We all know that being physically flexible is important to strengthen our body and keep us in supple shape.
However, cognitive flexibility isn’t really heard of, let alone practiced. With awareness and repetition, developing a flexible and agile mind will allow you to be malleable and bend towards living a more resilient, creative and fulfilled life.
Fostering flexibility of the mind is extremely important for our mental well-being. It allows us to escape the vicious cycle of thoughts in order to enhance the betterment of our emotions, actions and motivations; in turn this adapts our thinking and boosts our inner resilience.
Through stretching our minds, we become open to the possibilities of change.
Here are 10 methods to improve your mental flexibility:
1.Practise divergent thinking. Make an effort to think in unconventional and creative ways.
2.Seek out new experiences. Trying new things will boost your curiosity and enhance your knowledge.
3.Don’t always take the easy route. Desirable difficulties can lead to deeper learning. This will keep your mind sharp, alert and ameliorate your mental clarity.
4.Spend time with people who think differently. Diverse perspectives and viewpoints will make you less rigid in your thinking and more open to change.
5.Routine alteration: Brush your teeth with your left hand, take a different route home. Doing this regularly will aid to switch the neural pathways.
6.Meditation: Regulating your mind. When we change the thought, we change the feeling. Meditation allows us to go deeper into the realm of un-becoming.
7.Unwind. Work hard, play harder. The mind needs to be cleaned and refreshed like the body.
8.Connect to your source: God, light, universe. Through removing self-importance, having humility and focusing on a higher purpose will bring a lightness of being.
9.Let go and live now. We can get easily caught up in the past or the future. Being present, right here, right now reaps amazing benefits and rewards.
10.Gratitude. When we vibrate on a higher level of consciousness, we improve our flexibility muscle.
Flexibility of the mind is being able to declutter it like you would your living environment. The aim is to revert to being inquisitive, to not be so stubborn in your ways and always be in a state of learning and growth.
Cognitive flexibility allows you to see your failures and mistakes as part of the process of life, so you are able to bounce back from adversity quicker. Being more adaptable and resilient better equips you to go with the flow armed with a strengthened ability to solve complex problems.
A flexible thinker will see roadblocks as growth opportunities not defeat. A supple mindset moves us away from limiting thought patterns to a place of openness and endless possibilities.
Through these eyes, we are guaranteed to see atypical perspectives and most importantly to not be so inflexible in our patterns of belief. Maintaining a flexible mind is effectively powerful and powerfully effective.
The writer is a NLP practitioner, hypnotherapist and a life coach
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