THE POWER OF FLEXIBILITY

Morpheus says to Neo: “Good! Adaptation, improvisation…”

Flexibility is power. Yes, I know that the images of flexibility may not convey the idea of “power” in the traditional way of being rigid and unmoveable, and yet it does convey another kind of strength and effectiveness, the strength of adapting. Consider a tree blowing in the wind or a 100-story skyscraper moving in a thunderstorm or tornado. So while it might seem more intuitive to think that both the tree and the skyscraper need to be more rigid, stiff, and stable, yet counter-intuitively, we know that something stiff and rigid would not be as strong in that context. The strength of the tree and of the skyscraper lies in its flexibility, its ability to adapt.

The power of flexibility lies precisely in how it enables us to be flexible so we can adapt within an acceptable range of movement. And because it does, flexibility enables us to survive, cope well, and even thrive.

The power of flexibility in sports and in strength-development is well known. That’s why athletes stretch. After the exercise of using muscles or a muscle group, to maintain the highest levels of strength and power, the athletes stretch the muscles in the opposite direction. The stretching increases flexibility and that, in turn, increases actual strength. By contrast, the person who does not stretch can over-exercise a set of muscles and can become to rigid and so stiff that the person becomes much less capable, much less effective.

This concept of flexibility doesn’t just apply to physical things like trees, buildings, and the muscles of athletes. It also applies to thinking—to mental flexibility and to emotions— to emotional flexibility, and also to relational skills—to relational flexibility. Mental and emotional flexibility refers to such important competencies as creativity, inventiveness, the ability to “think out of the box,” to entertain new and weird ideas and possibilities— all critical ingredients in human capital in organizations and in problem-solving.

Relational flexibility speaks about the ability to cope with change, with the stress of things being unpredictable, with the need to be quick in adapting effectively to the challenges that life can throw at you. It is this kind of flexibility that enables on to “think on his or her feet” while under pressure, to perform well when others suffer from performance anxiety, and to adapt ideas, thoughts, perspectives, metaphors, etc. when speaking.

Now for a set of personal questions: Do you have this power of flexibility? Does the power of continuous learning and adjusting to current conditions endow you with a

sense of trust of yourself and that all you need is to stay current? Do you have the mental-emotional flexibility so that you can create multiple meanings? Do you have the semantic flexibility that you have multiple choices about how to respond to any given stimulus? Are you ready to develop the powers of flexibility?

Semantic rigidity occurs when what you know, understand, and believe results in you only have a single response. When someone says or does something, you only have one response. That is not flexibility; that’s rigidity. You also lack semantic flexibility if all of your choices are either-or choices, Either you think and feel X or you think and feel Y.

The power of flexibility depends your ability to represent and frame things in multiple ways. In fact, the more choices you have in your representing and framing, the more flexibility you can express. This of course is one of the more important reasons for studying NLP and Neuro-Semantics. By discovering how you represent and frame and learning the full range of choices in this, you extend your ability to “think” and that increases your flexibility.

The power of semantic flexibility saves you from the semantic rigidness that sets us up with “buttons.” Every “button” that you have that someone can push and “get” you signals that you have lost the semantic flexibility. In that area, you no longer (if ever) could choose your response. The person who finds and pushes the button controls you! That person “gets” you because you have only one response or even two or three, but they are all on the same order and you cannot escape. You cannot transcend the situation and so you feel controlled, determined, and out of control. And in that situation, you are.

The solution? Recover the power of semantic flexibility by dis-identifying with whatever you’ve identified with and recover the map/territory distinction. Use your self-reflexivity to meta-state a step- back response so that you can first gain perspective about what’s happening and then choose the meaning and the subsequent response that will give you the effective response. If nothing like that is occurring at the moment, be sure to do some stretching— some semantic stretching. In Unleashing Potentials the homework we give is to take any item and give it 7 meanings, and then 7 more and then 7 more. That’s good practice for recognizing that you are the meaning-making and developing the flexibility to choose your meanings with thoughtful elegance.