Are you agile enough?
Last week I turned 40. I am fully aware that when it comes to age there is a lot of bias out there - regardless of age, we will find somebody willing to cast us as a “spring chicken” or “too old to learn new tricks”. The bias often held by our societies is just one of thousands of biases that our brains are naturally susceptible to. It’s the result of programming that we are mostly unconscious of as we develop and form habits.
As a psychologist specialising in human behaviour and motivation, and leadership, our brain’s ability to create rigid or flexible thinking and ways of reacting to this is something I am fascinated by. As ever, for me, I'm reflecting at 40 on how I can develop my ability to be even more cognitively and emotionally flexible. Whilst I am in most cases a very open-minded, non judgemental, and empathetic and compassionate person, I am not always as cognitively flexible as I need to be (so my husband James would tell you!). But it’s something I know is important to work on.
In my research into Positive Leadership, we identified that emotional agility, adaptability and resilience are crucial mindsets and behaviours for leaders to develop to bring the best out of themselves and others - we call this set of resources “Limberness”. The term derives from both the ability to be physically limber and in reference to our brain's sophisticated limbic brain network.
Having and developing limberness is something that I work on to be the best version of myself, and I've enjoyed seeing the growth in this area of my leadership over the last 10 years. I’m also privileged to have had a huge impact in helping others learn from this aspect of leadership development too (see case study below). We know through the phenomenon of neuroplasticity - the brain's ability to adapt and evolve over time in structure and function - that we can and are able through reflection, practice, and choice, to grow our limberness.
And this is just as well. Leaders will need to hone this skill of limberness and developing it in others, now more than ever. As we continue to live in a world of geo-political , conflicts between employees are poised to be at an all-time high in 2024 (HBR - see the resources section below for more on this). More commonly than not, humans see the world in either/ or rather than both/and thinking. We can see the world as black and white, or choose to see it as grey - a mixture of the two. The world we live in is super complex, and BANI (‘brittle’, ‘anxious’, ‘nonlinear’ and ‘incomprehensible’ - my new favourite organisational acronym!) so there is increasing need for us to be more psychologically flexible for our peaceful survival and ability to thrive at work.
Historically the belief is that as we get older we get more fixed in our views too. However, this does not need to be the case. Developmental psychology teaches us that some people do have higher levels of self awareness than others naturally, but with the right experiences and appropriate, targeted, leadership development we can nearly all work on our self awareness to become more emotionally and cognitively flexible leaders.
So what are some practical ways to develop our limberness?
We can work on our adaptability, emotional agility, and our resilience through reflection and action. Here’s a mixture of reflection and action activities to develop our adaptability and emotional agility:
Adaptability: On a scale of 1-5 (1 being very unlikely, 5 being definitely) would you be able to assess the statement “ I am willing to change my mind if a situation calls for it?”? Explain why you have rated yourself this score. Would others agree with your rating?
Emotional agility: What's one small thing you could do to maintain, or build your capacity to change your mind if a situation calls for it?
Resilience: Take a piece of paper and for 20 minutes write about an emotionally charged situation that you are facing right now or have faced over the past week, month, or year. Set a timer for 20 minutes, write freely, and go wherever your mind takes you, not worrying about grammar or sense. Then throw the paper away or do not save the document. After 20 minutes, notice how different you feel after this exercise. The point is to separate your thoughts from yourself temporarily so you can step out of your experience and develop a new perspective (David, 2017, adapted from Pennebaker, 1997. See also Dahl et al., 2021).