Here’s the second of my two blogs based on my recent interview with ABC South West.

The first one looked at neuroplasticity – our brain’s amazing capacity to support  new ways of thinking and being. It also explored how a fixed mindset holds us back when it comes to becoming our best most adaptive optimistic selves.

This blog looks at ways to soften a fixed mindset so you can take advantage of your hardwired gift for growing and changing your mind.

Moving from a fixed to a flexible mindset means gently nudging yourself towards viewing the world and your place in it differently.

The biggest challenge is to ditch the unhelpful belief that your key characteristics – intelligence, creativity and personality are part of your fixed inheritance – like eye colour and height and having your grandmother’s nose.

Tackle this challenge by taking a look at scary thoughts that pull you up short anytime you’re confronted by an actual or imagined big new thing.  This is your opening move towards a more flexible adaptive mindset.

It’s time for some healthy disruptive action

Observe your difficult thoughts

Practice seeing these thoughts without judging them – no ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t required. See if you can simply identify them – ‘there’s fear’ or ‘there’s anger’ without hooking into the strong feelings they bring along for the ride.

This is tricky skill to master so here’s an astoundingly useful bit of biological insight to help you.  It’s called the 90-second emotional rule

Apply the 90-second rule

In the words of the woman who discovered it, bio anatomist and stroke survivor Dr Jill Bolt Taylor,

‘When a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there’s a 90 second chemical process that happens in the body; after that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop.’

So, if you can just sit quietly with a scary thought and a strong feeling for a minute and a half without getting swept away – chances are they will simply disappear.  Reflect on how often you observe the arrival of all sorts of strong feelings and difficult thoughts compared to how often you note their going.

Taking the sting out of scary thoughts and their emotional sidekicks – anxiety, fear, and frustration gives you the calm and clarity you need to make your second move.

Unmask your limiting beliefs

Find out just how fake these fear-fuelled ideas really are. Generally speaking, I’m no fan of acronyms but when it comes to nailing limiting beliefs, here’s one that works.

False Evidence Appearing Real

Fixed minds tend to think alike.  They’re especially prone to unhelpful thinking that shores up their limiting beliefs. Unobserved and unchallenged, these thoughts can stop you in your tracks when you try to do something differently, recover from a set back or start something new. Think of them as your own special stash of ‘alternative facts’. No amount of actual evidence about your competence, capability or courage can counter them.

See if you can spot your favourite forms of unhelpful thinking in this excellent list of 10 common limiting beliefs courtesy of Dr Tim Sharp at the Happiness Institute.  He calls them ANTS, short for Automatic Negative Thinking.

Identify your ANTS so you can start to challenge and dispel them.

Sometimes it’s helpful to ask yourself where your ‘ANT infestations’ started. Perhaps you ‘inherited’ them. If you did, try reminding yourself that although it might feel like it, ANTs are not a fixed feature of your genetic or cultural makeup.

Reframe ‘failure’

Contrary to what your fixed mindset tells you, failing doesn’t make you fatally flawed or utterly incompetent. It simply makes you a courageous, curious human.

When things go awry it’s natural to feel bruised and bereft. This is another human trait. It’s not confined to fixed minded folk – we all feel it.

Once you’ve dealt with hurt and humiliation (hint – remember the 90 second rule) try thinking like persistent genius and light bulb inventor Thomas Edison, who said of his gazillion ‘failures’,

“I have not failed, not once. I’ve discovered ten thousand ways that don’t work.”

Take a clearheaded look at what ‘didn’t work’.  Without a skerrick of judgment ask yourself how well you planned and prepared and how much effort you invested.

Honest answers kindly given will teach you something about how to do things differently and better.  Sometimes this means arming your self with new knowledge and trying again from another angle, other times it means taking a completely different direction.

Finally failing doesn’t mean you made ‘a bad choice’. You did your best with the resources you had at the time. All our choices are chances to grow and learn if we’re prepared to see them as opportunities rather than threats. If your keen for a practical, heart lifting read on this topic, try Susan Jeffers’ classic  ‘Feel the fear and do it any way’.  Jeffers’ message is simple – you can handle anything if you believe every decision you make has life enhancing potential.

So let’s finish where we began – with your brain’s hardwired capacity to do extraordinary things, every single day. If you choose to trust the neuroscience and back your brain’s plastic fantastic ability to adapt you can literally change your mindset.

It will take time and energy and persistence but even the smallest shift in your thinking, feeling and being can make an enormous difference.

Keen to swap ‘fixed’ for ‘flexible’?  I can help

This is the first of two blogs that grew out of the notes I made for a recent interview with ABC South West.
Supporting resilience and adaptability is at the heart of my coaching practice. I’m fascinated and inspired by what neuroscience tells us about the relationships between biology and behaviour.

It took science a longish time to bust the myth that we humans were stuck with the brains we’ve built by the age of three. Thanks to the work of pioneering neuroscientists like Dr. Michael Merzenich we now know that our amazing, adaptive brain changes constantly. This is called neuroplasticity – in simple terms it means that like it or not, we’re continually rewiring our brain in response to new experiences new ideas and new ways of doing things.

Neuroplasticity in action

In fact there is nothing fixed or god given about our grey matter’s capacity to learn and grow. Our brain is a highly dynamic power grid, with masses of connected pathways that light up every time we do something.

Some of these pathways are well travelled. These are our habits, our established ways of thinking, feeling, responding and doing. Every time we do something a certain way it strengthens that pathway.

So, whenever we start to do something differently –ditch an unhelpful habit, learn a new skill, perform a new task, or simply choose a different feeling response – we start to build a new pathway. If we stick with the ‘new’ our fledgling pathway strengthens and the old habitual one weakens. Eventually we may even stop using it

Fixed or flexible? Why mindset matters

So if our biology makes us hardwired to adapt, why is change so damn difficult for so many of us?

Let’s start with our mindset.
Our mindset determines much of our behaviour and most of our beliefs about success and failure. It profoundly shapes our capacity for happiness.

If you have a growth mindset, you thrive on challenge and on pursuing mastery and competence. You see failure as feedback on your performance not as a judgement on your personality. Failure is a chance to grow your resilience and to move closer to realising your potential.

Alternatively, if you have a fixed mindset it’s tough to change and grow. This is mainly because you believe that everyone is born with a finite quota of talent, intelligence, and creativity. No matter what you do or how hard you work, if you haven’t got the ‘right gifts’ you’ll never ‘succeed.’

This mindset makes it hard to challenge your self, to take risks and to experiment. It’s also difficult to learn the lessons offered by small or spectacular failures. Insecurity about your ability makes you vulnerable and anxious and sensitive to criticism. Setbacks are evidence of your personal and specific inadequacies – proof that ‘something is wrong with you’. Mistakes are so painful that you try to avoid them at all costs.

Moving from fixed to flexible

Life and work have taught me a lot about changing mindsets. First up, it’s not easy. It takes practice and patience to change your fixed ways of thinking and acting.

Nobody builds new neural pathways over night. Rewiring your brain takes time and you need to be kind to yourself ( a big ask for fixed minded folk) as you overhaul the habits and beliefs of a lifetime.

Facing our fears

Your fixed mindset swings into action when you avoid starting or stop doing something you know is good for you. It’s calling the shots when you refuse to listen or you quit trying to understand someone or something. It’s usually present when you feel tired or bored or anxious or uncomfortable. It’s almost always there when you’re scared because fear is a fixed mind’s default feeling.

Like all emotions, fear is not innately good or bad. How we deal with fear determines how it shapes our lives. Being afraid makes us human, being ruled by fear makes us so much less than who we are.

Fear of not being good enough
This is a big one if you’re stuck with a fixed mindset! You think you must do more, be more, learn more before you dare take a step closer to whatever it is you need or want in life.

Move gently towards a flexible mindset by dropping perfectionism on its head. Try faking it til you make it – pretend you don’t care about being less than 150% ready for whatever. Just begin and watch your surprisingly capable self survive or thrive. Start to realise that you are good enough and you already have whatever it takes – skills, experience, courage, front, to take the next small or substantial step!

Fear of rejection

OK no one likes rejection but what if you don’t look at it as rejection?
Perhaps what you’re offering is not what that person or business or organisation needs right now! Perhaps it’s about money or timing or something else entirely unconnected to you. Choose to be vulnerable and brave and ask for feedback. Sometimes it is about you but perhaps its perfect opportunity to learn something you can use to do things differently and better.

Observe your limits ……
….. so you can get out from under them! Some of the best-loved sessions in my programmes and workshops teach techniques for observing and understanding limiting behaviours linked to a fixed mindset.

My next blog looks at strategies for pinpointing and disrupting fixed and fearful thinking.