Switch Craft: The Hidden Power of Mental Agility

The process of transition involves first letting go of the old situation, then suffering the bewilderment and confusion of the in-between state, and finally emerging to start again in the new situation.

There is much evidence that we need a range of approaches on hand to deal with life’s challenges.8 But range is not enough, we also need the agility to choose the right one for the right moment. This is the essence of switch craft.

and he spent several months really thinking about what it meant to give up professional sport, which had been his life since he was about ten years old. It was effectively a type of grieving process.

What I call a “sticky” attentional system can lead to a rigid mind. It’s like when you notice a spider and it’s impossible not to keep checking back to see what it’s doing. The same goes for our innermost thoughts, emotions, and actions. Once we think of a distressing thought it’s often difficult to pull our mind away from it. This mental stickines

an agile mind drastically improves your chances of success and happiness. But the flip side is also true: an inflexible mind fuels anxiety and stress and a “stickiness” that can torpedo your life.

Change is the external events that happen all through our lives. Transition is different. Transition is the subtle internal reorientation and self-definition that are necessary in order to deal well with changes in your life. “Without a transition,” as Bridges tells us, “a change is just a rearrangement of the furniture.”

Mental agility: The capacity to be agile and nimble in how you think, act, and feel so that you can navigate your way through all sorts of terrain, the rough as well as the smooth, and adapt well to changing circumstances. The science shows that agility is made up of four distinct components—what I call the “ABCD of agility”: Adaptability, Balancin

I was never convinced that this “high alert” theory was the whole story.6 In some of my own studies I was noticing that the main problem for anxious people was not actually scanning for threat, rather it was in struggling to pull attention away from a threat once it had been detected. This difficulty in disengaging attention from a threat is very d

While we feel like we are reacting to what is happening around us, the way it actually works is that your brain constructs what is likely to happen next drawing on your rich experience of what’s happened before. The latest science tells us that our every waking moment is dominated by predicting which actions we need to take next.