How Agile Are You?

Mental agility is the fourth element required for building resilience. In this post I am going to explore what it is and how you can do some simple things to increase it.

Mental agility is the ability to think, learn and quickly absorb new information, systems and approaches.    For the majority of the world this has been a critical aspect of dealing with the pandemic over the last two years, where our lives have been turned upside down.  Your capacity to deal with all this change will in some aspects have been influenced by your mental agility.  How comfortable have you been with the uncertainty, or dealing with the complexity of working from home with all the distractions and challenges this brings?

What new skills have you learnt in order to become more confident and at ease with the new way of working and staying in contact with friends and family?

 My mum, now aged 82 (and doesn’t look a day older than 70), is a good example of someone who has pretty good mental agility.  After taking early retirement from teaching in her mid-fifties she, along with my dad (he was in his late 60s) decided to move their life from the UK to France.  They were prepared to start again in a new country and deal with all the problems this creates, learning the language, dealing with the bureaucracy (it was France so say no more on this), and making new friends.

Twenty six years on, my mum is still going strong (dad died in 2015), she continues to drive, live on her own, be socially active in the community (she was President of the International Women's Club of the Riviera for many years) and speak French.  She still enjoys cooking and is writing a book on her life as a vicar's wife. She also  became the ‘tech’ guru amongst her friends as she taught them all how to use Zoom.

All these things are great for keeping her brain active and healthy and put her in a good place to deal with living on her own during the pandemic.  She lost a close friend early at the start of 2020, which did knock her back, but she recovered I believe due to her amazing capacity to not only re-frame (see my previous blog on this) but also her brain's agility.

In her book ‘Future Brain’, Dr. Jenny Brockis talks about the neuroplasticity of our brain - its ability to make new connections, even as we age.  Stories of how people who have suffered major strokes have learnt how to walk and talk again, after years of effort to rewire the brain's connections.  New information rewards the brain with releasing dopamine (it is a chemical which plays a role in how we feel pleasure).  When we are engaged and interested in something new it leads us into a flow state (see the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi & Stephen Kotler) and helps build a healthy fit brain, helping us thrive in the uncertain world we live in.

So how can you improve your brain's mental agility?  Here are 5 things you can do:

1. Be curious, explore new things and read books and articles that spark your imagination or interest you.
2. When you have a problem to solve, connect with others to help you brainstorm and come up with possible solutions
3. Mental exercises/puzzles such as Sudoku, Wordle and crosswords
4. Try something new such as ballroom dancing, painting or learning a language
5. Re-discover interests and hobbies like photography or start playing a musical instrument.

Despite the fact that our brain’s reach their cognitive peak in our early 20s it doesn’t mean we stop learning and developing new neural pathways.  Our brain is an amazing organ which can adapt.  It is true, if you don’t use it you lose it!  So get started today and learn something new to improve your mental agility and support your own resilience.

If you would like more help, with how you can improve your mental agility, so that you can thrive rather than just survive, then maybe working with a coach would help.  I will be launching a very special 8 week programme in April.   To find out more please follow me here on LinkedIn, Facebook & Instagram and look out in the next couple of weeks for more information.