Cara Brookins shared a new leadership playbook at the AWCI Industry Leaders Conference 2025.
By Mark L. Johnson
Today’s construction leaders face tight schedules, labor shortages and rising costs. In the AWCI Industry Leaders Conference (ILC) session, “Building Adaptitude™: Tools, Actions and Attitudes to Succeed in a Changing World,” bestselling author and motivation researcher Cara Brookins, CEO of By Brookins, Inc., offered a mindset shift for navigating today’s turbulence.
Brookins, a single mom, knows all about turbulence. She and her four children built a 3,500-square-foot house with only limited finances and YouTube instructional videos. The process taught her the ability to adapt is not the same as being resilient. Adaptability involves advancing through a tough situation.
“I’m tired of being ‘resilient’,” she told the audience. “I’m tired of just standing still when I want to be moving forward.”
Adaptability Matters More than Resilience
Brookins’ experience and research show why many professionals feel exhausted by the constant demand to be resilient. She coined the term Adaptitude™, which she defines as the ability to adjust in real time to problems, even when the path ahead is unclear.
Adaptitude is a trainable skill, not a personality trait, she said. And it begins by being audacious. Adults lose the natural confidence they had as children—the willingness to experiment, make mistakes and try again, Brookins said. She encourages leaders to reawaken that confidence, that audacity, to attempt new things even without the certainty of success.
“What if moving toward your goals felt like running toward freedom?” she said, recalling her own childhood moments of uninhibited experimentation.
The idea is for leaders to give their workers something they can own. Brookins suggested giving your workers more autonomy.
During her experience in building a house—a large, complex project—Brookins and her team of four children stayed committed to the job because they each had real responsibility. They did not feel “supervised,” even if they didn’t know at first how to frame walls or install plumbing.
Brookins said shared challenges can deepen collaboration. Neuroscience shows, she said, that completing difficult tasks together triggers oxytocin, which strengthens trust and cooperation.
So, what happens when teams hit uncertainty and progress often stalls? Brookins’ solution is to pose simple question: “What is the worst-case scenario?” She believes that 99 percent of the time, the worst-case is fixable.
Considering the worst-case scenario can strip fears down to facts and enable movement forward. She admitted that she and her children did not know how to build, for example, a diagonal wall. But they asked the question, what’s our worst-case scenario? And they were no longer paralyzed. They got the work done.
Learn to Adapt
Brookins’ message resonated deeply with the industry leaders in attendance at ILC.
The future, she said, belongs to adaptable teams—the ones willing to experiment, adjust and move forward. The combination of audacity, autonomy, having shared challenges and practical risk-taking can help any organization to survive uncertainty and grow from it, she said.
“When we reawaken that childhood energy, that enthusiasm, that confidence, that belief that we can figure anything out—that’s how we build the ability to adapt in real time,” Brookins said.
Save the Date: AWCI’s next Industry Leaders Conference 2026 will be at the Grand Hyatt Indian Wells Resort and Villas in Indian Wells, California, September 29-October 1. We can’t wait to see you there!
Mark L. Johnson writes for the walls and ceilings industry. He can be reached via LinkedIn.com/in/markjohnsoncommunications.