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By Root 346 0

what we usually do. Trotting out the same well-worn sayings. I often refer to it as ‘sleeping with our eyes open’. It would be too demanding, even exhausting, to stay alert and conscious of everything we do and think every second of the day. Imagine contemplating every thought you had, every sensation you experienced and every breath you took from the moment you awoke. You’d never get out of bed. A simple question like ‘How are you?’ would require agonising self-examination, comparisons and introspection. Every decision would be torturous. As well as being personally stressful, this would simply bamboozle your brain. The brain is hard-wired precisely to avoid this overload by operating on the efficiency principle. It creates automaticity to stop us over-thinking.

Have you ever been driving somewhere and found you’ve taken your usual route to work instead of where you were meant to be driving to? Or found yourself putting sugar in your partner’s tea when you know they have given up? Or throwing rubbish into a wastepaper bin that has been moved? These all demonstrate how unconscious and automatic much of our behaviour is when we are operating ‘efficiently’ or without thought.

So this efficiency principle has a cost. There’s a downside to being able to assign so much of living to an automatic pilot and not just in the errors described above. Sure, efficiency and automaticity conserve our brain’s valuable resources. And it may be handy for people to know how we’re likely to react in given situations. To know, for example, that if we said we would arrive at eight o’clock, we will do so. Or that if asked to treat something in confidence we can be relied on not to blab. But this has to be weighed against the times when doing what we always do leads us to act without thinking. To let our personality take over. To produce an automatic response to a situation where another, more considered reaction would have been more appropriate. To use just 1/10th of our potential personality.

Automaticity – being at the mercy of our narrow personality – means there will be new experiences that we try to solve with old models. Our constantly changing life will present us with opportunities that we will fail to notice. Decisions made when we are on autopilot will not always be the right ones. There will be unguarded occasions when our mindlessness allows others to manipulate us for their own ends. Unless we can flex we will fail to act upon life as it is in this very moment.

4. flexing

flex is about taking charge of ourselves when it is important. It’s about not giving ourselves over to automaticity. It’s about avoiding the personality trap. When we flex we do not lose ourselves but can adapt to what is happening in the moment.

One way to consider the need to flex comes from understanding the enormous costs to the individual of being too habitual. I’ll go into that more later. But I also have a more positive motivation for introducing the benefits of flex. The waiter in the Chinese restaurant prompted me to develop a new notion about personality.

I believe that we all have the capacity to be different people. In fact, the extent of our success in life will depend on the extent to which we develop that capacity. By that I do not mean being a charlatan or a fake individual. I mean a person making the most of every situation, the familiar and the new, by acting with integrity for the good of themselves and others.

We use only a fraction of our potential personality. We have a toolkit full of useful behaviours, yet repeatedly pull out the same one. We have myriad ways of reacting to situations, yet we do as we have always done. As long as we do this there will be a mismatch between life’s conditions and the strategies we use to cope with them. About 9/10ths of our tools for life are lying, gathering dust, in our brain’s toolbox.

We have seen repeatedly how flex is the key to overcoming many of the problems and struggles that people face. It does this by first helping people break the stranglehold of habits and automaticity. There