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Resilience
5 Uncommon Strategies to Become a More Flexible Thinker
Build resilience by enhancing your thinking.
Posted March 18, 2024 Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer
Flexible thinking can improve your mental resilience and problem-solving, help you see new paths to success, and reduce the pain associated with inflexible thinking, such as the pain of rumination.
It's a skill you can improve, if you know some strategies. Pick your favorite option from these.
1. Identify who you're willing to take advice and ideas from.
Unwanted advice can feel like an unwanted hug—uncomfortable or even traumatizing. On the other hand, appreciated advice can be magical, just like an appreciated hug can be.
Based on their personality and life experiences, other people will think differently from how you naturally do. You can become a more flexible thinker by tapping into others' thinking processes.
To do this, identify who you're willing to accept advice from. Who reliably gives you solid ideas you hadn't considered or had prematurely dismissed? Sometimes we dismiss good ideas until someone we respect mentions them and we're prompted to reconsider. Other times, other people give us ideas we hadn't considered.
Although I've merged these topics here, the people you seek advice from and those you seek ideas from might be different. Identify a shortlist of people in each category for yourself.
2. Try mental exercises that involve adopting alternative perspectives, "hats," or mindsets.
Consider what your natural thinking style is and try out other styles. For example:
- if you're prone to thinking about what could go wrong, try adopting the perspective of someone who isn't concerned with this.
- If you're lacking confidence in yourself, consider how a very self-assured person would see the situation you're in.
- If you think about other people first, try adopting the perspective of someone who puts their own needs first, or vice versa.
You don't need to fully adopt the other perspective, but considering an opposing mindset can help you see and shift assumptions you habitually make.
Although the idea of adopting different hats is a well-known creative thinking strategy (e.g., the "Six Hats" strategy), personalizing this based on opposing your natural style is not.
If you need help getting started with this, try using ChatGPT to help. Ask it to tackle your problem using the Six Hats method. Then go from there to try out other thinking styles that oppose your dominant tendencies. You can also use it to help identify your tendencies and opposing mindsets that might be worth experimenting with (such as being intuitive vs. structured, hasty vs. slow, present-focused vs. future-focused, improvisational vs. relying on routines, etc.)
3. Create standard operating procedures that correct your natural thinking errors.
Consider this scenario: If you tend to make impulsive decisions and want to mitigate risks, you can implement a standard operating procedure aimed at reducing risk-taking behaviors. Initially, you would pinpoint the factors that typically heighten risk. Then, you would establish a predetermined threshold for the number of risk factors that can be present before you don't act.
To illustrate, imagine a therapist who occasionally deviates from their usual practice to accommodate unfamiliar client issues. However, they maintain certain criteria to ensure they stay within their expertise. The therapist might be willing to see a client for a problem they don't treat as often, but not if the client is a different age from the clients they typically treat, or if their workload is already high. The therapist's threshold for venturing outside their experience and comfort zone might be for one factor to be different from their typical work, but not multiple factors.
This type of procedure allows you to expand your personal tolerances in safer and standardized ways.
Another example: You might drive somewhere unfamiliar, but not late at night or alone.
4. Treat your judgments, predictions, and other thoughts lightly.
This concept is borrowed and slightly adapted from a therapy called acceptance and commitment therapy (also known as ACT).
You can think more flexibly if your first instinct is to assume your thought is just a thought, not that it's automatically true. For instance, if you jump to the conclusion someone is selfish or you predict that you won't be successful at some endeavor, then treating those thoughts lightly would involve not just assuming those thoughts were true.
5. Look for disconfirming evidence.
Instead of looking for confirming evidence, deliberately look for the opposite. If you believe you won't succeed, look for evidence you will. If you believe someone is selfish, look for evidence they're not.
We're all prone to confirmation bias, that is, seeing the world in a way that's consistent with our existing stories. This can hinder our success. It can also be a huge trigger for painful rumination.
Areas in which you can challenge your current thinking by looking for disconfirming evidence include:
- what you predict will happen
- how you see past events (your stories about why an event occurred)
- how you perceive others
- how you believe others perceive you
- your explanations of your successes and failures
- your explanations of others' successes and failures
- your ideas about what is just vs. unjust
- your views of what is a good vs. bad idea
In summary, most people accept their thinking as true. People rarely engage in these types of deliberate strategies to think more flexibly. You can improve the accuracy and novelty of your thinking, and reduce emotional pain, by deliberately thinking more flexibly. Virtually any amount of purposeful, dedicated practice at flexible thinking will set you apart from other people.
