What Growing An Orchid Taught Me About How To Successfully Change And Adapt

Discover an often overlooked element that's critical to our ability to successfully change and adapt in response to changing conditions and demands.

There’s little doubt that most of us are now grappling with how to change and adapt to our current realities, not just in terms of the next few weeks, but more so in terms of the next few months and years as we come to realize how much things are about to fundamentally change in terms of what will now be considered “normal”.

Taking a step back, though, we have to be honest in admitting that any discussions around change or adapting to a new reality brings forth a lot of trepidation and wariness simply because we don’t know what we have control over to change and/or adapt.

This is where it becomes invaluable to remember to focus on what’s within our ability today or in the months ahead to change and adapt so that we can be successful in whatever efforts we put forward. To help illustrate this idea, I’d like to share with you my experiences with growing an orchid and what it reveals about the nature of being adaptive to change.

As an avid gardener, I have to admit I enjoy the challenge of growing a variety of different plants. However, the exception to this rule is orchids. Oftentimes, when my wife would see an orchid in a store or restaurant with its many flowers in bloom, she’d often ask me why I never wanted to buy one. My reply was always the same – orchids are ‘too fussy to grow’ and once they lose those flowers, you can’t get them to bloom again.

About two years ago, my wife came home from work with a thank you gift she got from a colleague – an orchid plant. Given my wife isn’t a fan of gardening, she asked me if I could take care of her orchid. After doing a quick search online, I came up with an approach to take care of her plant, taking note of how much indirect sun it got and when I needed to water it.

As I expected, the orchid lost all of its flowers a few months after my wife got it and we were left with this unremarkable looking potted plant. But I still made sure to tend to it, ensuring it got the right amount of light and water, and not putting much further thought to it. After about a year, though, something unexpected happened. The orchid actually grew a new flower stalk and we had three new orchid flowers.

But this plant really surprised me when a few months after that second bloom, the orchid grew another flower stalk, this one now covered in at least a half-dozen flower blooms. I still remember when my wife came home from work and I pointed out how this orchid was set to bloom for a third time and with more flowers, she laughed and said “So much for these plants being difficult to care for.”

Now I will admit I never imagined this orchid would grow new blooms not once, but two more times after its first set of flowers wilted away. But this experience made me appreciate how when it comes to making a change or adapting ourselves, we often resist this process not because it’s challenging or the path is uncertain, but because we’ve created this internal narrative about what we can and cannot do.

And it’s this mindset that influences the kinds of challenges we’re willing to take on in order to change and adapt to the new realities we face. Indeed, the kind of challenges we agree to take on often determines how much we’re able to change and adapt and with it, how much we can learn and grow [Share on Twitter].

Going back to my experience tending to my wife’s orchid, for years I refused to even consider buying one because I was convinced it was too difficult and fussy a plant to care for. That while it may be in bloom when we buy it, once it’s done, we’ll just be stuck with this very expensive plant that’s little more than a clump of flattened leaves.

And the truth is this is how many of us assess the various challenges we come across in terms of whether they’re worth pursuing or not. While most of us are willing to take on challenges that push us to learn and grow, we still limit ourselves to those challenges that we can expect some level of success [Share on Twitter]. That they are worthy of our time because they are in some way doable or we can at least attain some level of achievement.

Of course, in the case of this orchid plant, I didn’t choose it. But because it was a gift for my wife and she had entrusted me to take care of it, I had to adapt and change my outlook from not wanting to care for this kind of plant to doing whatever I could do to get it to continue to thrive and bloom.

Now to be honest, I’m still not a fan of orchids and I don’t have any interest in getting another one, even though my wife’s orchid is doing quite well. And this just goes to show how we shouldn’t limit ourselves in terms of where we choose to change and adapt based purely on personal preferences or what we believe ourselves more capable of achieving.

Besides, if there’s one thing our current global reality is forcing all of us to do it’s to make that choice – of either closing in on ourselves and attempting to stick to what we know and how we might grow within those self-imposed constraints. Or learning to embrace this pressure to change and adapt our outlook and the way we’ve been operating so that we might lean forward into that realm of possibility.

And let’s be clear here, this isn’t a novel concept of these times. Indeed, many of us are familiar with the stories of visionaries and leaders who weren’t willing to accept the status quo, no matter how comfortable or agreeable it may have been to the masses.

Instead, they envisioned something better – a better product, a better service, or even a better social contract – something that would not only disrupt how we operate or view what we do, but would open up countless unforeseen opportunities that were ready for the picking for those who dared to imagine doing things differently than before.

The only difference between most of those visionaries and all of us right now is that their drive to change and adapt was driven from within themselves, as opposed to that obligation now being imposed on all of us to not only do things differently, but to do so with a greater sense of intentionality and purpose.

That how we change and adapt is not simply to regain some sense of normalcy, but that it helps to build our collective resolve and resilience so that we might do better by those we serve when that next big wave of disruption crashes upon our shores.

I’m confident that those of us who will find a new path, a new course to succeed and thrive will not be those who prefer to stick to the past. Instead, it will be those who decide to take a chance on tending to building and nurturing their own type of orchid so that when this storm finally passes, they might get it to bloom once more.

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