E114 – Psychological Flexibility (w/ Richard MacKinnon)

and James.

Hello everyone. This is James. Just before this podcast, I wanted to take a minute and remind you that we're actually a community interest company working to improve people's experience, performance and engagement in the world of work. In addition to our free podcasts and articles, we provide online training seminars, workshops, courses and development programs, as well as one to one our team coaching. You can learn more on our website, www, dot World of work.io, that's www, dot World of work.io and if you like this podcast, please do take a minute to review. Okay, let's get into the show. Hello. This is James, and this is Jane, and here we are again today with another episode of World of Work podcast. We've got an old friend coming back to speak to us, and we're speaking about a new subject, which is exciting, Jane, what are we speaking

about today? Well, today we you're right, absolutely right. We have old friend of the show, Dr Richard MacKinnon of work life site coming to join us, and we are talking about a topic that he's really interested in, and I think sounds really engaging, psychological flexibility, cool. Well, let's get into the conversation.

Okay, so here we are on the main body of today's podcast conversation, and we are picking up again with one of the friends of the show, one of our good former hosts and friends, Dr Richard MacKinnon. And in the past, we've spoken to him about topics like procrastination and little bits around anxiety as well. And today, we're going back for a third of our planned conversations with him, and we're gonna be speaking about psychological flexibility, which is a helpful and important topic for us to be exploring. But before we do that, Richard, would you be willing to say hi and introduce yourself again to the audience, maybe check in a little bit and see how that's treated you in the last few months?

Absolutely. Thank you for the introduction. It's great to be back. It's always nice to be invited to someone else's podcast and have someone else do the heavy lifting. It's no it's no it's really nice to be speaking with you again. I'm an occupational psychologist, a workplace psychologist. I spend a good chunk of my time working with individuals in a coaching context. Work across three broad areas, mostly people's well being, their productivity and their interpersonal effectiveness. And the topic today is really something that covers all three of those, or can positively impact all three of those. So it's not surprising to know that it actually comes up quite frequently. And I suppose, since we last spoke, same old, same old, lockdown fun, right? Yeah, there hasn't. There hasn't. There haven't been many changes, but there haven't been any terrible changes either. We're all keeping, well, I'm working away, and hey, we're heading into spring, and yes, so we'll have fewer very dark mornings and evenings. And that's always welcome.

That's right, the days are getting lighter, the temperatures warming a little bit. It's, um, it's good to be facing into a more positive looking year than I think we were last year. Though, we didn't necessarily know it exactly 12 months ago. This is late, sorry, very early February 2021, by the way. So today we're going to be speaking about psychological flexibility and exploring that in bit more detail. Though, before we get into that, I just wanted to ask a little bit about the way that we experience our thinking and feeling. So a lot of psychological flexibility responds to or gives us toolkits to deal with some factors around the way that we think and the way that we feel in the workplace. And I guess I just wanted to open it up and explore, you know, from a lay perspective or an uninformed perspective, how do most of us experience our thoughts, maybe experience our feelings, particularly in the workplace? So

I'm going to try and answer that, bearing in mind everyone that's out there. Yeah, absolutely. But I suppose the things that many people can identify with would be, from time to time when we get quite busy, we could find ourselves working in a kind of an automatic pilot mode, where we're going from task to task, meeting to meeting. We're not really aware of what we think about these things. We're in task completion mode. And it doesn't always mean that we're doing the right thing, or we're bringing our attention to bear on the most useful thing, and it may mean that we respond automatically to things that are going on around us, or indeed, we might not even be present at all. We might be caught up in our minds. The other challenge with this sort of permanent busy status is that we may not, in fact, usually not, consider the why of what we do. We just do. We're in doing mode, and that, you know, we get stuff done, we feel tired as a result, but we may not feel connection with what we're doing, what we've done. We may not identify a sense of purpose or achievement. And so this all relates back to how connected we are with our inner experiences, our thoughts and our emotions. Something many people might identify with is that they become really aware of their emotions when they're quite strong, and they seem to appear out of nowhere, and they maybe dictate what we do next. And that is sort of the opposite of what we're aiming to do by cultivating psychological flexibility. We're aiming to move away from being at the mercy of an emotional state, but rather make conscious choices as to how we want to behave in any given situation.

Yeah, but that sounds like a brilliant place to be. And when you speak about that being kind of absorbed in the moment and that sort of autopilot, that's definitely something I find that I connect with, you know, a description that resonates with me, and I'll find that I I almost get sort of hyper focused or distracted or or just deeply engaged in something. And I, I stopped being intentional about things, and things are kind of just sort of predestined, and I'm in the flow of what's happening around me and and lacking in an ability to influence and be intentional in it, and is that something that you experience as well?

Yeah, I was just thinking of my examples of mindless, automatic behavior, you know, being at home, working from home. And I want to underline this. I really miss my office, which is not something I thought I'd ever say, but working from home, I've come to notice a few automatic behaviors, and I used to use these as examples in training. One is finding myself in front of the fridge when I can consciously say I'm hungry or thirsty, and the other is finding myself making a coffee at the machine when I didn't really say to myself, I would like some coffee now. So you know, they're relatively harmless, unless, you know, I find myself eating and drinking far too much, and it really having a negative impact on my well being. But these are the very everyday, automatic actions that we might evaluate and say, No, I'm not too keen on that. And of course, we can have habits that are really good for us as well. So just because it's automatic, it doesn't mean that it's necessarily bad.

Yeah, and those are examples that I think, again, many of us can relate to. And again, those like you said, they're not particularly troublesome women themselves, but potentially they're indicative of something a little bit more, or exposes to the idea that there are other things that we're doing in that automated way themselves, or in a non reflective, non intentional way. And, and something that certainly happens to me is that I build my sense of what I'm doing up into being more important than it is. So I like decontextualize the scope of the things that I'm working on, and I become overly involved in some facets of it, both in terms of focus and attention to detail, but also in terms of my emotional engagement with it and and if I can get that flexibility and step back, then I feel calmer and more effective in what I do. But that's

a great example, because you can, I think we can all imagine someone interrupting you when you're in the middle of that and you may not respond in a way that you're later really proud of because you were so invested in that task, and it was the most important thing to you there and then. But as you say, stepping back, it may not be a task you remember in six months, definitely not in six years. So why should it dictate your behavior right here

and now? Yeah, and I guess we've talked about some of the sort of ways that this stuff manifests itself, and we've talked a little bit about our sort of behaviors that can come out. Have you got any more thoughts on the specific thinking patterns or lack of them, or other ways that maybe our minds can kind of work away at us and then sort of work against us and degrade some of our desired intentionality? And, you know better?

Yeah. I mean, you know, our minds are amazing first of all, and they're just incredibly powerful, and they can, you know, being careful with language, always try and say the stuff our mind is giving us rather than I am that stuff, it's useful to distinguish, and maybe we can elaborate on that in a little while. But, you know, sometimes we can treat thoughts as being facts when they're not. We can treat thoughts as being instructions for action when maybe that's not the helpful thing to do. In that context, we might go with our minds on a time travel adventure to the past or the future, and it's useful to distinguish between when we want to do that. You know, we can go to the past to learn from experience. We can anticipate the future when we're planning, but we can all get caught up with imagined horrors in the future, and we can all get caught up with embarrassing things or upsetting things from our past. And of course, another big theme is our mind is trying to help us, but it paints pictures of situations we want to avoid because they're uncomfortable and not risk, not danger, not pain, but just uncomfortable, like boredom, embarrassment, failure, and so we can find ourselves in a pattern where we try to avoid that discomfort. That means we're making decisions around avoiding discomfort, rather than moving in the direction where we want to take ourselves in life. And so we might avoid some very useful situations, but they're difficult, but they're helpful to us in terms of our development or what's meaningful to us. And

do you think part of that is sort of to do with our calculation internally, for lack of a better word, you know, are we unable to calculate the benefits and the risks of actions we're taking and wave them up from the psychological cost or risk around them and the potential rewards for our performance? Do you think it's that sort of semi rational thing that's a bit missing within this?

I suppose you could describe it as semi rational, actually, yeah, because what we're doing is is, it's where we're putting our focus. So you know, if let's come up with an example. Now, I'm asked to speak in front of an audience of my peers, and the first thing I imagine is getting something wrong, feeling embarrassed, damage to my reputation. And of course, then my focus could go, Well, how do I avoid that? Or how do I do what I know to be the right thing, and there's going to be a risk of embarrassment, and if I do the former, I'm just being, just getting caught up with minimizing the risk of something that's not dangerous to me, but I'm not doing what could be really helpful to me, which is going through the presentation. And this is only you know, problematic if this becomes a habit, and so then I don't present, I don't go to meetings, I don't share my suggestions all to avoid the potential risk of being wrong or being embarrassed. And of course, you can draw your own conclusions about what I would miss out on by avoiding that discomfort, and it's super common. This isn't a judgment on anyone there now who can imagine themselves or can think of examples when they avoided some discomfort. You know, we all maybe avoid someone who tells boring stories, or we we don't want to get stuck in a networking situation. But at the same time, if it's I'm not putting myself forward for that promotion, in case I don't get it, that's deeply irrational. But if you look at it through the lens of discomfort, avoidance, that makes sense.

Yeah. And this sort of goes, or reminds me a little bit of some of our conversations around anxiety, where we said, with anxiety, I believe you said, you know, in small doses, that little bit of anxiety enhances our performance. And I guess there's a little bit of that in this situation as well.

That's key to this. You know, the being focused, being aware of the discomfort can bring you around to see, hey, this is meaningful to me. This is something that wants to get my attention. Now, what do I want to do with it, rather than it being a, you know, clock song going off and red lights flashing and quick move in the opposite direction. So how we interact with this psychological discomfort is, is really important. What? By no means do we end up liking it, or, by no means do we end up never feeling discomfort? The whole point about this skill set is that you see it for what it is, and you do the thing anyway, because you know it's meaningful to you so you will get embarrassed. We all will get embarrassed. I'll probably be embarrassed and that and or make mistakes before the end of the day. They won't be fun, they won't be enjoyable, but I'll be doing them in the service of something meaningful to me.

Yeah. And it seems to me like part of what we're exploring here is the fact that we have these sort of thinking patterns and emotional responses and behaviors all around us, and they can be detrimental to us, but to some extent, we can adjust them or flex them to some I guess, if that's the language we're using, we can have a reach a situation where we are no longer slaves to our thinking patterns and our emotions, but have some ability to respond and manage through intentionality and navigate through them in a more beneficial way. Is that fair about

the simplest way to look at being psychologically flexible is one of the components, is we learn how to see our thoughts for what they are, and we can see them as just temporary passing mental experiences, not rules, not instructions, not threats. And what we're not trying to do is change those thoughts or remove those thoughts. We're just saying there's a thought and there'll be another one along in a minute. It's almost a conveyor belt of mental content. But of course, all of us, from time to time, will get caught up with one thought that comes along that conveyor belt for no particular reason, and we'll think, I need to do something with that. And this is one of the great things about our minds, and it's also one of the challenges we've got problem solving minds so we can feel something or experience. Something in our minds, and then think, well, now I need to do something about that. And being psychologically flexible means we no longer feel we have to do something with that. We just let it pass. Of course, that frees up lots of energy or attention, however you want to put it to, then focus on other things if we're not caught up manipulating our inner experiences. And of course, we never can. We're wrestling with them. If we don't do that, then we can, you know, unleash all of our attention onto other meaningful things.

Do you think that different people are, I guess, naturally, more aware of their thinking processes and sort of more intuitive, and consequently better able to manage this. Or do you think this is something that everybody is taught or not taught throughout their lives? I guess. Where do these skills come from? Is it things that are embedded into the way that we grew up, in our in our sort of lived experiences? Or where do these skills come from?

Yes, so awareness of your values, for example, might be a function of how you were brought up and how you were educated, if it was a very values centric environment where you know principles of doing the right thing and principles of knowing why you do what you do were were reinforced. Of course, your upbringing could lead you to have some of that discomfort avoidance tendency and limit your experiences, or what we call experiential avoidance, if, if those things were associated with fear or punishment, you know, when we were taught, never do this, never say that, never stand out, you know, never never volunteer. Never be the first to do that. And of course, we could pick up an unhelpful habit that way. I wouldn't say that everyone has taught these skills. I've yet to meet someone outside of psychology circles who has just picked these up along the way, but we can develop them their skills. So that's the good news, and we can learn more about how our minds work. I think one of the challenges is because everyone has a mind, everyone feels they have some expertise in the mind, and a lot of what is well intentioned advice that we might get or indeed give runs contrary to everything I've just said. So someone has a bad day at work, we say, oh, cheer up. It's not that bad. And we don't have a switch to flick to cheer up. Or someone's feeling anxious, we say, Oh, don't feel so anxious. It's not that scary. And of course, we might introduce the word scary, which they haven't thought of, and now they're going, Oh, my God, maybe it's scary as well as anxiety inducing. So you know, a lot, a lot of the things that we think are helpful, are not helpful because our minds construct networks and webs of content and meaning, and we can't get rid of that stuff. We just need to learn how to navigate it. And we might find intuitively we've done some of these things over time, and then we might find the name for it. But definitely people differ in the extent to which they do these things. And we can measure that, you know, and people have been measuring it for quite some time, so we can see those differences, but we can also see that if we do more of these things, it's beneficial on a number of levels, and that's really the important thing.

I'm really, I'm really interested in so much of what you've just said. There's a couple of different types, a few different types of, I guess, techniques or approaches that you've talked about that might crop up. One one was around sort of allowing those thoughts that you have to just move on, knowing that another one's going to come in its place. And then also about that idea of gently, sort of knocking thoughts back, or just making way or turning away from them, is that, is that just a couple of different ways that people approach it? Or is it that people need multiple tools? Or is it that some tools work better for different

people? I would agree with the last point, different approaches, different tools that we would teach resonate differently with different people, because one of the well, let me take a step back, everything you've just described there fits under the umbrella term of what we call diffusion, defusing from thoughts so that we can look at them, not look through them. So it's getting that bit of space between us and that mental content. And there's lots of different ways we can practice diffusion, and I would argue starting point is learn one and see how well that works for you, and then learn some of those other techniques which might be useful in different contexts in which we find ourselves. And you can be creative. This is one of the joys. It's not that prescriptive. So, for example, if you have an active imagination and you can visualize, well, then you can visualize using any kind of metaphor you like, as long as that imagery involves your thoughts moving away, you know, moving towards you, past you and going. It might be trains going. Through a train station. It might be sushi plates on a conveyor belt, it might be clouds in the sky. It doesn't really matter, as long as you're able to visualize and represent this content as being the thing that's moving. Because what we're trying to do is see the thoughts as things rather than as me. We're able to see them moving rather than, well, I need to do something with this now. And so if you've got a few of these tools at your disposal, logically, it means you can choose the right tool for the moment. That

makes total sense. And James has talked on a couple of other podcasts, I think, one with you and previously as well, about this foundational idea of when people begin to accept they are separate from their thoughts, and their thoughts can be separate and they don't necessarily define them. I think it can be a really powerful thing. I just I just wondered, we're obviously recording this in, as we've already said, a somewhat well less unusual time than it was six months ago, but certainly in the grand scheme of things, pretty rare, and there's a lot of associated stress factors that we're experiencing. Do you? Do you think these techniques have particular relevance right now, or or indeed, whenever there's like major turbulence or uncertainty in the world?

I do now. I have no evidence to share today that say because there is a global pandemic, we must learn our psychological flexibility skills. But if you think about it for a moment, we might find ourselves suffering. And you know, all of this means we're going to have difficulties. We're going to face many, many difficulties, but the suffering is the sort of going over those difficulties and reliving those things and getting caught up with the difficulties rather than taking action that could be helpful to us in the context. And it's that adjustment to the context I think that's really helpful during times like this, we could get caught up in lots of thoughts about what we used to be able to do and is now forbidden. Or we could say, well, in this context, this is what I want to be able to do, what's like that but permitted? What gives me the same joy, what gives me the same connection? But we might just find ourselves saying, well, the pubs are closed. The gym is closed. Life is miserable. And of course, we could also a similar example. When working from home, we're now remote from our teams, we might start to get caught up with thoughts, wondering what other people are thinking about us? Are they judging my output? Will they wonder why I don't pick up the phone when I'm in the bathroom. Can I take a break and have some lunch? Or will that look bad? And of course, we can, and I think we've all seen examples of this. Compare ourselves to other people, whether that be people close to us, and how well they are doing, apparently, or on social media, and say, Well, I just scraped through today. I didn't make any banana bread. I haven't taught my children Spanish. I must be no good rather than how am I doing in my context? And how am I doing compared to yesterday? So whenever there is a crisis, whenever there's a big, big difficulty in our environment. It's useful to think, Okay, how has the context changed? And how might I need to do things differently because the context is so different?

Yeah, that makes Does that make sense? Complete sense. And I guess it you've articulated very well why the two things were hovering around in my head as related, because that I can, I can imagine all of those exact situations you mentioned. I love I love terminology, and I've just heard the phrase diffusion, which you mentioned a little bit earlier, and you gave us an excellent understanding of what that is. Are there other within this group of skills? Are there other things like diffusion, that people can be aware of. So

if we're able to see thoughts for what they are, we're able to have a new relationship with with discomfort, because we can see maybe, you know, the warning light on the dashboard doesn't tell us what to do next. It just tells us some things may be amiss. And so we can approach discomfort as being something we don't like, but can stand where a lot of the time our inner monolog is, I can't stand this. I wouldn't be able to stand that. I'm at the end of my tether. And so we can say, well, Aggie, I don't like it at all, but I can stand it. I can. I can keep going. It's not pleasant, and I don't have to like it. What really helps us, though, is if we're going to accept this level of discomfort, is to be clear on what we're working towards. We frequently use the imagery of wading through a swamp, and the swamp is the discomfort. And if. We keep going, we're accepting the discomfort involved. But you know, what really helps is if we know what's on the other side of the swamp, and if we're going towards that with intent, with purpose, and it's something desirable to us for some reason. And the notion of goals, it goes up and down in terms of popularity. But here's the thing contextually right now, somebody's goal could be to get out of bed in the morning. Their goal could be to get washed and dressed and sit in front of the screen. For someone else, their goal could be to launch a new business, save their business, educate their kids. All of these things are difficult for different reasons, for different people, if we shy away from the discomfort, we don't do any of that. We stay in bed, we don't turn up for work. We, you know, ignore our children, whatever it might be. So this is about saying, if this is meaningful to me, if I want to move in this direction, yeah, it's going to be uncomfortable, but that's not why I'm doing it. The discomfort is incidental. It's part of the package. But if it takes my focus, then I'm focused on reducing discomfort. I'm not moving in a in a really valued direction. And of course, if we practice these diffusion skills as part of that, and that's just seeing thoughts for what they are, you know, without getting too technical, we could practice things. And this is something everyone could do. After listening to this, we could practice labeling our thoughts, you know, getting more specific about the stuff that shows up inside. Instead of saying all of these are thoughts, we could say, well, that thing is a that's a bit of self criticism, that's me judging someone else. That's a memory. Fine, that's a prediction, okay, and All right, okay, I can be a bit more specific about this stuff that's showing up, and I can then more easily choose to do I need to do anything with this. That's a prediction. And, you know, there's no chance that things actually going to happen. So why would I give it my attention? This is a memory of how I solved a problem like this before. Actually, I find that quite useful. That's a helpful thing to show up right now. And so learning how to treat our thoughts as something that is passing through neither good nor bad, but helpful or unhelpful, depending on the context we're in. And that's at the crux of it all, is paying attention to the context so we can respond better, more helpfully, towards that context, towards what's going on around us.

You know, I've got two things I'm going to follow up with on that, but when you were speaking earlier about the different visualizations that people used to think about their thoughts in the past, I've always imagined clouds, and I've always had like a pole and I push them away, right? That's just what I've had. But with your last description there, I'm kind of drawn to your sushi conveyor belt visualization, and that's given me that analogy and an ability to choose, to some extent, a little bit more, and that feels kind of helpful for me in that I'd like to come back to that. But one of the things that we bet you touched on a little bit earlier, I'd like to explore a little bit more, and it's maybe slightly off topic, but I think it's relevant for for these times when, when you were speaking about our experiences of working from home, I have a minute, and we started to talk a little bit about what I loosely think of as social comparison, and where we think maybe we're being judged by other people, or we look at your example of somebody making banana bread and teaching their kids Spanish all at the same time, and then, you know, example of maybe somebody who's struggling to get out of bed and and we make these social comparisons that are upwards and downwards, and I think that's a big part of our life. But at the sense I get is that at a remove, when we are fully remote as we are now, and we don't get reassuring regular contact with people, but that our mind can have a stronger hold on what we create in ourselves of these comparisons, and then we can, you know, castas or grow these things. What are your thoughts on that? And how do you think people could use some of these techniques to help specifically with that sort of social element that comes into remote working and our unhelpful thinking patterns at the minute, I think

you make a really good point, and it is super relevant to what's going on at the moment, when we are maybe lacking some of the contact we're used to having with people, and we may rely on snapshots of what they choose to share with us, whether it's two minutes at the start of a video call with the team, or whether it's on social media, or whether it's someone we've never met, but is sharing their world with us. Online. Comparisons can often be unhelpful, because we're not comparing apples with apples. We're comparing how we feel right now with the product that someone else is showing us, what we don't see is the effort they put in, the struggle, the tears, the first three failures of the banana bread, whatever it is, we haven't seen them shout at their kids to get out of the kitchen. We've seen them. I say, look at this delicious banana bread I've made. And we go, I didn't make any. That means I should have or I'm bad for not doing it. You know, I'm being really simplistic here. But these comparisons, they're rarely helpful, because we're not comparing the complexity of that person with the complexity of me. We're comparing they did that, I didn't do that, and we're not thinking, why didn't I do that? And maybe I don't want to bake. Maybe it's just not something I have the resources to do right now. Maybe what's more important to me is looking after my family. So we need to watch out for comparisons, and of course, we can use anything I've been discussing so far to help us with those worries or those anxious thoughts that show up, because it's it's rare that our mind is happy with a vacuum, and if we don't have information, our mind will attempt to fill that vacuum with some kind of problem solving information, you know, to help US, but it's not really helping us. It's just giving us more to be anxious about. And so we can practice those diffusion skills, for example, if we notice that we're sitting in front of our laptop and we're thinking a lot about how our team are thinking about us, the simple question is, I've noticed I'm thinking about that rather than the thing that's in front of me. Is that helpful? Or is that not helpful? All we have to do is identify is ruminating over other people's evaluations of me, helpful right now in this moment, or is that unhelpful? And if it's unhelpful, what do I want to do instead? I want to finish this document. It's been in front of me all morning days, you know. And it is both as simple and as difficult as that, because the stories our minds give us are so compelling. Otherwise it would be easy to ignore them. They're up there on a big screen in Technicolor, you know, Hollywood productions. And so learning how to see them, learning how to be aware of them means we can then decide what we want to do with them. It's when we're unaware of them, and now we're back into the automatic action, we might find ourselves feeling a strong emotion about people who aren't in the room with us and act in a way we're not proud of later all because our mind said they're judging you.

Yeah, I think there's some great stuff in there, and that awareness piece remains for me. One of the most important things out of all of this is that ability to step back and see your thoughts as sort of products. When you were speaking there about children and schooling and all that, it reminded me I was chatting to a friend of mine, I guess, last week, every week before, and she's obviously, you know, really good parent. And he's got four kids, and they're doing homeschooling, and he runs a business, and he was saying he had one morning, and it was really pleased with himself. He was like, it was half a he'd had, like, a morning call. He'd got kids downstairs. They were all doing their, you know, homeschooling, and everything was really great. And he thought it was all under control. Then one of the kids turned him and said, Dad, where's kid number three? And he did a little head count, and he realized that he'd missed one of our kids, and they were upstairs in bed playing with their phone, right? So it's just, I guess we all, like you said, we make those mistakes. Well, two out of three isn't bad, right? Three

out of four in this case. So I mean, hats off, but that's remarkable in some of the language that you use, and I guess it's worth COVID out here, but you do have some stuff on your website on this, and we'll reference that later, but with some of the sort of documentation and the ways that you think about this, you use the phrase show up, let go, get moving. Would you sort of elaborate on that as a sort of mantra, or way to distill down some of the more positive alternative approaches. So the

first thing I need to say is that the research and practice community that this is all grounded in is a very generous one. So so many of the resources, so many of the approaches and the things you might want to look at in this area, are completely free, and they're out there. And that means that we can take each other's metaphors imagery, use them with different client groups if they land well there. So I want to, while I remember it, say the sushi one is not mine. I have egregiously stolen that, but it lands really well with people who've ever been to a conveyor belt sushi restaurant, you know. But this notion of show up, let go, get moving, is just the shorthand I use when working with clients, because psychological flexibility, strictly speaking, is made up of six skills, and six is a little bit harder to remember, and some of the ways we graphically represent those six skills can be a little bit complex where, however, if you you know, meet, if back in the old days when we used to socialize, if I ended up talking to someone about these concepts at a party, okay, imagine meeting me at a party. But anyway, you. You need to be able to explain these things very simply, so hence, show up flexibly in the here and now. Pay attention to here and now. That will give you great cues for how you can respond to what's going on in the here and now. So show up second one is to let go of any struggle with thoughts and emotions, not trying to change them, minimize them, get rid of them, stop that struggle, and let them be, you know. So that's the let go component. And then if you if you're able to show up and let go, you need to take helpful action, and that's the get moving. Get moving in a direction that's valued despite the discomfort. So we need to be clear on what matters to us, and then that acts as a bit of a inner compass to keep us going generally in a direction that we think is important. So it's kind of predicated on being aware of what's going on around us and what's going on inside of us. We then work on those diffusion skills to end that struggle, and then we can take action that in that context is helpful to us rather than unhelpful. And that's not the same as good and evil or or good and bad. It's just Well, given the context that I am trying to lose weight, does finding myself in front of the fridge when I'm bored, is that helpful to me? It's not in this context, because I'm trying to lose weight. If I was recovering from surgery and I needed to put on lots of weight, that would be fine. So we try and move away from simplistic evaluations of good and bad and say in the context what's helpful and that's kind of liberating, and it gives us more options, and that's what we're trying to do, move away from rigid responses every time to well, what's going on now, what would be an optimum way for me to respond to what's going on around me?

And that's all of those things sound like. They have incredible importance for us as individuals when we are navigating our way through life, be it our personal lives or our professional lives, when we think about managers of teams or leaders of teams, how do you think this, these kind of concepts and these ideas and these, these sort of tools can help help managers, help their teams.

Yep, I think it's really important that we're able to ground these things in the everyday and in the workplace context. We need to turn it into practical benefits. So, for example, managers could make use of these skills by being able to give the people that work for them the personal attention that they would really like. So, you know, to engage in things like active listening, to focus on people as people and not as tasks, and to really listen to them rather than wait for a gap in the conversation to tell them something more broadly, you know, these skills give managers and leaders the capacity to role model behavior that represents them at their best. And that's the opposite of, you know, the cycles we sometimes see where someone is, they're great, and then they have a massive explosion of emotion and desk thumping, then they apologize, then they're great again, but it keeps happening. So you know, practicing these skills means that they can walk the talk of the values in their organization and be a lot more congruent with what the organization is is hoping for. And of course, if they know what's important, they can really focus on that stuff a values led approach which has inherent flexibility, rather than a kind of a punishment error seeking approach where it's a lot more rigid, and if we're able to, I mean, I just had this conversation this morning about people returning to the workplace when they've been on a development program. You know, it's really important that when they come back off that learning experience, that they return to an environment that is tolerant of them trying out new things, and a manager who's psychologically flexible will be able to see the intent, will be able to see the experimentation, will be able to reinforce and talk about these things much more flexibly than someone who's focused on right and wrong, or who might see new behaviors as a threat to their position. So there's so many ways we could see the benefits of these skills for for anyone, in an organization and in in my own work, I've I've taught these skills to kind of newly minted graduates on their first week of work, and I've worked with C suite, C suite executives. And actually one thing that feedback I've had many, many times, the more senior the person, the more likely they are to say, why didn't I hear about this stuff a long time ago? And I think that's kind of telling, because it gives them that light bulb. Moment, and they realize they have more options, but they also wish that they'd started doing it 20 years ago. But

so it's it's funny, because just as you're saying that last piece about about people not being aware of it, it strikes me that, and I don't want to say a responsibility, because that feels harsh, but it strikes me that if you do have some understanding of these, these skills and these, these abilities and these concepts, and that you're able in some way to use them, you kind of have a responsibility, or at least it would be very kind or or nice to your team and your peers and the people you work with to make people aware of it. Because I think there's something incredibly powerful about saying, Hey, I have these thoughts too, and, you know, I struggle with these things too. It's just that I have been given some really practical ways in which I managed to navigate them so that they maybe don't seem as if they impact me so much. Because I'll confess that, you know, absolutely I had no idea about any of these types of techniques and these kinds of skills and concepts before I started studying in the area of work psychology.

is important. These are life skills. You know, you talked about them being useful in the work and outside of work. I mean, these are skills for life, because life throws challenges at us daily, you know, whether it's a busy email inbox or it's another lockdown, you know, and everything in between. So being able to practice these skills just aids us and those around us and normalizing this stuff, I think, is very powerful, and it's something I regularly do in coaching and in training. Use of self in that regard by saying, well, while you're thinking about an example, let me share an example of how I screwed up massively by fusing with my thoughts a few years ago and just saying, this stuff happens all the time, and it will continue to happen. And we will have thoughts we don't like, and we will feel emotions we don't like, and some days we'll drop the ball completely, and I will be like the Antichrist, and then I'll remember yet, you know what? Let's put this into practice that was particularly tough. What can we learn from that? And so it's important to remember that psychological flexibility is not a state we reach and tick the box. It's an ongoing practice of multiple skills, and so there is no I've achieved it. It's I know how to use these skills, and so therefore I will continue to try and use them in as many contexts as I can. And

you know what strikes me when, when you're speaking about that, or my own personal experience of this, at least, and I guess playing back some of my lived experiences. But these skills are easier when things are pretty good, right? Like it's Life's good, it's pretty easy. But when stuff really gets bad, boy, I fall down to all the same traps I always used to fall into, right? Yeah,

and, and, you know, I would always say that noticing that you're doing that is still a win. You know, rather than doing things automatically and only much later realizing you could have handled it slightly differently. So noticing, wow, I'm furious, or I was furious. And then the question is, so what am I going to do about that, and then we can be really vulnerable and approach it in a slightly different way. And, you know, apologize and talk about where we've come from, or we can, you know, make good on our promises. We, you know, we can do something that's helpful, rather than, can we all forget that happened? Please. It was all very awkward.

And back to your point earlier about, you know, sort of values, values based living, I guess, so we can sort of link back to our values and say, Well, what is important for me? And even if things are difficult, at least I've got some guiding principles to help me through which can be helpful

tough. It can sound very just out of reach, and values are often thought of as something Well, that's all right for you, but I've got a busy life and I've got no time for values. But actually, you can just boil it down to the concept of, what would I do at my best in this situation, if I was being the best version of me, what would I do? And it's so powerful, because you can, like yesterday, I looked out the window here, and there was sunshine, and I was stunned, and I thought, you know, I'll regret this if I don't get out in that sunshine. And in fact, I've no excuse not to go for a run. I came up with 20 why I couldn't. But I actually what I want, you know, the kind of person I want to be is someone who goes and gets exercise. So I'll do that. And after three to four minutes of initial discomfort out there, I realized this was exactly the right thing to do. I didn't talk myself out of it. And it can be as simple

as that. Yeah, that's That's brilliant, and a great analogy, um, or example, I should say, um. We're sort of getting to the end of this in some run out of time. I guess one question for me, before we start to wrap up, is, if you wanted to try and make sure that people listening took away, I guess one key message as an individual, based on what we've spoken about with like psychological flexibility, what do you think really the key starting point of information is the key nugget to take away is something to help them, I guess, improve their navigation of ebbs and flows of our psychological well being throughout our

lives. I'm a big fan of anything that can fit on a post it note. So if people could just remember that a thought is just a thought.

Yeah, great, lovely. Simple, a thought. It's just a thought. I think that's hugely powerful. All right. Well, I think we're going to start to wrap up. So just before we go, I mentioned earlier that you have some things on your website in terms of materials that people can can look at, but also it would be good for you. Chef is but also, is there anything else people could do to learn a little bit more about you and what you're up to at the minute? Sure, minute.

Sure, if you go to worklife psych.com, you can see the kinds of things that we're up to on Twitter. Work Life psych, we've got a page dedicated to this theme. You can find it at psychological flexibility.com that's the both the easiest way to find it, and it's a jumping off point because I linked to other free resources there. We did a series on each of these skills on our podcast, my pocket psych, and that started with episode 53 and if this is something that you think I'm interested, but I've got questions about it, or I'd like to do it, but I don't want to go on training or something. Well, we have a new online platform for free discussions like this that your listeners are more than welcome to come and visit. And you can find that at work life psych dot club, because it's a club of people who are interested in developing themselves brilliant

Well, Those all sound like fabulous resources. So that's at the end. It's been a wonderful conversation. Again, that's a third of these, and it's been really informative and helpful. So I would just like to say thank you for me, yeah, and it's a massive thank you for me as I furiously scribble on my post, it not furiously, calmly, no, thank you both. It's been great to chat with you as ever.

Okay, you were back in the room with us. That was our conversation with Richard. All about psychological flexibility. I think we covered some really good stuff in there. Jane, is there anything specific you wanted to pick up on?

I guess the thing, and I think Richard's actually said this to us before, James, the thing that always really strikes me as helpful is when he talks about how to find the things that work for you. And he's usually, you know, he was just saying that just, just try something and see if it works for you and helps and how it feels, and then, you know, if it, if it doesn't, there are other, you know, try one of the other methods or tactics that he talked about. And I think that's a really helpful way. And you were mentioning just before we sort of came on, about how we're all different and unique anyway, and how we change. And so I think it's it's really important to keep working at it and keep I think the phrase that maybe even he or you used was building your toolkit. And I love that idea, like you have this little tool belt wrapped around you, and you can pull out these different tactics or these different methods to support yourself when you're trying to move past the discomfort.

Yeah, I think that's, that's a great message. I think there's a lot in that sort of exploration of what works, and that continual discovery and iteration and trying. I guess the thing that I was going to pull out is similar to that, and it's really just the power of, I guess, intention and understanding. And the thing that one of the things we spoke about in there is the fact that when you become aware of your thoughts and your feelings and can name them, and can do that type of interaction with them, and separate them from you, and have them be sort of another thing that you name it that gives you lots of power and ability to sort of shape your existence and feelings and thinking patterns. And so I think that awareness is a key point that I'd call out. And I think just spending a bit of time to help develop that awareness is a great starting point, a great jumping off point for anything that you do in this space. So I think that's it for us today, and we will say goodbye until the next time. So it is goodbye from me, yeah,