Building Resilience Through Flexibility and Adaptability

Are you stuck in the status quo? In a world where change is the only constant, the ability to be flexible and adaptable is no longer a soft skill—it’s a critical component of personal and community resilience. In this episode of Less House More Resilience, Laura dives into the psychological and mental elements of the Resilience Wealth Wheel, urging listeners to examine their relationship with change and overcome the cognitive biases that keep them rigid.

(Download the free Resilience Wealth Wheel guide in the show notes!)

Resources

Theory of Planned Behavior - https://expertprogrammanagement.com/2019/12/theory-of-planned-behavior/

Resilience Wealth Wheel - https://www.thetinyhouseadviser.com/resilientwealth

Cognitive Biases and Decision Making - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/cognitive-biases

Happiness Study  https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_the_longest_happiness_study_reveals_about_finding_fulfillment

Book a Call with Laura

Go to thetinyhouseadviser.com

Transcript

Less House More Resilience ... (00:45)

Hey there, welcome to Less House More Resilience podcast, Laura here. We are continuing our journey around the resilience wealth wheel. The resilience wealth wheel is a concept that I developed that you can get access to on my website for free. I'll make sure that the link is in the show notes. The idea that I'm continuing to talk about is how we

in this moment need to be thinking more holistically more multi dimensionally about our wealth in terms of the resources that we need in order to take care of ourselves and our communities.

recording this on March 10. So of course we are 10 days I believe into a war that is affecting things in a

in a global way. And definitely there's a lot of different takes. But at the end of the day, these are the types of things that happen that make us think about the what ifs in life. So I've been thinking about what ifs a lot in the last, say, six months or so and have been working on a resilience plan. Here I talked about

some of the things that we've been working on in the last episode. And I'll continue to explore those. Today, I wanted to dip over into say, a mental and psychological element. And that is our flexibility and adaptability. We're going to take this from a couple different angles. At the root of it, my thought is that

flexibility and adaptability is really about our comfort with change. And when we're too rigid or stuck in our ways or uncomfortable with new conditions, this stifles us from being able to flex and move around the change that we're encountering. In fact, many of us may even have just a strong aversion to change.

And so when presented with any kind of change, our first stance is to resist. And it takes time in order for us to maybe get on board or move with the change or even convert that change into something positive.

And so I would say that our first way of tackling flexibility and adaptability is knowing our own relationship with change and thinking about it from a historical context. How have we made change in our lives in the past? How have those changes turned out? And what did we learn about ourselves and our ability to change from past experiences?

I actually talked about change at some length in episode number 52 of this podcast. So can go back and listen to that. But just to call up again, our theory of planned behavior, which is a change theory. This is a concept that I learned in a organizational behavior class in my master's program. Actually

talking about change within organizations and how we can execute change within organizations, but the theory applies very much to our own selves as well. And that is the idea that there are three contributors to change. ⁓ One is attitudes. Another is subjective norms.

And the third is our perceived behavioral control. And all three of these components play into our intention for change and thus the change of behavior itself. So let's unpack this little bit. Let's unpack it within the very silly context of me giving up coffee, which is something that I'm working on right now. I have learned from my past behavior.

that I can make change in my life, I just have to get myself on board. And really what that is, is that's about attitudes. When we have an attitude that is positive about the change, if we perhaps educate ourselves enough, or see enough examples in our life or others lives of this change having a positive outcome, we can really get our attitude in alignment with our intention.

So recently I've been reading some things about substituting yerba mate for coffee, because there are benefits to that mate that we don't have with coffee, including the experience of the caffeine as well as some of the antioxidants and other beneficial compounds. And so I've been working on my attitude.

my attitude towards coffee has been very favorable, shall we say I've been very much convinced that this promotes my better attitude every day. So I've had to work on my attitude and ⁓ my convincing myself about this intention that I want to have around this change. Now to continue this fun

and lighthearted analogy. Another component to our intention and our behavior change is subjective norms. So subjective norms, obviously, everyone knows about coffee culture. And, having cups of coffee is something that we've been doing for not forever, but for a while in this country. And it's it's ubiquitous, right. And when I talk about this potential change to Eric,

my husband, he asked me why I want to do this hard thing, like isn't life hard enough. So around me, the subjective norms are not supportive of my intention and my behavior change. But you know, maybe you can overcome those subjective norms and just really lean into yourself and your own truth.

Now, perceived behavioral control is an interesting element because I feel like this so much goes to our self-efficacy, our belief in ourself, our experience with ourself. I know from past experience that when I educate myself enough and set my mind to a particular change that I can definitely make and stick to the change. So I have a good deal of confidence in my ability to make this change if I can get myself.

if I can get my attitudes correctly aligned. So those three components really go into formulating an intention towards a change in behavior. So again, I talked about this in episode 52 about change in and of itself. But I think when it comes back to our topic for today, which is flexibility and adaptability,

really, it all goes into dealing with change. And so if we have kind of this relationship with change, where we understand that we can make, accept and adapt change for ourselves that we have experience with it that we can get our mind around it that we can  convince ourselves of anything as I like to say, then we can maybe be more welcoming.

of change. And so everything about flexibility and adaptability is tied into this change component. So definitely go explore this theory if that resonates for you. I'll put a link to a nice little graphic and explanation in the show notes theory of planned behavior there.

Another part of this flexibility and adaptability is about what we have come to accept as normal. And so I think it's useful to have a little bit of a flashback and think about how quickly things have actually changed in developed societies and how it really wasn't that long ago that things were very, very different than they are in our modern world.

So we have become very normalized, habituated, whatever term you want to use to the life that we have or that we've been having over say the last several decades. But yet if you go back, even just over a hundred years, things were very different. So my grandmother, my BFF, she's 97. She remembers when things were very, very different. And I think for those of us that have

come of age and been an adult in the last few decades, we have gotten used to a whole different world than what used to be about 100 years ago. Life expectancy has dramatically ⁓ increased over that amount of time. ⁓ Just basic conveniences, obviously, plumbing, electrical in our homes, telephones, all of those things have come to be

It is just so normal for us that the idea of being without those things can be crippling for folks if they try to think about a world in which they don't have some of these basic conveniences. We definitely drove a lot slower 100 years ago. Life was slower 100 years ago. Things were obviously

less expensive, More than 95 % of all births took place at home, right? yet less overwhelming healthcare, a lot more of home remedies, home births, home deaths, all of those sorts of things. Home was the basis of our life.

population density obviously was a lot less 100 years ago. And then if we go and we start to parlay that into what has changed just since the digital revolution in terms of our lives being so digitized, so connected, so ever present, obviously there are pros and cons to our digital conveniences, devices, technologies.

We're once again in the midst of a major technological shift that will have likely pros and cons associated with it. And so if we think about a life in which when we went somewhere to a nearby city that we maybe didn't know the streets exactly, we did not have access to a map program to tell us where to go. We had to figure that out maybe from a paper map

or asking someone how to get there. And those things slowed us down. So our life has really sped up and in speeding up, it has demanded a lot more from us. And so we can imagine that if we just mentally put ourselves in a place a hundred years ago, where life was slower, life was more home and community based, that we did more for ourselves.

and sourced more from our direct neighbors and community that maybe we could disengage from that claw that makes us feel like any change that would take us out of our modern conveniences would be terrible. And maybe we could instead see the positive aspects that we could return to if things were

different in those particular ways. None of us know what change obviously is coming in front of us. We don't know what tomorrow or next week or next year looks like. So I'm not saying that our change tomorrow looks like what it did 100 years ago, but just sort of exploring the concept that we have lived through tremendous amounts of change. Some of it we've resisted some of it we've embraced.

All of it probably has become normal for us. And yet at the same time, we have lost things and we have gained things. so change in and of itself is not terrible. It just is a matter of just rolling with the human experience and understanding that change is going to come and how we make use of it and embrace it is the key.

There is I think I've mentioned recently a concept around our expectations are our pain and we can work towards being more accepting and just living in the moment and being with the moment and experiencing the moment rather than holding and clutching so tightly to

the world that makes us feel comfortable or the conditions that make us feel comfortable or the conveniences or the level of development and technology that makes us feel comfortable. Because all of this is subject to change. Another thing that I think might be interesting for us to tap into just a little bit is just some of the biases that we experience.

as humans that affect this concept of adaptability and flexibility. And really, we have just a whole host of biases that make us really rigid and really, really content to stay just as we are. And so I have this little book here of behavioral biases that I'm going to ⁓ just tap into for a second for us to explore.

all the ways that we humans are just programmed to be very resistant to being adaptable. So for anyone who's not experienced this concept before, we're going to talk about some cognitive biases, biases, we're to talk about some emotional biases, a cognitive bias is a type of thinking that occurs when we're processing and interpreting information, think of them as rules of thumb or mental shortcuts.

that help us make sense of the world and reach decisions quickly. I've heard this described as we take in so many inputs every single day that there's no possible way that we could process everything from start to finish from scratch in order to digest all the information that we get. And so we have created these shortcuts in our brain that help us process information and be able to move forward. I'm guessing that just me saying that

in a world in which we are bombarded with more information every day than we were the day before, based on the volume of information that is being created every day, that we've probably created more shortcuts in order to quickly process and be able to move forward, because we just have so much coming at us all the time. You really see this in politics in terms of the shortcuts that we have. So one of them is

Framing we have this framing bias framing occurs when people make decisions based on the way information is presented or framed rather than the facts themselves. This is really really true in the way that we see our media. I recently decided that I needed all the facts in terms of information and news and so I sought out ⁓ where can I get the news that's going to show me

the range of bias that's going to show me the factuality that's going to give me a sense for where blind spots are being presented. And so I want to have a good idea that I am actually seeing facts to the extent that we have facts and that the framing is made clear. I want to understand the angle of the person who's saying the words so that I can better figure out what their spin is on the thing.

in order to have a feeling about something if I'm going to have an opinion about something I want to understand fully how that opinion showed up for me. So framing is really important. And when we think about it in the context of our modern experience, our modern experience of consumerism, get everything the minute that you need it, have this full range of options.

always be able to get every possible cuisine, always be able to, have a different set of clothes every day. All of these things are framed as like, our wealth was the ultimate objective and the ultimate good. And actually, what we know about happiness, which I'll come back to in a minute, is that this all this wealth and this choice and these options and this consumption.

don't actually make us happy, but they're presented to make us happy. And so if we think about a world where we have perhaps a little bit less and our convenience is interrupted, maybe it's not the worst thing in the world and that there is a possibility that we have just framed it as the best thing in the world, but it actually isn't.

Another bias that we have is availability. And availability  bias, this is a really good one, occurs when people estimate the probability of an outcome based on how easily the outcome comes to mind. Easily or recently recalled conclusions are often perceived as being more likely than those that are harder to remember or understand. We really have a strong bias around what's

happened recently or what we've seen recently, or what the outcome was of something that recently happened. And we can't necessarily fully process the full range of possibilities or outcomes. And so maybe we give certain credence to certain possibilities or outcomes based on, what has showed up in our lives or in our newsfeed recently. And so once again, when we think about

this bias related to our ability to be flexible or adaptable. If we can't really understand what the outcome was for someone 100 years ago, having to take a horse and cart to go pick up, bulk goods or whatever, then we can't possibly imagine that that might have been a good experience, because it's just so far outside of our range of possibility.

And likewise, not saying that this is the case, but likewise, if we don't have immediate grasp on how AI benefited some thing in a really good and transformative way, then we maybe can't imagine that possibility.

Mental accounting, this is where we put different assets into different buckets. And this is an interesting one because we have definitely prioritized the notion of our dollars, whether they're in cash or invested or in our house, as being really, really a strong and important bucket, as opposed to many of the other things in the resilient.

wealth wheel that are equally important resources, but because they're not attributed necessarily to fungible dollars, we don't give them as much credence or as much weight. And this is a great example of mental accounting. And so if we're going to be flexible and adaptable, we need to start to value the other parts of our lives that are really important resources. For example, water in the West, where I live is a very important resource.

Water, of course, as we know, has been really just undervalued. And so the way that we have undervalued water will mean that no amount of dollars will be able to buy people out of a condition where we're in a water crisis. And so we have had this mental accounting around water versus dollars, and this is causing a problem. So as we become more flexible and adaptable, we need to think about.

all of these resources and value them and put them as a priority in our resilience plan. Anchoring love this one anchoring is the tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information that we learn which  can have a serious impact on the decisions that we make. This is ⁓ I saw this just play out so clearly in my brain recently in that I had a major purchase for the studio greenhouse building.

that I was planning on making. I had an idea of how much I thought I was gonna have to spend on it. It's a big expense. yet when the proposed price got sent to me, it was a great deal higher than what I, and I was like immediately reactive to that. And I think that's where we all are with price increases, all of them, right? We get very anchored. When I go to the grocery store, I know I'm gonna spend,

you know, $6 on a dozen eggs and now they're $8 and this anchoring causes a lot of friction in our life. That friction is painful to us. We don't necessarily have to process that friction is pain. We just have to adapt and we just have to figure out, okay, where are my other sources of eggs? Who else, you know, maybe it could I trade something for that? You know, you've got chickens, like we've got to figure out where else we can source things if it reaches a breaking point and

The pain of being resistant to the price is not productive. It doesn't get us anywhere. We just have to continue to adapt as things change and look for other options.

Confirmation: People tend to look for a notice evidence that confirms their existing beliefs. People also ignore information that challenges or contradicts their views. This is this is social media. Okay, this is your this is your and my algorithm. This is exactly the way that it is programmed to polarize. When we only see information that confirms our existing beliefs.

And we also tend to avoid the mental discomfort that occurs when new information conflicts with our beliefs or perceptions, thus resulting in cognitive dissonance. Like this confirmation bias, this sense that, hey, I believe that my life next year should look just as easy and convenient as it does today. And I only want to see information that tells me everything is going to be fine.

or vice versa, I only want to believe that the people in the next state over are, a bunch of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I only want to see information that confirms this. And I don't want to ever be able to view them as a human being with the same desires, needs and ⁓ empathies and kindness as I have. ⁓

This is why we are where we are today, civically and socially. And so I think this is one that we can all perhaps think a little bit more about how are we constantly reinforcing this bias in our life and how is it making us rigid and inflexible because again, change, it's a train, we can't stop it. We just have to be ready to adapt and flex with it.

Now we're going to talk about emotional biases.

There's a few here. I think that this is really a little different than cognitive because these stem from factors such as impulse or intuition, and that distort our ability to view situations and make decisions. So a little bit different than the cognitive bias. Maybe this gets more to our amygdala and our emotional center. Loss aversion.

people typically feel the pain more profoundly than the joy of a gain. a pain of a loss stronger than the joy of a gain. Just think about it like this. If you walked out of your door today and you accidentally dropped a $20 bill somewhere where you're never going to be able to go back and find it. And then later in the day you found $100 bill. How would you react to those two events? And would you feel more pain about the loss of a 20?

and versus the gain of 100. This is our life ⁓ really magnified, we feel these pain points so much stronger than we feel the gain and we might not even recognize the gain. You know, if we all lost access to some particular technology that we knew was taking away too much of our attention.

We might feel that pain really profoundly and not even recognize the gain of getting the time back that we had lost over so many years. So these are really important when it comes to how changes affect us in the future. If we view the change as a loss, we are going to feel it so much more profoundly. If we start to rewrite that script and figure out what we're gaining because nothing is

zero sum, right, there's always going to be some give and pull there. And so what is the gain and how can we perhaps zero our attention to the gain just to feel it as strongly as we would the loss, right? That is the thing we feel losses so much more strongly than we do gains.

Okay, so here we go. This is like the ultimate bias related to flexibility and adaptability, the status quo bias. Status quo bias is an emotional bias in which people respond to new circumstances by doing nothing, instead of adapting. People are generally more comfortable keeping things as they are. If we are stuck in status quo bias, going forward.

we are going to miss opportunities to be adaptable and to be resilient and to be flexible in times of change. Being aware of the status quo bias, I like my routine exactly as it is. I like my, my, my week, my family structure. like my friend group. I like my social outings. I like things exactly as they are. Yeah, great. You can like things exactly as they are.

but at any moment those things can change. So how can we recognize this status quo bias and how it keeps us stuck and inable to adapt when new information presents itself? Endowment effect, the endowment bias inspires people to disproportionately value things they already own. So if we already have

a big American dream house or if we already have the, prize possession or prize job or whatever it is, we will value it so much more highly than an alternative. And yet when we have that alternative, we might value it quite highly too, because the endowment effect applies again. just being aware that

There are things that maybe we hold a little too tightly onto our value a little bit too much when there might be something better or some lifestyle better out there. And because we are holding so tightly to the things that we already have, we can't let go and receive the things that are coming.

Overconfidence. This occurs when people overestimate their own abilities, believing that they are smarter or more informed than they really are.

People showing overconfidence may mistakenly equate information quantity with quality feeling more confident if they have substantial amounts of information, even if the quality is poor, which goes to that confirmation bias, right of gathering so much information that reaffirms your belief or your value or your idea, which may, you know, be somewhere on the spectrum of good and bad, right and wrong.

accurate and accurate. But we definitely can overboost our sense of our stance or opinion or belief about something. And we'll go out and seek out a bunch of information that may not be high quality in order to keep that overconfidence in place. So these are a variety of different cognitive and emotional biases that we as humans

We don't even have to think about them. don't have to pull them out of the little booklet that I just read to you and employ them. They just come to us naturally. They are the shortcuts that we use in order to make decisions all the time. And there's no way we can completely, deprogram or, or exit those biases, but being aware of them is definitely helpful in cultivating.

our adaptability and flexibility because without being aware of how we will selectively choose to stay in the status quo or selectively choose information that reinforces our existing beliefs, or that we were will overvalue our current lifestyle and devalue anything else. Like all of these things can help us realize that, hey, if change is going to show up for me, maybe that change

could actually bring something to me that I don't have already. And maybe not, but it's coming anyway. But how do we become flexible and adaptable is by releasing our attachment to some of these conveniences or or things that we consider normal that didn't even exist. You know, 100 years ago, or

accepting changes that have never existed before. So all of these things are a matter of flexing with what's coming. And I think that it is useful and talking about this to think about it in terms of our own happiness as well. Happiness is not something that I claim to be an expert or coach on. But definitely it's something that I've studied a good bit and I found

particularly interesting. I came across a summary of a study that's gone on since the 1930s that tracked happiness within a group of study participants over many, years. And really what it came down to is that though there are many things that make up happiness and perhaps I have mentioned before about money and it's tie to our happiness.

cliff notes, it's really a matter of how much money to take care of our necessities and, buy us some quality of life. But the utility or happiness that we get from each incremental amount of money beyond that is less and less diminishing returns as, as they say. And so really maybe the core of happiness.

And maybe we all know this, right? It's about our relationships. It is about the connections that we have. And golly, this is a hard thing to really do successfully right now. These quality relationships and connections with people require us to overcome probably all those biases that I just talked about to overcome our algorithms that are working really hard to polarize us. It requires us

to put ourselves out there, be vulnerable, ask for connection from people. It requires us to put ourselves in places where we may not feel the most comfortable, especially those of us that are kind of introverted and home bodies. But yet at the end of the day, those relationships are truly important for our happiness. And in addition, they are truly critical to our resilience. People

are where we are going to draw our strength as we have always done. And so, as we think about what change and adaptability and flexibility might be required of us, we have to think about it in the context of community and our relationships. And we'll of course talk about more about community and relationships always as we take this turn around the resilience wealth wheel, because that is

tied into all of these items. But if we're going to be flexible and adaptable, we really need to think about how we are sourcing what makes us happy and whether or not our status quo, our current life is actually the source of our happiness or if there are areas that we need to start putting more attention. And so that is

my exploration today of flexibility and adaptability. Our lives today did not exist as they do today 100 years ago. So clearly we can live differently than we do right now. And the world that we're going to experience in the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years is going to look a lot different.

The pace of change has never been this fast and will never be this slow again. So change is coming at us and we have to work inside of ourselves to figure out how we are going to let that change unfold without being so rigid and attached to what existed in 2025 or 2020 or 2015 or what have you we have to

adapt, we have to roll with it. And so understanding all the ways that we are stuck in our own rigid mindsets and shortcuts, and recognizing them in the moment and saying, ⁓ that's that status quo bias or ⁓ that's anchoring bias can help us think differently, and accept things and perhaps make changes that need to be made in our life.

thanks for being here with me and continuing this conversation about resilient wealth. I think that all of it is tied to our ability to adapt and change as

the human experience requires us. And so if you are wanting to get the worksheet guide that I have, you can go over to the tiny house of advisor, backslash resilient wealth and get that free download.