Flexibility, what is that?
As a success coach for business owners and people who want to redesign and change their life, I often come across this little understood principle of personal development. It is little understood, yet so important in achieving our goals and targets.
Flexibility is mostly referred to as the physical property of things to be movable and bent without damage. The usefulness of flexibility is, of course, flexible! It all depends on the purpose of the item. You would not want a wooden chair’s legs to be flexible, you would fall off! You do want a bridge, on the other hand, to have a certain flexibility to compensate for wind and other loadings.
Flexibility is one of the most misunderstood principles in human behaviour and personal development. I have also met other coaches who do not use this property or effectively.
There is a principle of Cybernetics (simplistically means communication and control processes in systems) called the Law of Requisite Variety. This is often used in NLP and personal development circles. Law of Requisite Variety states that “the most flexible part of the system controls the system.”
Let’s start with the definition of flexibility in the context of human behaviour. Would you agree that flexibility is really being adaptable? We all like a person with a flexible nature because they seem to take life as it comes with ease and grace. A leader requires a high degree of flexibility to eall with all the challenges of ensuring that the job gets done. Flexibility is also more often than not, associated with freedom.
Most people associate the word flexible as the opposite to stuck, rigid or “not-rigid”. While this is true of the physical properties, with our behaviour, that may not be entirely useful when it comes to human behaviour.
You see when you hold flexibility to be bendable and not-rigid, then it would be only fair to state that one should be flexible at all times. This is not the best way to apply the principle.
When you consider that rigidity is part of the range of behaviour, then there seems to appear a choice or another option. When flexibility is the only option or the default, there is not really flexibility, is there? Then, there is not really the flexibility by its definition.
In other words when one can be bendable or rigid by choice, one truely has flexibility. A radical thought.
Author F. Scott Fitzgerald once said,”The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas
in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
Here is a case where the two opposed ideas, flexibility and rigidity, are existing in a symbiotic duality.
So how does this relate to human behaviour?
Well, let’s think of a person who is uncontrollably nice. We all know one like that. They are nice, nice, nice. But they cannot help it and have no control over it. They just have to be nice, no matter what. They say yes to many things and end up over obligated. So “nice” is usually amiable, amicable and accomodating. We can call that “flexible”. Yet they cannot say no, a persceived rigid status.
A truly flexible person will have the ability to say yes or no to any situation at will and by choice.
Something to think about.
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~ Adrian Ponnampalam
Wealth Catalyst
Money Flow workshop (Cashflow 101) Recommendation
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