For the past couple of years, I’ve gotten into a routine of stretching in the morning. While it feels like age is catching up to me, stretching has helped offset some of the muscle tightness and difficulty recovering from workouts. It seemed in my more youthful days the muscles would stretch like a rubber band, but as time progresses, it’s clear our muscles get tighter, and flexibility continues to deplete.
The way our body evolves has a lot of parallel to how our mind progresses. In our youth, flexibility is at its greatest with the mind. Life experiences have only in a limited way shaped how we perceive the world. We typically are more open to soaking in new information and perspective. We are more flexible to forming new ideas and thoughts.
Over time experiences start to accumulate and we develop more defined perceptions of the world. The perceptions evolve to shape what we believe to be the truth. While not always the case, as we age we become more cemented in the way we have defined these truths. The flexibility of challenging and reshaping how we perceive the world becomes much more difficult.
When our flexibility diminishes in our muscles, our movement becomes more constrained, and we limit our muscle growth. When the flexibility in our mind diminishes, the desire to seek out new perspective and information becomes constrained and stunts our growth. When our truth has little to no flexibility, we miss opportunities to uncover new insights to challenge our beliefs for future growth.
At work inflexibility is seen through employees holding on to the old ways of running a business or doing a job. In health and fitness, inflexibility may look like sticking to old routines of working out and eating habits. In your community, holding on to what worked 20 years ago instead of questioning what’s needed for the future of the community showcases a lack of flexibility.
When we don’t stretch our mind and challenge how we perceive the truth, we miss opportunities to evolve, and inflexibility sets in. As time moves along, we become more and more inflexible and stretching the mind becomes more critical. When we choose to stretch the mind, we allow ourselves to unlearn what we’re cemented in believing from the past so that we can rethink what the future can hold.
Take your step: Identify an area personally or professionally where your mindset or approach has become static. Most likely you’ve become inflexible in this area and some stretching needs to take place. Consider a couple of questions:
1) Has your world changed since the last time you’ve challenged how you’ve defined the truth of the situation?
2) What are alternative ways someone may interpret the truth of your situation?
When we’re willing to explore alternatives to the truth we’ve defined, we challenge our status quo and stretch the mind to consider something better for the future.