Last week, I undertook to become a kettlebeller, in earnest.

RTd solely b/c otherwise no one would believe me. . .LOL. @510kettlebeller: @taranicholle is a superstar kettlebeller in the making! 😉

— taranicholle (@taranicholle) October 30, 2012

This week, a legit beekeeper.  No joke – check the picture! During my writing retreat this week at Carmel Valley Ranch, I donned the hood and suit and sopped up as much information and experience with something like 40,000 honeybees as I could in a couple of hours.

Carmel Valley Ranch has an in-house beekeeping expert, John Russo, who has an encyclopedic knowledge and affectionate philosophy toward his tiny charges.  John tends not only the bees, but also the Ranch’s extensive lavender gardens.  In-between teaching us all about the various roles bees play, from undertaker to queen and playing Fact-or-Fiction with the youngest hotel guests around their Bee Movie takeaways, John made mention of an elemental truth about bees from which I think we can draw inspiration at times of transition.

You see, I actually want to raise bees in my backyard. So going into the session, I’d asked John to verbally annotate his normal curriculum with notes I might find useful.  As he began to talk about bees and their natural GPS systems, he threw in one such note. When you move bees, he explained, you seal up the hive and take them to their new home.  But the home must be over 2 miles away from their old one, or they just fly right back.  When they get to their new home, he went on, they do what’s called an orientation flight, an intricate set of circles around their new place of residence.  They fly around something like 20 times and, in the process, permanently reset their internal positioning systems around their new home’s location.

Sometimes we are knocked out of our comfort zone, by life or by changes in the marketplace. Often we think of these displacements as involuntary, like when a competitor swallows up the other companies in our space and we’re immediately rendered the little guy.  Or when someone leaves us, dies or we get a troublesome medical report or a pink slip. We should take care, though, not to underestimate the disorienting power of even the smallest steps we intentionally take toward our deepest, most desired dreams.  They can make us feel like imposters, like we are operating in something other than the reality we’ve always known. (Because, in fact, we are.)

That disorientation can cause us to backslide on our goal and habit change efforts, to play smaller than we really are, or to get stuck clinging to a past that is long gone – and not coming back. Just like the bees who aren’t moved far enough away.

It is in these moments that perhaps we should consider doing our own version of an orientation flight – our own set of practices and check-ins to remind us who we really are and what we are really about. These are the times when we must sit still, in the dark of the mornings; the times when we should revisit our intentions and targets for the era; the times when we should engage our advisors (personal or otherwise) and read what nourishes us.  These are the times in which moving and caring for our physical bodies is elevated from medical mandate to sacred routine.

In our businesses, these are times when the mission and vision statements, roadmaps and objectives that once seemed like silly academic exercises now seem like orienting lifelines – or require revision or rewriting.

With these “orienting flights,” we can be resilient and adapt quickly to the changes that have been forced upon us – or move out of imposter syndrome and into the process of becoming the newest version of ourselves with joy and ease.