We are willing to achieve a goal, but we are not willing to make the sacrifice necessary to face the obstacles that take us away from that goal.

Life often leads us to realize that we need a change, that we need something new, something that stimulates us to live better. This happens at any age; we have an innate instinct for continuous improvement.

We feel thrilled when we understand what our next goal will be, but then something unexpected happens. An unexpected event, whose probability of manifesting itself along our journey was low, overwhelms us like a tidal wave that sweeps away any shred of hope of being able to realize that dream.

But why does this happen? What drives us to give up in front of the first obstacle we encounter? What causes us to become demoralized as soon as we see that things are not as linear as we imagined?

I have been asked this numerous times and there are several answers available:

  • Who says we always want to take shortcuts and make as little effort as possible.
  • Who says we are too used to doing things in the same way and therefore unable to adapt.
  • Who is used to having someone else do things for us.
  • Those who think they do not have the right skills for that given task.
  • Those who want to feel good immediately and do not consider their well-being also in the long term.

Adapt to new situation keeping in mind your final destination

In short, there are several theories, and I would like to sum them all into a single metaphor that in my opinion could help you have a different vision of the world around you. It is related to sailing and not to flying, and my intent here is to bring you to “adapt” to a different environment to which you can apply your knowledge as a pilot.

Valid for anyone, particularly to aspiring pilots and active pilots: it is important to adapt to situations without ever forgetting your goal.

You must be like a sailboat: you have a destination and a route to follow, but you don’t always have favourable winds and you have to adapt your route according to the situation around you.

How to adapt and overcome obstacles

Let’s face it, nothing is accomplished without a certain degree of difficulty. It is important to predict the possible unexpected events or potential problems that we might meet along the way, but it is even more important to understand that there is at least a 20% probability that we will encounter events that we did not foresee and to which we will have to dedicate 80% of our energy.

A sailboat cannot always point directly to the destination and travel in a straight line. In fact, sailboats often travel in zigzags. This is because the most favourable wind is the one that blows 45 ° with respect to the bow of the boat.

But what should we do when the wind does not come from the expected direction?

Simple, you adapt, you do not stop waiting for better winds. Heading is calculated taking advantage of the current wind, even if the heading is not directly in line with the final destination.

This can mean many things:

  • greatly lengthen the travel time
  • slow down the trend
  • arrive later than expected
  • passing moments of navigation in which you will travel faster and others in which you will travel at almost zero speed

Once in the middle of the sea and with very little or no wind at all, what can we do?

Overcoming obstacles means adapting

Intelligence has been defined in many ways. It is often referred to by using the words competence or ability to learn.

The one I prefer defines intelligence as the ability to adapt to situations, because this adaptation leads to the learning of new skills, understand our emotions, and gives us the opportunity to get to know ourselves better in different situations.

Adapting to situations means “thinking more”, it means using the knowledge you already possess to the fullest, developing and modifying it according to the moment, the people or your emotional state.

But we don’t just adapt to the world around us, we have to adapt to ourselves too.

Adapt to our emotions and get to know them better

In fact, we don’t only adapt to the external environment (to what the world “throws at us”), but we also adapt to our moods and emotions, learning to manage and improve them, for example, to develop our capacity for self-control, our ability to deal with negative emotions and reduce their influence on our thoughts, or we can train our creativity.

In short, like a boat that does not always know which wind will push it towards its destination, so we too can adapt along our path to the destination and learn, live better, feel more capable of acting and therefore stronger and more confident. In other words, we can feel happier and more fulfilled.

For future pilots or those who are experiencing a moment of uncertainty in this particular period, I say that the wind is perhaps not of the best, perhaps it is not blowing in the direction you would like or it does not blow at all, but this does not mean that your destination has changed or you will never reach it.