Many thought and business leaders have consistently spoken about the power of flexible approaches to thinking and decision-making. But what do they mean when they say it’s beneficial to be a flexible thinker?
To be a flexible thinker is to develop the ability to adopt new thought patterns and keep an open mind in your approach to situations. Flexible thinking combines logic, which points to valid reasoning and deductive argument; ethics, which refers to standards and character; and aesthetics, which is the ability to develop creative, intuitive, and fluid ideas.
Human beings are creatures of habits and patterns. Once they find a way that works, it becomes hard for them to adopt new approaches. However, changes in technology and access to information, changes in the way of life, and increased access to quality education, among other factors, provide avenues for people to learn to develop new and flexible thought patterns and approaches.
In this respect, the points below will show you a number of approaches you can adopt to teach yourself to be a flexible thinker. Read on.
1. Learn To Develop An Agile Mental Attitude
Agile mental attitude, a mental mindset model that incorporates the ability to equate failure or disappointment with learning and feedback opportunities, is the hallmark of flexible thinking.
Unlike a fixed mindset, an agile mental attitude will encourage you to take accountability for your mistakes, develop respect for others and their opinions regardless of whether you agree with them, and adapt to change in your social environment, be it school or at home, or the workplace.
To develop an agile mindset, you must establish proper listening and perception skills, empathy, and understanding. With an agile mental attitude, you’ll apply logical and critical thinking to interrogate situations on merit, not against your biases.
An agile mental attitude will not only improve your collaborative tendencies with fellow students, colleagues, or family members but will also improve the quality of your work and inculcate leadership and accountability traits in you as you’ll learn to appreciate feedback, whether positive or negative and accept your role in it. Your first step into being a flexible thinker will depend on how pliable and agile your mind is.
2. Consult Professionals
You can teach yourself to be a flexible thinker by seeking the help of professionals like life coaches, teachers, and counseling psychologists. If you’re in school, your teachers can help you come up with games and activities, and scenarios that’ll help you develop flexible thinking skills.
Some things professionals can help you with include gaming critical and flexible thinking scenarios, helping you see biases that hamper your capacity to think flexibly, and directing you toward experiences that’d benefit your path to flexible thinking. Flexible thinking will make you resilient and more confident in decision-making.
3. Practice Philosophy
For thousands of years, philosophical pursuits have proven to be effective in inculcating flexibility in people. There are many schools of philosophy that you can tap into if you wish to teach yourself to be a flexible thinker.
Stoicism, for example, emphasizes understanding the sphere of control and the value of indifference, while Zen Buddhism speaks of your connections with worldly attachments. Thousands of schools of philosophy that currently exist can inform logic, ethics, and aesthetics and help you make flexible decisions based on your critical and flexible thinking capacities.
4. Develop A Thirst For Knowledge
One way to teach yourself to be a flexible thinker and gain critical thinking is to develop a thirst for knowledge. Knowledge will help rid you of biases that may have formed because of your frames of reference, be they books, visual content, or individuals.
A thirst for knowledge will eliminate four major types of cognitive biases. These biases are:
- Confirmation Bias – Paying extra attention to information that’s in concordance with a person’s existing belief systems and ignoring that which is contrary.
- Anchoring Bias – This is the potential to be overly influenced by information that an individual hears first. This information becomes the anchoring point you stubbornly stick to and may disregard evidence pointing to the contrary.
- The Availability Heuristic – The capacity to overestimate the likelihood of something happening based on the number of examples that readily come to mind; for example, the probability of a plane being in an accident is a form of bias called the Availability Heuristic.
- False Consensus Effect – This bias describes the tendency to overestimate the capacity to which others agree with your behaviors, beliefs, and values. This type of bias can be informed by the people you spend time with, like family, who may agree with most of what you say or do, or people on social media groups you frequent.
The search for knowledge might lead you to reading materials you’d never have read before or meeting and following people on social media that you’d never have before. These new interactions will help you develop critical thinking informed by knowledge and facts. With time, you’ll become flexible enough to change your mind if your mental model doesn’t fit the available data.
5. Incorporate Relevant Mental Exercises Into Everyday Routines
Some fun exercises to encourage you to become a flexible thinker include using flashcards to test scenarios that demand flexible thinking. These flashcards could help you envision what would happen to you if you were in a situation that requires flexible thinking, the harm fixed thinking could have on you or the people around you, and more.
You can also play strictly chance games, like snakes and ladders, or depend on a flip of the coin to encourage you to let go of what you can’t control. The outcomes of these games will go a long way in making you a flexible thinker, as you’ll learn to be comfortable with results and understand your complicity in them.
Parting Shot
Teaching yourself to be a flexible thinker is an exciting and, at the same time, daunting pursuit. It may involve forgetting how you’ve been doing things for a long time and adopting novel ways.
In the end, however, flexible thinking will enable you to learn to regulate your emotions, accommodate new information, solve problems, and deal with uncertainties. It’ll also allow you to adapt to circumstances outside your control and to let go of expectations you have of others that may only end up disappointing you. Leveraging the points mentioned in this post would help you be a flexible thinker.
