’t frustrate you, work can’t overwhelm you – these are external objects, and they have no access to your mind. Those emotions you feel, as real as they are, come from the inside, not the outside.”

There’s been a quote written on the whiteboard in our living room for a while now. It’s from Anthony de Mello and reads as follow:

“The cause of my irritation is not in this person but in me.”

It reminds me that all the things I’m troubled with are made up in my head. It has nothing to do with other people. It’s just because of my expectations, and what I think is right. But really, if I feel harmed, it’s because of me and no one else. The real source of harm lies within me, not outside me.

It is our reaction that decides whether harm has occurred or not.
--> No reaction, no harm.

You shouldn’t give circumstances the power to rouse anger, for they don’t care at all.
– Marcus Aurelius

Ryan Holiday interprets this quote beautifully:

“Why bother getting mad at causes and forces far bigger than us? Why do we take things personally? After all, external events are not sentient beings – they cannot respond to our shouts and cries – and neither can the mostly indifferent gods.”

Situations don’t give a shit.

They don’t care whether you like it or not. So stop acting like getting angry or happy because of an outside event will have an impact on the event itself. Because it won’t. Again, situations don’t give a shit. They just happen.

Getting Angry Makes Things Only Worse

How much more harmful are the consequences of anger and grief
than the circumstances that aroused them in us!
– Marcus Aurelius

Think about this for a second.

Because that shit happens all the time. Something happens and we get angry. Although we can’t change it because it’s already happened...

I observed it just today within myself. Nils and I went to this parking ground to play football (with the feet) and there were some cars parked. And I got frustrated a bit because one car was parked in the middle of the parking area. There was so much space to park his car and he chose the middle…