Psychological Flexibility & Navigating Change

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Welcome back to another episode of Zevo Talks. Today we are joined by the lovely Kyra Conley. Today Kyra will take us through psychological flexibility and navigating change and what this looks like.

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Here we start off by telling us a bit about yourself. Yeah, so my name is Kyra Conley. I’m an integrative counsellor and I’m also a well-being specialist here at Zevo Health. So my practice so far in my career has been very diverse.

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I work with issues such as self-care, work-life balance, self-awareness. I like to help my clients find meaning and purpose in their life and also support people coming to terms with disabilities and long-term illnesses.

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So when I’m working with my clients, what’s really important to me is that all my therapeutic models are grounded in a humanistic approach. So this basically means that there’s no one size fits all when it comes to therapy.

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What I believe is that each model needs to be based off the individual and the client’s needs and what goals they really want to get to. And then through therapy and mindful self-care, I help my clients get to that place and resolve and soothe some of those issues that are there as well.

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That’s amazing, thanks for describing that Karen. I suppose we’ll jump into the topic itself then and what is psychological flexibility? Okay, so we will explain this in maybe two different kinds of ways.

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So the working definition that we have from Bond would be that it’s the capacity to fully contact the present moment and then change the behaviour based on our values in that moment as well, putting it into kind of layman’s terms.

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Psychological flexibility is having the ability to assess how we feel in the moment, so we’re present. but then to change the way that we behave and think. So we’re staying on course to where we want to go, if that makes sense.

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So psychological flexibility is having flexibility in our thinking and our behavior. So a lot of the time, if you think of any situation, a situation that is unexpected, we have a quick reaction. A lot of the time when we react to situations, it’s not necessarily coherent.

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It doesn’t really maybe make sense. Or maybe we say something that we don’t necessarily need, or we do something. We just react. Having psychological flexibility, what we’re trying to do is slow down that response.

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That we’re not just reacting to situations all of the time, or maybe recognizing that let’s say anger is with us. Why is that anger there? How would we like to deal with it? And that we, instead of reacting incoherently to our values, we’re reacting in a very coherent way that’s helping us all to move towards that kind of shared goal, or that value, be it kindness, be it professionalism, be it, you know,

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work-life balance, you know, even in the sense of, let’s say, people pleasing behaviors. We’re not saying yes to everything very quickly. We have that time and space to kind of think about, can I do this?

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Do I have the capacity to do it? And say yes to when we can, and know when we can’t. So, with psychological flexibility, it’s flexibility about flexibility. You know, if nothing is going to be set in stone, and it’s just recognizing that there’s more than one way of thinking, and depending on how we’re feeling in that moment on that specific day, that’s what we’re going to base our answers of, our behaviors of,

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our thoughts of, you know. So, we just really want, with psychological flexibility, to be open, open to other thoughts, opinions, thinkings, and behaviors, and not kind of always staying in that autopilot mode of just doing, rather than actually being present and acting upon our values.

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And how does someone go about achieving psychological flexibility? So, there’s lots of different theoretical perspectives. Probably my favorite is from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, okay? So, we call that ACT.

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You might hear me say that throughout today’s session. So, really what ACT says is that there are six aspects of psychological flexibility, and each component represents what psychological flexibility is.

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So, we need all six of them. So, if we’ve got six, we’re actually going to break them into two different categories, okay? We have the commitment and behavior change process, but that’s for three, and then the remaining three is for the mindfulness and acceptance process, okay?

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So, if we think about it in a sense that you know, how can we act or think according to our values, if we don’t know how we truly feel or what we really want in life? Okay, so that’s why it’s separated into two, the mindfulness and the acceptance is really, really important to understanding our values and ourselves.

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And then with that knowledge, we can then use that as fuel to get the car moving. And we can then commit and behave and get ourselves to you know, where we want to go. So if we think about, how do we actually achieve psychological flexibility?

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Firstly, we’re going to be looking at acceptance. Okay, so as I was saying earlier, is that one of the key things with psychological flexibility is that I need you to be open, open to other thoughts, beliefs, and experiences and open to change in the way that maybe you typically think as well.

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So kind of to the wider reality, but also openness to sit with uncomfortable emotions. This can be really difficult because a lot of the time, you know, with anger, we maybe shout or we maybe run away from situations because obviously we don’t like dealing with it.

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Like anger is not a nice emotion, you know, it’s an important one, but we might not necessarily like it. Well, with psychological flexibility for us to be able to manage it differently, we’re gonna actually have to sit with it for a few minutes, listen to the message that it has to say, and then we can decide then how we want to deal with it.

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So even though these emotions are uncomfortable, we don’t enjoy them, just remember that all emotions pass. No emotion is permanent, they’re all transients, they absolutely will pass. Secondly, what I’ll ask clients to do is, we’re now gonna learn some skills to actually detach from thoughts.

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So we’re sitting down with the anger, the emotion that’s with us, we’re having a cup of tea with them, and now they’re, you know, telling us their story and why they’ve paid us a visit, let’s say. So what we want to kind of recognize is, okay, is what they’re saying to be helpful, or is it unhelpful?

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You know, are they delivering an important message to help me to stay safe? Or is this anger maybe assuming what someone is saying? Is it jumping to conclusions? Is it maximizing something, or is it minimizing something?

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This, for some people, they may recognize some of these terms. We call these unhelpful thought patterns or cognitive distortions. These are a key kind of aspect to CVT, so cognitive behavioral therapy.

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So if someone has experience with CVT, they would know how to kind of do this exercise. There are loads of online resources if someone does want to explore that, or if you’re not sure exactly how to learn to detach from our thoughts, you can absolutely do this on a one-to-one basis with a counselor.

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But what we’re trying to do is observe the typical thought patterns that we have and avoid being conscious. consumed by our thoughts. Okay, so now we’re kind of looking objectively rather than subjectively and trying to see, okay, what information is there to support the thought or what’s there to kind of disregard it and how can I react that is in a way that’s also reflective to my moral values and my core values as well.

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So we do this a lot of the time through talk, maybe talking to someone and getting kind of that verbal feedback. Are those like to do it kind of personally, like journal, so be journal our thoughts and we reread over them and see you know what we think about them, can we reframe them or we can do it in that counseling session where we learn how to actually reframe our thoughts.

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There’s a lot of information here that don’t be too overwhelmed, as I was saying, you know, if this is familiar to you, absolutely fantastic, but if not, absolutely, I do reach out to that medical professional or to that counselor to ask them for a little bit more information on anything that we discuss today.

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But I’m going to move you on to the third thing, okay, so we’re nearly halfway there. So I mentioned earlier about how important mindfulness was, you know, how can we live a life that’s reflective of our values if we actually don’t take the time to stop and think about what are my values, what do I stand for, what do I like, what do I don’t like, what do I want from life, you know.

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So number three is that we want that present focus perspective, okay, we are often in this autopilot pilot mode that I was talking about earlier, and we really do need to be present to achieve psychological flexibility.

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So what we need to start doing is helping ourselves to learn how to come into the present moment. So before we even get to the values, we want to learn how to bring ourselves there. So we can do this through mindful meditation, through our breathing exercises, maybe when we recognize that we’re triggered, we’re feeling anxious or maybe overwhelmed, or even just practicing it as mindful self care.

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Trying to spend a little bit more time with ourselves rather than, you know, answering work calls or emails or being engaged on social media, you know, we’re always consuming something. And when we’re when our attention is, you know, constantly being kind of pulled in 101 different directions, we then forget about ourselves, you know.

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So it’s really, really important that if we’re achieving psychological flexibility, that we start reminding ourselves, oh, how am I feeling today? How, how’s my energy level? So do I need more sleep or do I need some food, you know, we need to start looking after ourselves.

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So we’re just going to try and build that real positive relationship with ourselves and build up that kind of mindful muscle. also in our brain too. With that, we’re then going to move on to step four, which is observing the self.

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Okay, so this is our fourth aspect of psychological flexibility. So observing self is simply observing the self, getting to know yourself. So now that we’re practicing how to be mindful, we’re now going to do a little bit of investigation, getting to know ourselves a little bit better, recognising our behaviours that are helpful and recognising our behaviours that are unhelpful, and the same for our thoughts and emotions too.

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Now we’ve got a good sense of self, we can then begin to deepen that sense through values clarification, which is our fifth aspect of psychological flexibility. So it’s really important that we take time to discover the things we need, as this is going to help us to move forward in life, okay, in a way that’s going to be fulfilling.

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Remember, that’s what we’re trying to achieve here. We want to be happy. So we want to make sure that we are living a life and a happiness that is defined by us, not by our boss or our fellow colleagues or social media or family, you know, there’s so many external influences out there that very quickly we forget to listen to our own voice.

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Remember, that’s what we’re trying to build here with psychological flexibility, is that we’re listening to our voice first. So by listening to ourselves and learning about what we like and what we don’t like and what’s important to us, clarifying those values, now we have a roadmap.

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Okay, so these are the places that I want to go. How do I get there? And that brings us to number six. So this brings us to our last aspect of psychological flexibility, which is values in action. So this is where we put our goals into action.

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Okay, so we’ve done number five, we’ve done all the hard work, we now have good clear clarification of what gives us a sense of meaning and purpose in life. Now we’re following it, we’re going to do something about it.

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This is going to give us such a good like roadmap or just guidelines as when we’re making decisions in our lives, so we can kind of go back to them and say, okay, is this in line with my values? Yes, I’m going to do this.

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No, it’s not. So I’m going to say no. So this is going to be really, really helpful. So with the psychological flexibility, it’s not only allowing us to slow down a little bit in our reactions, but it’s also also allowing us to reach our full potential as we’re now making decisions based on how we truly feel we’re controlling for all those external influences, the opinions of work, our friends, social media,

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all of that there, and we’re really listening to the most important voice, which is our thoughts. ourselves. But we also have that flexibility there to recognise that sometimes our voice can be wrong.

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And we don’t mind sitting with the thought we have that openness to sit even if it does feel uncomfortable and work with it to help us to find the best possible solution or approach. Zevo is a fully integrated workplace wellbeing provider.

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We understand that every company has different goals, needs and characteristics. Our team of psychologists, performance nutritionists and experts in the field of physical health conduct in-depth research and thereafter develop and tailor strategic corporate wellbeing programs based on the outcome for each organisation.

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Our broad range of services available both online and on-site are designed to improve employees’ overall well-being and increase engagement within the workplace. We aim to create the healthiest workplace across the globe to ensure that your most important assets, your employees, are energized and thriving.

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Contact us today to start your workplace well-being journey, www.zevohealth.com. OK, Cara, I’m just wondering then, what signs would you look at within yourself to see if you weren’t psychologically flexible?

Unknown speaker

Yeah, that’s a really good question. So it’s going to be different for everyone. None of us are perfect either. We’re never going to get 100% all of the time, so that’s really important to say too. But what we want to do is, if you’re curious to be like, you know, do I have this psychological flexibility?

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We want to check in with ourselves. What is my current narrative? What is my current way of thinking? We all have this autopilot mode, or we tend to react and communicate in the same ways. Kind of this go-to way of communication.

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We just want to make sure that is that go-to way actually the most helpful, or the most helpful, or the most productive. So, for example, do you find that, are you present in the moment? We’re talking about how important mindfulness and presentateness is today.

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Is that something that you can relate to? If not, do you feel like you disconnect from the world quite a lot? So are you preoccupied with the past? Are you current? Are you always preoccupied with the future?

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You know that kind of way where you’re maybe, let’s say, you’re at work and you’re concentrating on tasks. The next minute you’re five years down the line and you’re worrying about the housing crisis where you’re no way near, you know, thinking about buying a home or anything like that, or possibly your constantly repaying an argument that you had, you know, with a colleague or a friend maybe two or three years ago.

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Are you constantly disconnecting from that present moment? Is your mind bringing you to other places which are unhelpful? When I spoke about values earlier, did you kind of go, oh, yeah, I know, minor, x, y, and z, or were you thinking, actually, I’m not too sure what my values are, what is important to me?

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You know, we could have maybe lost touch with that a little bit as well. When I also maybe was mentioning about flexibility, flexibility about flexibility, openness to other opinions and ideas, if you maybe kind of shut that down or was like, no, I don’t, I don’t like the sound of that.

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Maybe, you know, that we, you have a tendency to kind of, you know, have that rigid perspective or like black and white thinking. it could be kind of, you know, putting us in a tunnel where we’re not able to see, you know, the other different possibilities of dealing with certain situations or relieving stress as well.

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We may feel that we’re kind of a blinker in a sense, but also as well, you know, if we’re trying to assess whether we’re psychologically flexible, maybe it’s just looking at our actual willingness to sit with uncomfortable emotions, or, you know, being open to kind of listen to them or quiz them or challenge them.

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A lot of people want to push and ignore, and that’s super understandable as to why we want to do that, but that’s no problem. But, you know, short term, it may offer us a sense of relief, but long term, these strategies are not helping us to get us where we want to go.

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Long term is causing us more stress, you know. Short term, you know, we, okay, we feel better for maybe one day, but we’re possibly just prolonging and pushing off a stress that if we sat with it and we challenged it, maybe we could relieve or soothe it as well.

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So if we want to move forward, and with regards to who we want to be and where we want to go, we really need to engage in those actions that work for us in the long term, rather than using the short term kind of distraction or avoidance techniques.

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So if you are kind of, to answer just a little bit more concisely, if you are kind of wondering, you know, about psychological flexibility and how much do you relate to it, remember again, none of us are perfect, but if you can relate to anything there, you feel like you do have a tendency of thinking or a behavior in which after you’re kind of going, no, that wasn’t very helpful, or it isn’t necessary,

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you’re finding yourself a little bit stuck, then maybe this is something that you can kind of investigate a little bit more and see. you know, is there an aspect here that you can work on? So if someone was kind of described themselves as stuck, do you think psychological flexibility will be, help them along?

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I think it’d be an asset to them. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, a hundred percent. So psychological flexibility is, you know, it’s going to help us in loads of difficult situations, you know, if we’re feeling stuck, if we’re, you know, not sure maybe how to react to a confrontation or a conflict, or even if we’re trying to make a big life decision, you know, we’re trying to decide, okay, like where do I want to live?

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Do I want to move? Where do I want to go in my career? You know, all of these big questions, psychological flexibility will help us again, to sit down with these thoughts, to listen with them, and to go back to our values and see, you know, kind of where this all, where it all fits.

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And we have that roadmap then to help us to inform that whole decision-making process. So yeah, like with this darkness. place we probably feel the most stuck is when we’re having to deal with change.

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Oh my God, it’s the one thing that we all absolutely dread. So change is, it’s ambiguous, I suppose. We don’t know exactly what it is, but what we can say about change is that it’s constant, it’s global, it’s inevitable, and it is stressful.

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And as you know, whilst we can’t control change and nine times out of 10 we can’t predict it that it’s coming, you know, what we can control is our attitude towards it. So psychological flexibility allows us that space to breathe and allows us to kind of recognize, okay, there is 101 different options here.

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And, you know, we’re not in that, we don’t have that kind of tunnel vision or that blinkerness in a sense of, you know, I only have one way to deal with it, which is the way that I always deal with it, you know?

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So psychological flexibility, again, it’s going to allow us to connect to that present moment, okay, while acting on longer-term values instead of those short-term impulses, such as anger. Frustration with the change, we’re gonna say, okay, let’s say if I take the example of maybe losing a job and maybe being made redundant, you know, we have that anger whilst it has place, it has its place, and once we feel like we have the resilience then to come into a place of acceptance of the situation,

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we can think about, okay, what can we do about this? You know, we can look at the thoughts, we can look at how to use mindful self-care to soothe and treat the emotions that are with us in such a difficult situation, but also we can then cultivate some of that emotional energy to help us to maybe send out CVs or even write the CV or explore the market that’s there as well.

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So what we want to be doing is with psychological flexibility when we’re navigating change is observe our thoughts and feelings without judgment, not getting caught up in them. We’re observing them, and again, help them out.

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us to get back on track so we pull out that roadmap again and we say okay what’s important to me where do I want to go in life and then you know we have that that ends fulfillment that we’re helping ourselves to get there so psychological flexibility is going to allow us to create that distance from our thoughts so we can respond in line with our values rather than react or again bring us back to that word feeling stuck not knowing where to go thankfully now due to all of our hard work we have that fantastic roadmap so I’m really you know the goal is you know when it comes to psychological flexibility we want to become the best version of ourselves and you know give ourselves the chance the opportunity to fulfill our potential you know we’re all achieve those amazing things,

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but mindfully in a sense that we don’t want to be setting those super high expectations for ourselves as well. We want to be doing it every step of the way, having that present focus, that connection with ourselves, checking in and you know, whilst we’re getting to the places we want to go, we’re doing it in a way that is helpful to ourselves, to those around us, but we’re also keeping our mental health and our physical health and mind as well,

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not just occupational and intellectual. So it gets through the ability to stay in contact with the present moment, regardless of unpleasant thoughts, feelings or bodily sensations, while choosing our behaviour based on the situation or our personal values.

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So again, if I just bring you back to almost the analogy of, you know, let’s say that anger is a person and they’re coming in our front door and we invite them in to sit down with a cup of tea and to speak to us, you know, and we’re listening to what they’re saying and we get to make that decision whether we’re going to take this information or we’re going to, as the person leaves, we’re going to say,

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yeah, no, I don’t agree with anything that they’re saying that this is actually how I’m going to deal with it. You know, when the emotion comes in, we don’t always have to take its advice, but we do want to sit down with it, even though it’s an uncomfortable situation or it’s an uncomfortable emotion or discussion even, but we want to take whatever it is and then see does it align with those personal values and if it does,

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then great, then help us to get us where we want to go, but if it doesn’t, we don’t have to do what it’s telling us to do either. We can change it and adjust it so it is in line with those personal values.

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So with psychological flexibility, kind of to wrap everything up is that we’re building that self-awareness that we know when we’re heading off course with regards to that roadmap of our values and we can pull ourselves back onto it and this is going to help us to have that, you know, super really fulfilling and meaningful.

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full life that we’ve built for ourselves. No, we’re not following ones that we’re seeing on social media or what our family or friends are telling us to do. We’ve built this ourselves because we’ve built a really good relationship with ourselves and we know ourselves well.

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Let’s take a moment to breathe with a lot of information thrown at us so far. We’re going to stop here. As I was saying, psychological flexibility, we’re really exploring concepts and really seeing how it works well in everyday life, how it can help us deal with change and also decision-making.

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Hopefully, I’ve sold it to you all. It’s fantastic. I want to leave you with these three points. This is my take-home message. Be patient. Ask for support if you feel that you need it. This is all very overwhelming.

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We have so many different responsibilities. We have work, we have our families, we have our friends. We can’t know everything. can’t be doctors and psychologists all on top of that as well. You know, we have a profession that’s just stick to that, you know.

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So if you do need that support, ask for it. If you’re seeing something and you’re not really understanding what it is, but you’re curious and you want to learn, reach out to those who do know. And ideally, you know, what the kind of take my message for psychological flexibility is, is that we’re working to understand our thoughts, our values and our feelings.

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And we’re trying to. Number three, my last message is to practice mindfulness and rescue regularly. We’re not doing this because we we’re imperfect people or we need to improve or become better. No, we’re doing it because we want to live a life that is reflective of what we want.

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You know, there’s no carbon copy. We’re not all the same. There is no one size fits all, you know. So get to know yourself, find out what that actually looks like. And then we can start living that super meaningful and happy life.

Unknown speaker

But I just want to say thank you so much, Michelle, for having me. Hopefully I haven’t completely overwhelmed everyone here. But as I was saying, there’s so many resources online, loads of resources from ACT that I was telling you about earlier, too.

Unknown speaker

So if you really are intrigued or curious about this topic, do check out those resources. And again, thank you so much for having me. That was brilliant. It was really, really insightful and kind of part provoking looking to ourselves and hopefully find something that we like and definitely areas to help us improve how we kind of deal with ourselves internally as well.

Unknown speaker

So thank you very, very much for joining us. And thank you to you, the listener, for joining. And we look forward to welcoming you to another episode.