The Unexpected Trick to Become More Agile (And Relaxed!) At Work
Your bosses want you to be more and more agile. It’s the key to your success and employability, they say. But given the flexibility you already offer, it’s almost scary!
Your brain is constantly spinning. You revisit — when you’re not brooding — what’s happened in the last few days: “Why such a change of course? They still could have involved me in this decision, right!?”
You are also under the stress of constant anticipation. You think about what’s next, sometimes anxiously: “What if everything doesn’t go as planned? What if I fail? What if this plan B doesn’t work?”
Your head connects information, analyzes, interprets, and sends back more questions in a constant, continuous stream. So sometimes you can’t even sleep at night.
Juggle more? Become more agile? It seems impossible. I remember the energy spent, the fatigue generated by these operating modes. What if there was another way?
Agility: the multiplication of possibilities and its roller coaster
Agility is the ability to adapt and learn from change, which goes beyond flexibility. It means the ability to learn, give up, change direction, and quickly digest the emotions that go with this volatility. Not to mention that agility is also about anticipating! In a VUCA world, in this digital revolution, where speed becomes one of the first factors of competitiveness, the pace is accelerating. This phenomenon is valid for all industries and sectors. So how do you find your way in the face of this seemingly unstoppable phenomenon? The challenge is critical and significant.
Energizing at times, agility can generate a downright exhausting dynamic, even a real overload: thinking in scenarios, constantly learning from mistakes, letting go of what doesn’t work all make the mental load sometimes heavy. According to estimations, the human brain produces about 60,000 thoughts per day. These thoughts are associated with emotions, and together they make you spend more or less pleasant moments in your daily life.
The result? A mixed one: the feeling that the price for agility is potentially high. What if you could have the benefits of agility without its side effects?
Why your mind is sometimes your worst enemy
If you feel like you’re on a roller coaster, it’s because you have a remarkable ability to fully associate with your thoughts and emotions. This ability will be beneficial when projecting yourself into success and visualizing the goal, for example.
But what about the less pleasant stories your head tells you? Here’s a selection:
- This idea doesn’t make sense! It’s all nonsense! It goes in all directions! We’re never going to get there!
- This guy is unbearable! This arrogance! HR could do something about it…
- I can’t take it anymore. These emails, these calls, these endless discussions. I’m not far from breaking down and throwing it all away.
These thoughts are not insignificant: they will make or break your day! In this case, I’ll let you see in which mood they leave you.
“The fundamental problem is that we tend to associate ourselves with our thoughts.”
Starting from these thoughts, the confirmation bias to which we are all subjected will make you find everything that will confirm your idea. You know those days that start badly, and you think you’re unlucky? And then when it’s time to take stock and go to bed, you feel you were right? It’s the principle!
The fundamental issue is we tend to associate ourselves with our thoughts. From this association, your reality is born. A reality that you think is “THE reality.” But it is “only” your reality — relative and subjective but also “freezing.”
How to gain agility
Your mind filters your experiences and labels them automatically. Based on your programs, your experience, your education, or your training. These thoughts generate all kinds of emotions. These thoughts and feelings are not universal: they are yours. You and I will not see the world in the same way. And so much the better, this is our richness!
If you can observe these filters and put a name on these emotions, it means that you are neither your thoughts nor your feelings, right? Yet, you noticed how much you tend to listen and swallow your mind’s stories almost without flinching? So one of the keys to gaining agility is to dissociate yourself from your mental stories, your emotions and use them for what they are: ideas, options, feelings. Not THE truth or even “your” truth.
“What you think and feel makes your reality. It is relative! But highly malleable and in your hands.”
Destabilizing? Disappointing? What if this was your most significant opportunity? If reality is relative and depends on you, that means you have power over it! Pretty promising, isn’t it?
Your power over reality
Even better: if your reality depends on your mind, it does not depend on external circumstances! However uncertain and ambiguous they may be!
The principle has been known for a long time. In the Bhagavad Gita, a 3–5000 years old “bible” in yoga, the need to take control over your mind was already at the heart of the message. It’s your job to control its unstable and wavering nature. In my posts, I often talk about the Observer, your witness-consciousness in a way. This capacity that you have to observe what is going on within you. It’s the key to regain control.
More recently, neurosciences have helped complete this picture. Anil Seth, Professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex in England, points out: “we don’t passively perceive the world. We actively generate it.” In other words, our conditioning, experiences, and, more generally, our mind determine our reading of events.
Try this: close your eyes for a minute or two. And visualize the best day of your life:
- Where are you?
- What are you doing and with whom?
- What do you feel?
- Where do you feel these emotions on a physical level?
- What are you saying to yourself?
It’s like you’re there. Do you feel the joy of that moment? Do you understand how easy it is to generate a reality and the emotions that go with it?
I will spare you the worst day of your life because what you have observed for the best will work the same way for the worst!
You have just seen with this “laboratory” example how you generate your reality. Your energy follows your attention. The invitation here is never again to let your inner state depend on external circumstances without your consent!
The agility of juggling realities
What does this have to do with agility? Being agile is knowing how to juggle with other perspectives, other realities and make space for them. To cohabit with them and to understand how to adapt to the one that wins the vote. Consciously. What could be better than knowing how to distance yourself from all these stories? Yours as well as your colleagues’ or your hierarchy’s!
Of course this doesn’t mean betraying your values. That said, very often, the scenarios that emerge are not a compromise with your values. Learn to distinguish this. Being agile means not being too attached to your vision of things, nor those of others. This flexibility of mind is your passport to a VUCA world.
Of course, it is demanding and requires practice. Sometimes this means:
- Knowing how to step back,
- Knowing how to let go,
- Knowing how to reconnect with meaning.
- And often, it will mean developing your ability to find comfort in discomfort.
Acquiring such an future-proof skill will require some subtle work on yourself. One more stress? What if learning to juggle faster, to live in confusion and uncertainty, is your school of wisdom?
What’s stopping you from building such a story? Nothing anymore! You know it now, don’t you?
In a nutshell,
Your mind and your emotions are constantly building your reality. But you are neither your mind nor your feelings because you can observe them. From this awareness, it becomes possible to influence your reality in a very concrete way. Naturally, this requires not getting caught up in your stories or emotions, but it is a “muscle” that develops.
Being the creator of your reality means that everything which happens around you does not necessarily have the power to influence you. Over-empowering and easy to say? Or simply an incredible under-exploited power? Only you will decide! Whatever you decide, you will be right ;-)!
It took me some time and practice to make it a reflex. But this trick and this reading key have changed the quality of life of the “professional grinder” that I can be… This precious distance is the key to your agility and… Your serenity!
I’m looking forward to hearing from you: what effects did the proposed exercise have on you? What are you becoming aware of? What does this article make you want to do? And of course, what questions does it raise?
I look forward to hearing from you!
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This post was originally published in French on the blog www.theworklab.org.
