A Pint of Psychological Flexibility

How many of you have ever found yourself consumed by unproductive or negative thoughts and emotions that are stopping you from taking action? For example, after a session with your client or customer, you remembered something you had forgotten to inform, or simply to send a text of the summary of the session. You noticed that the message sent was not been read even after 2 hours. Your mind started to be consumed with hypothetical scenarios about what your client/ customer may be feeling and thinking.

Did the session not as good as it was supposed to be? Did I under performed?Instead of taking action, now you become a prisoner to your thoughts. You hesitated to connect further and find out. 

How about this? Your boss just reprimanded on your idea and somehow you started to notice that your colleagues’ ideas were always received with approval and acceptance from your boss. Your mind started to theatre up speculative self talks about what was happening. Again, you became your own prisoner of thoughts. You stopped innovative and upfront with ideas. You could not contribute more to the team. Developing more psychological flexibility can help you out of this kind of destructive cycle.

One of the mindset nugget for psychological flexibility is processing the emotion in the moment. The natural reflex response is to avoid, to brush aside the thoughts and emotions that wrapped around them. Instead if we take the moment to embrace and accept those emotions. It is okay to feel this way because you own those emotions. The key is that you OWN these emotions. Since you OWN them, you can master them. After savouring the emotions, you can decide to reflect on the why and the learnings. This deviation will steer you onward and forward in your next course of action.

It was my insecurities that got me worried about my client not reading the text but my passion of wanting to provide the best for my client would drive me to connect, innovate and adding more values. It was hurtful for the boss to reject the idea and the idea was not going in sync with the mission statement of the team!