Any Small Change?

To thrive in periods of change, it’s important to remain flexible, right? But what does that actually mean – and just how flexible are we really? 

Our physical bodies adapt to the conditions we set for them and self-adjust to the minimum fitness level required by those conditions. So we need to balance sedentary life styles with chosen exercise routines or our bodies self-adjust down to unhealthy levels. The key physical elements of remaining flexible come as no surprise:

• Exercise – ‘use it or lose it’. If you tied your arm to your body it wouldn’t be too long before it became altogether useless – on the other hand there’s not much point in attaining the fitness of a marathon runner unless you intend to run marathons. Physical self-management towards a physical purpose makes good sense. 

• Stretching – generally accepted as important in warming up and down so you don’t crash into physical limits. This is also important if your purpose changes – going from couch-potato to marathon runner is going to require a lot of stretching of physical and mental boundaries. 

• Knowing your limitations – and working with them rather than against them. ‘Stretching, but not straining’ is the right attitude for healthy progress. 

• Rest and healing – if you exceed those limitations too quickly and do some damage, then proper healing and appropriate rest are also essential to restoring health. 

But do we acknowledge the same points in regard to other aspects of our lives? How can we maintain flexibility in our emotional world?

• Exercise – do you regularly robustly engage with people who don’t agree with you, or your partner, or children, or go to the theatre or good movies? Or are you more of an emotional couch-potato? 

• Stretching – what emotional situations do you avoid – highly-charged or non-charged? Do you maintain unhealthy (minimum fitness) emotional boundaries? 

• Limitations – do you work with them or defend them? Remember ‘stretch – don’t strain’.

• Rest and healing – grieving and loss for example. Do you fully experience it and let it go – or do you soldier on in spite of it? Can you ask for and accept nurturing from others? 

And what about our mental world – do the same elements of flexibility apply there?

• Exercise – do you regularly do crosswords, or Sudoku, or play chess or cards or create something original – write a song or make a speech? Or are you a mental couch-potato, running your mind in the same groove all day, or only in input mode, allowing it to be filled with mind-numbing TV shows? 

• Stretching – what was the last mental stretch for you? I recently got to understand why E = MC squared (from a non-mind-numbing TV show) and it was so satisfying! 

• Limitations – do you work with them or defend them? “I’m no good at maths!” “I can’t remember names!” “I’ll never understand kids today!” Do you practice more of what you’re not good at – or do you avoid it? 

• Rest and healing – when do you switch off? Can you consciously go into blob consciousness, as opposed to collapsing into unconsciousness? Do you allow yourself dream time in balance with here-and-now focus time? 

It seems that physical, emotional and mental fitness all self-adjust to the minimum levels required by the conditions we ourselves allow to prevail.

So here’s a big flexibility test. What if our teetering global financial system collapses and we hit a depression of similar scale to the Great Depression of 1929-1932? The stock market crashed and investments vanished overnight. Jobs also vanished and unemployment topped out at 32% in Australia. The few jobs that were available generally required hard physical labour and were piece work only. Many people lost their homes as banks foreclosed and had to live in camps outside of the cities. Many men simply deserted their families and went ‘on the track’. Others turned to drink, gambling and theft. Children had to leave school at 13 or 14 and find ways to contribute to family survival. Extreme political parties formed on both the left and right and gained growing support. Government initiatives to kick start the economy failed and they were unable to borrow more money from overseas.

Of course with our current leadership competence and global financial systems that couldn’t happen again – right?! But if it did, how flexible could you be – really?

Perhaps now is the time we should all be making ‘Small Change’.

Your VitallyMe report will identify the key small changes that you can make personally, that will add flexibility and resilience to your everyday life experiences.  Read more...