Switch Craft: The Hidden Power of Mental Agility

Our brains have evolved to operate as “prediction machines.”

An inflexible mind leads to anxiety and depression.

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

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.

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

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.

Uncertainty is the only certainty.

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.”

Respect the process: growth occurs at its own pace, and you should not try to force it. An internal shift in identity is essential: you can only adapt to new circumstances by changing inside. Accept yourself for who you are and what the process of change entails. Lower your expectations about what you can and can’t do during this period.