Flex_ Do Something Different - Ben [17]
Open a book at random and read for half an hour.
Start volunteering.
We have run many DSD programmes and interventions (some of which we’ll talk more about later) and one of the people who took part told us she had got the DSD ‘bug’. That’s because new experiences bring about pleasurable feelings that are self-reinforcing. So staying with a DSD programme isn’t an effort; it’s something that people want to do because of the returns it brings and it usually becomes a way of life. A big mindset shift that people doing DSD undergo is the realisation that waiting for the world to change is futile. It won’t. And trying to change the world is also a tough task. But changing the way you experience the world, simply by doing something different, is something that everyone can manage. And, as another person who tried DSD told us:
‘When you do something different something magical happens.’
More of that later, but for now let’s go on to look at why it’s such a powerful way to change.
2
Section 2:
Behavioural flexibility
19. The birth of FIT Science
I developed a new branch of psychology, known as FIT Science, which focuses on personal development and the qualities that determine success and well-being. It wasn’t enough to say that person-based factors play a key role in stress, performance, relationships and decision-making. Or simply to blame people’s habits. We needed a model that explained what a person could change in order to cope better with their existence and lead a fuller life. There was a need to identify which behavioural dimensions a broad personality should encompass. And to know which underlying traits would keep them flexible. These led me to develop and test a new model.
I called my new model FIT Science: FIT stands for ‘Framework for Internal Transformation’. I developed FIT Science when I was dean of a large business school (at the University of Hertfordshire) and had been working on these ideas for some years.
As a consequence of my stress research I had already produced the Work FIT Profiler (then called the Micro-Cultural Audit) – a tool that measured work demands, supports and constraints and a plethora of important outcomes (stress, performance, commitment and teamwork, amongst other things.). One of my PhD students, Bob Stead, was researching the effects of long hours of work on well-being. We came up with the idea of measuring the key factors that are at the root of how people perform, what makes them see things the way they do, both in their work and in life generally.
Some years earlier I had published some groundbreaking research looking at occupational mortality in a new way. Essentially, my research demonstrated that the life expectancy – and precise cause of death of a married woman – could be predicted from her husband’s job. This was true for all causes of death, even suicide, accidents, different cancers, multiple sclerosis and so on. I showed that there were very subtle but powerful psychological processes at work in determining mortality, both occupational and disease-specific across the 500-plus jobs I analysed. For example, police sergeants (and their wives) had high cancer mortality, builders’ labourers (and their wives) high accident mortality and musicians (and their wives) high respiratory disease mortality. The effects were not owing to social class differences. There were many factors that could be responsible for such findings but – with the help of another PhD student, Fiona Jones – I came to the conclusion that these predictable deaths were owing to changes in what I called ‘cognitive architecture’ brought about by marriage and the shared psychological environment, or the common ways in which couples come to perceive and interact with their world. That architecture became FIT.
With Bob Stead, I set about ways of defining and measuring that architecture, which resulted in the FIT Profiler. We tested many hundreds of people with early versions of the Profiler and looked at all factors in relation to FIT. FIT Science, and the measuring tools necessary to