There is a real objection buried in “I do not want to change how I talk depending on who I am talking to”, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a motivational one. The objection is about honesty. The answer is that there are two different operations being called by the same name, and only one of them is a problem.
Packaging Versus Content
Packaging is length, formality, ordering, how much background you assume, whether you open with a greeting. Content is the facts, the ask, the position you are taking and the things you are not going to do.
Changing packaging for a reader is ordinary competence — it is the same instinct that makes you explain your job differently to a colleague and to your grandmother. Changing content for a reader is a different act, and it is the one that eventually gets found out, because different people compare notes.
Almost everyone who says adapting feels fake has watched somebody do the second thing and correctly disliked it.
Four Dials, Not One
- Formality. Contractions, greetings, sign-offs. The most visible dial and the least consequential.
- Length. The most consequential and the least noticed. Senior readers and unfamiliar readers both need shorter.
- Assumed context. How much you can skip. Getting this wrong in either direction is the single biggest cause of a message failing.
- Directness of the ask. Not whether you ask — always ask — but whether it arrives in line one or line four.
None of these four is your personality. All four move independently, which is why “be more professional” is unhelpful advice: it names no dial.
A Drill That Takes Five Minutes
- Take a real message you sent this week that mattered.
- Rewrite it for a different reader — a teacher instead of a friend, or a stranger instead of a teammate.
- List every fact in version one and check it survived into version two.
- If a fact disappeared, ask why. That is where the actual skill is.
Facts disappear for two reasons: because the new reader genuinely does not need them, or because they were awkward to say to that particular reader. The first is adaptation. The second is the thing you were right to be suspicious of.
Three Rooms Worth Practising In
Adapting is not a general capacity you either have or lack; it is a set of specific rooms you have or have not spent time in. Three of them cover most of early working life.
A teacher, a manager, an admissions officer. The dial that matters here is length — they are deciding among many things, and brevity reads as competence rather than as curtness. The common error is padding the message with justification nobody asked for.
A stranger, another department, a company you are applying to. Here the dial is assumed context: they know nothing about you, so every reference to “the project” or “last week” is a dead end. Say who you are and what this concerns in the first sentence.
The dial is directness of the ask. Softening it into a hint feels kinder and reliably produces a second conversation later. State the thing, then leave room — “I think we should cut the third section; what am I missing?”
Where Adapting Goes Wrong
Two failure modes worth watching for, because both feel like doing it well while you are doing them.
The first is over-adapting to status: becoming so careful with someone senior that the actual problem never gets stated. A message that takes four polite paragraphs to not quite say the deadline will be missed has failed at the only thing it was for.
The second is mirroring instead of adapting. Copying someone’s tone back at them is not the same as fitting the message to them — if a stressed manager writes in clipped fragments, matching the fragments adds to the noise. Match the register, not the stress.
Knowing Which Dial Is Stuck
Most people are not uniformly bad at this. They have one dial that never moves — usually assumed context, occasionally length — and it fails them only with a specific kind of reader, which makes it hard to notice from the inside.
The Communication Adaptability test scores four separate skills rather than one, which is the point: the useful output is which part slips, not a single number that tells you what you already suspected.