Build your (psychological) flexibility in order to hit your goals
Following on from last week’s newsletter on improving our health while navigating choice points in the chaos of daily life, this week’s focus is going deeper on the first step of the process. The psychological flexibility to change our planned actions in the face of changing circumstances is the key first step in successfully navigating a choice point and keep progressing towards our health opportunities. With the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world we live in, if we can’t develop the flexibility to adapt on the fly then we will struggle to make progress towards our goals and even live a life aligned with our values.
As affective neuroscientist Golnaz Tabibnia out of UC Irvine puts it in her fantastic 2020 paper “Also known as coping flexibility, or regulatory flexibility, and related to cognitive flexibility, psychological flexibility is the ability to recognize which strategy to use or not use and the flexibility to select and implement, and even switch to, a strategy that fits changing situational demands.”
When I’m working with my clients (both individuals and organisations) we take a top down approach to health planning.
Selecting health opportunities to pursue that align with your values and your vision of what good health looks like.
Identifying the high level principles that will move you in that direction.
Identifying a buffet of tactics that support those principles that you could apply, as well as understanding which situations each tactic fits best with.
Developing an understanding of the “punch in the face” moments that might take you off course. In your classic SWOT analysis, this is the threat section. Then working on plans to avoid, navigate, or recover from each barrier.
Front loading health planning this way builds a level of flexibility into your ability to navigate the choice points beyond the classic way most people approach health. Picking a specific tactic (diet, workout routine, meditation app) and just following that. With the classic model, when faced with a choice point you're left with two options. You can no longer do what you had originally planned. You can now either try to do a little bit of what you intended, or you could do nothing. When you build out a top down plan you're often left with a range of options that you can plug and play into a scenario when things go awry because you've prepped for it, or for something similar happening.
Even with this robust plan, it can still be difficult to remain flexible in the midst of chaos and a challenge to not take the "nothing" option. Some other practices that can help with psychological flexibility when plans need to change are
Grounding yourself in the moment, bringing your attention to something physical in the present. Your breath, the pressure on your feet, a smell or a touch, or the intricate detail on something you can see.
Trying to become the observer of your thoughts. Thoughts and planning go into overdrive when dealing with a challenge. Taking a moment to step back from them and observe allows you to set a new direction.
Accept the new situation for what it is. It's not what you initially hoped to do, but you can't go back and change it. Accepting that it is what it is allows you to move forward with the next best choice.
Check in with your values and what you care about. When you do that, it reminds you to take action towards them.
This last one isn’t something you can do in the moment, but reading widely, listening to podcasts and audiobooks, and watching stories help us see examples of other people navigating choice points and hopefully we can build some helpful strategies to assist us in our next choice point.
When you start to build the flexibility to quickly change your plan at a choice point, taking action towards your goals and values suddenly becomes easier.
Thanks for reading. When you’re ready to improve your health here is a way we can help with that.
Want to chat about Health mentoring to improve your health and performance, or your organisations. Please feel free to book in a time for a 30 minute introductory chat https://calendly.com/healthmentors/30min
