Adapting Your Mind To Cope With Change

Whether you lose your job, or a relationship breaks up or someone close falls ill, major crises are a fact of life.  They happen to all of us.  Learning to cope and move on entails the period of time for expansion and self-expression as well as the period of time to do critical analysis and self-correction  Many people try to avoid the latter phase.  They feel that it is  too depressing.  But they pay the consequences.  Other people are good at facing their problems but not at making the adjustments that will let them put the problems to rest. 

Possibly the greatest value of adaptation and change is the help it offers you in adapting to changes in your life and your world.  Where does this knowledge come from?  One comes from the hands-on situations we are faced day to day, or  emergency situations that we may encounter.  Another comes from the history of science.  Textbook science tells us stories of the great thinkers, such as Galileo and Newton, who changed the way we understand the world in which we live.  But what happened to the less famous scientists, the professionals who needed to adapt when a Newton or an Einstein challenged the core of their work?  Adaptation to change is no harder or easier for scientists than for the rest of us.  Scientists need to adapt successfully as a matter of course because change and progress are the very lifeblood of science.  The ways in which scientists cope have valuable implications for how we can adapt to change as well.

Charles Darwin wrote, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives.  It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”  Regardless of your IQ or your history, you can learn how to be more intelligent and how to succeed in the constantly changing world of the information age.  The key ideas to remember are adaptability, creativity, and information management.

Having the courage to learn and change may not necessarily make you a happy person, but it will help you negotiate hard times more smoothly and successfully as well as learn from these experiences.  Knowing how your brain works helps you know when and how to intervene in managing your mind to make the process of adaptation happen more smoothly and perhaps more quickly.  It also helps you monitor both the conscious and unconscious spheres of your mind and gives you feedback about whether you are adapting successfully.

Mental consciousness serves the needs of your head as well as your heart.  To understand the way that you think and learn is to gain at least partial control over your mind.  If you understand how our minds work, then you can deliberately put your mind power to work for you.  You can improve your memory, have better recall ability and able to learn new tasks or cope in a new job or situation better and quicker.  Good memory training techniques should help handle your life changing moments and once learnt, you will have the skills for the rest of your life. 

The real beauty of adopting good mental techniques is the way it combines simplicity and power.  As you come to understand the concept of mental consciousness, it can start to change your whole conception of what learning involves.  You see the essence of learning more as a process of acquiring new ways of thinking.  At the same time, you see it much less as a process of acquiring information.

Most people believe that you can acquire specific skills (such as reading) and bodies of information (such as social economics).  But can you acquire the higher-level skill of becoming more adept at the process of knowledge acquisition?  And in general, can you acquire your ability to use your mind more effectively?  The principle of mental consciousness asserts that you can.  In other words, it means that you can tap into the vast resources of your mind.

The way you naturally think is far more reliable than you give yourself credit for.  If you are like most people, you have had to face numerous obstacles over the course of growing up and functioning as an adult in our society.  You have probably been wrong some of the time.  Nevertheless, most of the time your mind almost certainly has served you well.  Your mind’s strong track record shows that it cannot help but function remarkably well in many ways.  Treasure the skill at thinking that your already have, only learn to make it even better.