Plans change. Deadlines get moved up. Someone drops the ball. A new technology platform is launched in your organization. We live in a world of change. Sometimes the change is good (e.g., for those who are enjoying a new iPhone). Sometimes it's hard (e.g., adjusting to a pandemic, kids at home, online meetings).
We all have developed a variety of coping strategies to deal with change and the resulting stress. Some healthy, some not so healthy.
Given that the pace of change is only increasing, we need to develop more helpful tools and strategies to deal with it. For me, our brain is much like a muscle, wherein there are ways to train it such that it gets both stronger and more flexible. These are the characteristics that give me the mental agility to not only cope with stress, but ideally to reframe and leverage that stress to move forward, often in in a better way than I might have without the stress.
Let’s look at how this might be possible.
It’s All How You Look at It!
In my last article, I described how we can use acceptance as a powerful tool to help us respond to the many unmet expectations life brings our way. As we hone our mental agility, we can go beyond accepting what’s happening. We can use the stress as a seed to provoke creativity or to refocus our mind on what matters most.
1. Using Stress to increase mental agility
Let’s start with stress. When most of us feel stress, we want it to go away. Or we wish the cause of the stress would go away. But if you change how you look at it, at a very fundamental level, our stress response is information and it can be very useful.
Imagine that you notice you are feeling stressed because the deadline for a report or project was moved up. If we are already struggling to keep up, this can easily trigger us into a state of anxiety or overwhelm. In this state, our mind feels fretful, often jumping from task to task and it can struggle to think clearly, prioritize and focus. Our reaction to the stress is just that, a reaction.
But what if you could notice the stress and then use it as a cue? A cue that you are at risk of slipping into an unproductive mental-emotional state; one in which you are highly susceptible to unproductive spinning or distraction. Then use that cue to intentionally pause and breathe for a moment to help your nervous system relax, allowing you to get grounded and centred again. From a place of greater calm, you can now take a moment to evaluate priorities and options more clearly and intentionally. This is your pivot - mental agility in action. What can you delegate? What can wait? What do you need to adjust? Which task needs to get done first?
With true mental agility you are able to quickly accept and face challenges, change and unmet expectations head on. You don't waste energy on frustration, complaining or wishing things could be different; rather you look at the evolving situation and say "Ok, I can handle this! Bring it on! What’s my next step?".
2. using conflict to increase mental agility
Another circumstance where we can use the idea of mental agility is when dealing with someone who we are in disagreement or conflict with. Fight or flight is our natural response to a threat, and interpersonal conflict definitely evokes a threat response in most of us. We are hard-wired to either push back (fight) or alternatively, shut down (flight). In either case, we distance ourselves from that person and limit our ability to connect, think creatively and solve problems. It erodes trust and creates a lot of negative energy that struggles to find a productive outlet, usually ending up as stress, complaining or further conflict.
In this case, we can notice the conflict and accept that we don’t currently agree or see eye-to-eye. As you develop more mental awareness, you realize that you can pause and breathe to dampen your natural reaction. With a calmer mind, you can then look for what you share in common and leverage that to help resolve the conflict. If you scratch below the surface of many disagreements you will often find that you share many of the same desired outcomes with the other person, but you currently have very different ways of approaching or solving the problem. Mental agility allows us to see the game at a higher level, access thinking that allows for connection and creativity and moves us forward in a positive way.
3. using Fear to increase mental agility
Marie Forleo has this great quote: “Fear isn’t the enemy, waiting to stop feeling afraid is”. Our survival brain likes to think we will reach a state of readiness to take on a new role, begin a big project or buckle down on the hard task in front of us. We are waiting until we feel excited, inspired and ready. But we rarely have this feeling at the start of anything new and it limits us from taking action.
Whether it is stepping into a role before we are comfortable, speaking up against the status quo in a meeting or having a difficult performance conversation, our nervous system misreads the cue of ‘of not knowing how this will go’ as a reason to stop. When in reality, it is just a signal that we are in the territory of something exciting that may turn into growth and opportunity. Rather than react or hesitate because of the fear, what if we could reframe that fear and leverage it? What if we mentally channel anxiety into excitement as we step into a new role (both emotions feel surprisingly similar)? As we practice this our mental agility actually grows. We will still feel the fear or hesitation, but we channel it toward a positive outcome and take action.
4. it’s going to take Practice.
Going against our reactive brain, particularly with respect to things that threaten us or cause a stress response, is hard. Really hard. We are wired to react, hesitate or worry. Even more so if we are tired, stressed or dealing with a lot of change. So, this isn’t something you can just read in a LinkedIn post and do that afternoon! Though I’d love to hear about it if you did. :)
This is also where practice comes in. Neuroplasticity describes how we get better at whatever it is that we practice – neurons that fire together, wire together (D. Hebb, 1949). Just like the early stages of learning any skill, this will definitely feel new and awkward at first. But if we recognize that the pace of change only seems to be getting faster, that the complexity of the challenges we face only seems to be getting greater and the importance of having greater mental agility is more crucial than ever, it becomes clearer than ever to me that this is the skill I need to hone.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post. Let me know about your experience with this and please feel free to share your comments.
I work with forward-thinking accountants and CPAs who realize that training their brain sits firmly in the the bucket of “things in my control”, and that their mental agility has an inordinate ROI on everything else they are focused on achieving in their lives.
I would love to hear how you are doing. So if you are ready to break unhelpful patterns and unproductive behaviors for you or your team, book a FREE consultation with me HERE so we can explore how I can help you navigate your journey.