“Strong women don’t have ‘attitudes’, we have standards.”

Marilyn Monroe

Flexible thinking is the ability to see something from a different perspective and find alternative approaches to the challenges and changes we face. Having a flexible and open mindset helps prevent us from making snap judgements and assumptions about other people and situations – which can cause stress, or make us feel lacking in resilience.

Flexible thinking is really important when it comes to resilience. It helps you get ‘unstuck,’ allows you to come up with different options and approaches and helps you to handle setbacks quickly and effectively. It also helps you deal with the constant change we face in modern times, to be able to see change in a positive light and adapt to the different circumstances brought about by change. Flexible thinking will help you come up with new ideas and ways of working.

There are two key elements to flexible thinking – being open-minded and positive framing:

1. Having an open and optimistic mindset can support resilience because it helps you to make positive and adaptive responses to change and challenges. You’re more likely to see negative events as short-term and specific to a particular circumstance – something that is happening now. This means that you can adopt a broader perspective and feel less threatened by the situation you’re facing. You’re more likely to see the bigger picture and look to the future when you have an open mind.

Being open-minded will allow you to recognise that you have choices and options – both in terms of how you think about the situation and how you respond to it. In doing so, you’re likely to consider different approaches to resolving a situation and stay more optimistic that a solution can and will be found.

2. Positive framing allows you to look at even potentially negative situations in a more positive light. This will reduce your sense of threat and allow you to channel your focus more actively into how you can influence a positive outcome.

Your ability to reappraise and re-frame a situation can influence how you feel about it and then how you respond to it. Your approach will become less emotionally charged, you can access your higher cognitive functions and so think more expansively – and creatively – towards finding a solution.

When a stressful or difficult situation arises, before jumping to conclusions about it or worrying about how you will deal with it, focus on being more open-minded and framing the situation in a more positive way. These two tools will help you work out how best to deal with the situation in a more measured way – and with greater resilience.

Positive Practice – The Re-framing Matrix

Here’s a really useful way to develop more flexible thinking – by re-framing the challenge or issue and looking at it from different perspectives. This helps you to step out of the problem emotionally and look at it more rationally and logically.

Try this quick exercise:

Pick a current problem you are grappling with and write it in the middle of a sheet of paper. Then consider it from four different perspectives, giving each one a quarter of the page, around the problem.

1. Others: How someone else might view the problem? Think of three other people and what they’d advise you to do.
2. Context: How important is it really? If it’s really important it demands top priority; if it turns out to be unimportant it’ll be easier to let go.
3. Time: How important will it seem in the future? In a week, a month or even a year from now?
4. Content: How might it actually be positive? Could there be a new way of working or a new skill you could learn, so next time the problem arises, you’ll know exactly what to do?

Write down 2-3 alternative perspectives in each quarter of the paper and then notice how your thoughts about the problem have changed.

When we challenge ourselves to explore new ways of thinking, we disrupt unhelpful, limiting thinking patterns. We open up our minds to alternatives and this sense of ‘choice’ can help restore a sense of control. We see that we have options as to how we view the situation and see that we have options as to how we adapt and respond to it.

There are other exercises you can use, for developing more flexible thinking. If you’d like to talk about how they can help you, call me on +44 07977 072 760 or click here to email me and we can arrange a coaching call.