I have a confession. I currently have a bit of a professional reading crush on Karen Morley. I’ve been reading and re-reading her book “FlexAbility. How high achievers beat burnout and find freedom in an overworked world”. It’s gooood!

I wanted to share a piece of her thinking that resonated with me. Karen (yes, we are on a first-name basis), speaks of three elements she sees as being critical for psychological flexibility.

Think mindfully: Manage your attention.

At the heart of how we respond to situations is dependent on how we make sense of them. This impacts our emotions and the choices we make.

Attention is perhaps one of the biggest resources for any leader. Being able to manage your attention in order to flex with the complexities of your role, is, I believe, vital for a leader. 

Morley shares a quote that I think captures the essence of this, and is honestly, quite yummy.

Mindful thinking means being present in the moment with full awareness and openness.

Feel freely: Increase your emotional agility.

Stevie was experiencing some resistant and sometimes passive-aggressive behaviour from a team member. The initial response was to come back firmer, and harder by re-stipulating the rules and expectations, and then micro-managing the team member. When Stevie realised that this was making matters worse, not to mention, their relationship, they considered another approach and perspective. 

Shifting into a second-person perspective, they started to explore the situation from the perspective of the team member. Feeling freely into the emotions the team member was experiencing, and the impact of their leadership on them, they came to realise that the reactions they were getting were directly in response to their leadership. They needed to take a different approach, in order to get a different response.

Leading requires a large amount of emotional agility. It requires that we can, in an instant, create space between an event and our response, to mindfully choose an appropriate way to address it.

Learn Openly: Be contagiously curious.

In FlexAbility, Karen Morley uses the term “conscious learning”, which I found both exciting and interesting. She speaks of how we are always learning, unconsciously connecting new and familiar knowledge and experiences, linking, sifting and sorting. We are never not learning.

But as she does say, we need to consider being more conscious in our learning. How does this information link with my/our values, ways of being, and vision? Conscious learning requires that we pass information and experiences through what I, from my farming experience call, a drafting gate. We sift, sort, and synthesise it according to alignment with our core purpose and values. We’d be exhausted if we did this with everything, so using our mindful attention to what we do focus on, will support us to gain more alignment. 

Being contagiously curious requires that we take the mantle of curiosity as our default. We ask curious questions to first seek to understand and show genuine curiosity and inquiry-mindedness. Using question starters such as:

• What if..?
• How else..?
• I wonder…
• Why not… (do the opposite to)?
• What would happen if we didn’t..?

Or…

• What don’t I know about this person/situation? What might I learn from this person/situation?
• What do I believe? How might my thinking be wrong or limited?
• What’s another way to think about this? And another way? And yet another way?
• How does our disagreement help us increase the possibilities?
• What can I enable?

Curiosity is contagious. It can increase energy, add enthusiasm and develop creativity. So this week, I encourage you to consider your psychological flexibility.

How will you lean into thinking mindfully, feeling freely and learning openly?

Go well

MA