Flex_ Do Something Different - Ben [27]
This exploration is likely to reveal where you have deep-seated bias and prejudice in your everyday attitudes and opinions too. You might have fixed reasons for objecting to why governments or your bosses make the decisions they do. Or why your own habits mean that you get the reactions you get from others, when you were hoping for a different response. Once these are exposed you can set about being more open to the new. You may catch yourself bemoaning something unfamiliar that has appeared in your life. Perhaps your local shop has been taken over by folk from a different culture. Or another piece of technology has come out that you have resisted embracing. Instead of dismissing it, why not force yourself to try it out? Often we need to feel the discomfort of trying to act differently to see why our habitual responses have the outcomes they normally do.
The key to being open to the new and ready to learn and accept difference is to be constantly open to it. Habits, by their very nature, don’t break down easily and try to steer us away from the unfamiliar and back to the comfort zone. It often takes a few exposures to the new to begin to understand how constraining and limiting our habits of thinking and behaviour have been.
Does this repeated exposure always work? Perhaps not. Are there areas of life where this approach does not work? Perhaps. But we can never know which attempts will or won’t be successful until we open ourselves up with repeated tests of our own habits.
Habits can, as we have mentioned, also be very good for us. But to achieve our full potential we do need to subject them to a check every now and again. We need to regularly put ourselves into the discomfort zone so that we can question and scrutinise them and ask ourselves honestly if the habits we have continue to serve us well. Or whether they are conspiring to shrink our world even further.
36. Back to stress and the discomfort zone
If a person has a small set of possible behaviours – as in the example in Figure 1 – this is likely to mean that their corresponding stress zone is big. People with a limited range of behaviours deal with many situations in an ineffective and inefficient way because their natural behaviours are unlikely to be appropriate for making the most of a situation. A small behavioural repertoire makes for a big stress potential. That’s because, as we have seen, the person will encounter many life situations they are inadequately equipped to deal with effectively. It is for this reason that behavioural flexibility is a good prophylactic for stress. In fact, expanding our behavioural repertoires can help us to minimise anxiety and depression, low self-esteem and low self-efficacy. flex is about making your stress or inefficiency zone as small as possible.
A common reaction to this from those with ‘strong’ personalities, or those with a narrow range of behaviours who happen to have been successful, is denial. When a person does behave in a way they are not used to, or when this is suggested, a common response is to deny the need to behave differently or simply to refuse to do it. Some are very insistent that their particular mix of behaviours happens to be the right one for being successful. This is illogical, of course, as well as narrowly focused. I cannot deny their success (although, as I previously noted, it is often accompanied by other life and relationship costs), but there is an undeniable logic in the idea that having a wider toolset of behaviours better equips a person to deal with a broader range of situations.
37. New behaviours have effects on others
Other people probably like you the way you are. That’s how they know you, and of course they have habits too. The habits of thinking they have mean that if you behave differently they will:
notice a difference because your new behaviour breaks an expectation they had