Latest / RiseUp - Live Joy Your Way / Adopt a Flexible Thinking Mindset

Transcript

Adopt a Flexible Thinking Mindset · RiseUp - Live Joy Your Way

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Today's episode is produced by my friends at WalkWest.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: If you're looking to grow your brand and generate leads through podcast or video production, head over to walkwest.com.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's start the show.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Rise up and live joy your way.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: From emotional intelligence through cognitive distortions, certified life and wellness coach Comedy Wood is on a mission to help people see the magnificence of their own unique human spirit.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: Through these small bites of self-visualization and self-confidence, you can have healthy relationships, success in business and career, and live the life you want to live.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Rise up, live joy your way.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Hi there and welcome to another episode of Rise Up, Live Joy Your Way.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: If it's morning, afternoon, or evening, I just want to say thank you to you for taking some time out of your day to spend with me.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Today I'm going to be talking about this concept of flexible thinking and how that can help us move towards success and move towards more joy and fulfillment.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: When we think about our thoughts, what happens is that's funny to say when we think about our thoughts, but our thoughts in and of themselves are tied to feelings and they're tied to narratives and stories.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's how we experience our reality.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: The way that we think is going to affect our reality.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: So cognitive flexibility is essential in the ability to allow ourselves to make new connections or to see things from a different standpoint, to allow ourselves that room to get creative in solving problems.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because when we have a rigid way of thinking or we have just this one path that we see things and we have that closed-minded perspective, we don't, we're not allowing ourselves maybe to see other people's perspectives, but we're also not allowing our own selves to see things differently, maybe to look at something with a different lens.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that inability to focus on a situation can actually lead to uh stress and overwhelm, and it can lead to stagnation, it can lead to not moving forward at all, which can help, which can actually affect our professional careers and it can affect our relationships and our just our overall well-being as well.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: So when we think about why is it important to maybe build this idea of flexible thinking, really what we're doing is we are giving ourselves the ability to build our own resilience and we're also allowing ourselves to potentially see things in a different way, which could move our move us forward in the professional world or in our personal world.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: So why do I say that that um cognitive inflexibility leads to stress and overwhelm?
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, because when we have a rigid way of thinking, again, we think that there's only one way to do something.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so if it's not working, we might cause ourselves uh that that overwhelm or that that chronic stress, which will then lead to destruction in our own personal health.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: It can harm our relationships and it can just overall harm our productivity as well.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Because when we're dealing with stress, eventually we get exhausted or we shut down.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: So when we're thinking about this idea of um flexible thinking, what we're really asking ourselves is to um gain a different way to look at things.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: So what that means is we're we're building the skill to see things differently, to shift perspectives, to adapt to changes.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it involves the ability of our brain to build that muscle to switch between different ways of seeing things.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: So cognitive agility is when I mentioned it earlier, it's essential to actually building resilience because what it does is it allows us to think about things differently.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just the one, the one, the one highway to something.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: It instead we're allowed, we allow ourselves to see things in a broader sense, which gives us the ability to come up with solutions to problems as well as allows us to make strong, strong and good decisions for ourselves and can allow us to bounce back.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, when we talk about resilience, it's a it's about being able to bounce back from something that may not have gone the way that we expected it to.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now, resilience is not a characteristic that you either have or don't have.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, we can actually build it and we can acquire it and we can grow it through our own established attitudes, our ideas, and flexible thinking is one of the ways that we can actually build this.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: In acceptance and commitment-based coaching that I utilize with my clients, a lot of times we're talking about how do we become more psychologically flexible?
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because the flexible brain allows the ability to have our experience and then to look at it with different ways of seeing it.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: So when we are trying to overcome mental rigidity, for instance, we are actually challenging the thoughts that we're having.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Is this actually true?
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: Is the way that I'm speaking to myself actually true?
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: Is the way that I'm speaking to myself helpful?
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: When we're what we're doing with this is we're actually becoming more conscious of the thoughts that we're having.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: We're not trying to control them, we're just becoming more conscious of them.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then we're allowed, we allow ourselves the ability to challenge it and to learn how we might either choose to disengage from a specific thought and maybe engage with ones that are more helpful for us.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: So when we think about this, when you're over overworked or you're exhausted, thinking flexibly is pretty challenging.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you just take yourself back to a time when you felt overstressed and overworked and you just were just it was difficult to think through anything because you are just um your your brain is actually on overload.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so, how do we do this?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: How do we actually build the ability to become more flexible in our thinking?
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, a couple things.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: One, we can actually change up our routine.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: If we keep our routine exactly the same and very rigid day by day by day by day, uh our brains don't allow for that ability to maybe think about something differently.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, we could come up with a few different ways maybe to drive to school or drive to work and allow ourselves to change up that routine so that we're not going exactly the same way.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: It sounds silly, but it's it's just a way that we can potentially break up old ways of doing something or that routine, and it allows our brains to recognize that there are different ways to get to the same place, which builds us the ability to see that we can connect things differently.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: We don't always have to go down that one path.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Spontaneity, doing something just without having planned it, can allow ourselves to be introduced to this idea of stepping outside of our comfort zone, stepping into our growth zone.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: What that does again is it allows the brains to ex our brain to experience something in a different way.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: The reason why flexible thinking is so valuable is because when we have that flexible mindset, we're able to recognize that just because something doesn't go the way that we want, because I talk about this a lot in self-compassion, flexible thinking is really intertwined with self-compassion.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: What we're doing is we're allowing ourselves to see that there might be more than one solution to an issue.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: Just because one thing has happened and maybe we've dealt with it a certain way, time and time before, and maybe it's not working out, we can think about it differently.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Flexible thinking also allows you to recognize when maybe you have made a mistake, and then you can call in self-compassion and say, okay, now this didn't go the way that I wanted, but what did I learn from it?
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: How did I how can I take the information I gained from this experience and how do I want to apply it moving forward?
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: And really what we're doing with this, with this ability to think flexibly is we are building our resiliency factor.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: We're building our ability to deal with challenges that come up.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because when we're talking about growth, uh self-development, we're talking about growth as an individual, these are lifelong things.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: We don't just, you know, it's not like a one and done thing.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: We're not just gonna quote unquote get there.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I think a lot of times people think that if they could just fix this one thing with them and themselves, then everything would be fine.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's about we're working and we're growing and we're evolving.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: We're not trying to become immune to life's challenges.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's just something, you know, life is going to throw challenges, it's going to throw curveballs.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: So what we're doing is we're through self-development and these these growth processes, we're building up our arsenal and our toolbase that we can deal with things maybe in a different way.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe we let go of old narratives and old stories in terms of how we dealt with it before.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly what flexible thinking is about.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's about giving ourselves the ability to think about things and see things differently so that we might be able to come up with a different way to handle the challenge in the future.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: If you'd like to talk about this or anything else that might be coming up in your world that might be keeping you stuck or stagnant, feel free to reach out to me at any time at chatwithcomedy.com.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: And until next time, stay well.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for listening to Rise Up, Live Joy Your Way.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: For more information, book a chat with comedy at www.chatwithcomedy.com.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: Or visit her website at www.comedywood.com.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: You can also find comedy on Facebook or Instagram.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: Username it is authentic me.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for listening.