“Improvise, Adapt & Overcome”
Articles
By: Nick Kacher
I am traveling to a meeting in Chicago to make a presentation and while I have my toothbrush and an extra pair of socks, I realize my laptop is sitting next to my bed. What do I do? Improvise, adapt and overcome.
I begin getting dressed for an out-of-town wedding and realize I brought two shoes, just not a pair of shoes. What do I do? Improvise, adapt and overcome.
I run to the courthouse for a brief pretrial hearing and realize I brought the wrong file. What do I do? Improvise, adapt and overcome.
Improvise, adapt and overcome. This has been a mantra I have lived by for many years. These words were taught to me by my high school wrestling coach, and I have passed them along to students and athletes I have coached, trained and mentored over the years. These words reverberate inside my head every time I come across problems and obstacles in my life no matter how big or small. “Improvise, adapt and overcome.”
Each day we wake up to a world that we would not have recognized two short months ago. While this crisis had different starting points for many of us, we are all in this together now. So, what do we do? What can we do? What should we do? I would never presume to be the one to answer those questions. Plus, the answers will be different for every one of us. What I do know is that if we are going to make it through these trying times, we all must figure out a way to improvise, adapt and overcome.
Many of us are striving to find our rhythm in a home office that is suddenly crawling with spouses, children, pets and robot vacuum cleaners that seem to never stop. We are taking conference calls in corners and spaces of our homes that we have never seen before. And we are maintaining a business casual approach up top, but down beneath the table we feel unfettered by our yoga pants and pajama bottoms. While I joke about some of these lighthearted things, we all understand that there are some real issues we must overcome in both our professional and personal lives. These are serious times. We all have clients, customers and contacts with differing degrees of fear and trepidation about both their physical and financial health. Many people are frightened, others nervous and some simply more cautious these days, but make no mistake, we are all living in a different reality.
We are facing a reality that is closer to dystopian fiction than we would like it to be. I don’t know how you will best make it through these times. I don’t know when things will be better or “back to normal.” I don’t have any answers. I just know that if you take each problem, each hurdle, each setback, each obstacle and figure out a way to improvise, adapt and overcome that you will not only make it, you will come out stronger on the other side.