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Change can be risky, and often when life presents an opportunity that means making a big change we have an initial period of excitement, imagining all the good things, followed by emerging doubts about all the things that could go wrong if we take the leap.

Our minds are good at bombarding us with these doubts. Day after day, an endless chatter of “what ifs” comes into our heads, and even if we are not persuaded by these fearful messages, it can make things uncomfortable. It can also stop us focusing on the things we need to be paying attention to in order to make a successful change like a transition into a new job or a big move to another country.

We humans have evolved into risk-averse creatures. Nature has killed off out those genetically predisposed to ignore life-threatening risks over tens of thousands of years. A lot of controlled studies show that people often decline opportunities that even a simple arithmetic calculation would show are worthwhile risks. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman co-developed Prospect Theory based on his studies in this area. He showed that in contradiction to earlier economic models, people often don’t make good decisions because they are too concerned with losses.

Change coaching can help sort out the wheat from the chatter!  The coaching process can help you uncover the truth of your situation, and provide you with tools to “dial down” the inner doubts so that they can inform rather than dominate your decision-making. It’s not about ignoring doubts, but rather being able to critically assess them and give them due weight.

This ability to listen to our inner voice in an objective way is a very useful skill. It affects not only the big decisions, but all those every day situations where we may be a prisoner of habit, dictated to by our inner self-talk. These habits are often limiting : “I’m a useless dancer”,  “The boss would never agree to a pay rise”, “Best to stay in my comfort zone and avoid trouble”. Coaching can help you listen to the talk, understand it, put it in perspective and thus live a more flexible, fulfilled life

Many people moving abroad, especially for the first time, find the experience stressful. While some of this stress is unavoidable, changing the way you think about things – psychological flexibility – is key to making your move abroad a more fun and rewarding experience.

Psychological flexibility is the ability to respond in the most appropriate way to a given set of circumstances. It enables you to act in the way most likely to achieve what you want, using all the resources at your disposal. This may mean doing something you would not normally do because it better fits the circumstances than your usual habit. Giving up on fixed ideas helps us to gain flexibility.

Navigating obstacles

A simple parallel might be driving to work. You may have a normal route that gets you there and which you know well. But one morning you hear a traffic report that tells you your normal route is blocked due to a traffic accident. Do you then follow the same route? You could choose to do that, but you would likely end up being very late. Taking a route you know to be longer but not blocked, checking a map for an alternative or asking a friend so suggest a different route is likely to work out better.

Our ability to think flexibly is a powerful tool to help us get what we want. Sometimes our inflexible thinking is not obvious to us. As a coach, my job is often to ask clients questions that make them re-examine their own though patterns and come up with new routes that serve them better.

Moving abroad, you may well find a lot of ‘normal routes’ blocked. Different social customs, language, legal issues and a number of other factors can make things you expected to be simple much more difficult in your new life. Expecting your usual approach to work and finding that it doesn’t can be stressful and frustrating. This is where coaching can help you, by identifying your own inflexible thinking and helping you to think around problems in novel ways.

Our flexible brains

The good news is that this new flexibility also helps in other areas. Being more open to new ideas and ways of living in a new country can pay dividends in other areas as you become more able to respond flexibly to life. Our brains are not static, but rather adaptable and programmable through experience. And the more new experiences, the greater our opportunity to develop flexible thinking.

The BBC and Open University have produced a fun short video about flexible thinking here

We humans have some strange ideas at times. We often see other people doing things that make no apparent sense. For example:

• A person so afraid of learning to swim that they end up drowning when they accidentally fall in a lake.
• The husband fearful of losing his wife who becomes controlling and so loses her love and respect.
• The diner who is served a bad plate of food who tells the enquiring waiter that the meal is delicious.

It’s usually easy to see these failings in others. It’s much harder to spot our own patterns of avoidance, denial and poor reasoning.

Why do ideas get Fixed?

Usually, these patterns of thought and behaviour have a purpose. Our ancient ancestors faced real existential threats – one wrong decision meant death – and so we have developed social rules and deeply ingrained ways of thinking to keep us safe. At the same time, however, they may limit our choices, or make us behave in ways that to an outsider appear completely irrational.

If that irrational idea isn’t very important – for example, a fear of house spiders – it won’t hold you back in life. But other common fears like asking for what we want, public speaking or meeting new people can really limit us. For some people, such as those experiencing agoraphobia, they can become crippling.

Acceptance and Commitment theory calls this type of fixed thinking ‘cognitive fusion’. We all do it, all the time and we are often not aware of it. It’s one of the six ‘core processes’ in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy or Coaching (ACT and ACC).

Defusion

One of the ways in which someone can improve their life through ACT/ACC is to identify these fixed ideas and then free themselves from responding to them in the same way every time they come up. They are, after all, just thoughts. We can choose whether we believe them or act upon them.

This process of ‘defusion’ is actually quite simple, but often over time the fused ideas have cemented themselves in your mind. It takes time and practice to develop the flexibility to treat ideas as thoughts that are not absolutely set in concrete. We have to learn to be able to take note of our other thoughts (particularly when under stress) and to act in a different way. A way which, hopefully, better suits our needs.

Defusion can involve a lot of different techniques, including physical or spoken metaphors designed to help a person understand the nature of ‘thoughts as thoughts’ and to be aware of their impact. People can also use exercises that help develop the sense of the ‘self’ in which these ideas act as helpful tools rather than slave masters.

If you are interested in finding out more about defusing from fixed Ideas, there are some great examples by ACT ‘guru’ Dr. Russ Harris, author of ‘The Happiness Trap’ here.

Acceptance and Commitment coaching can help you explore your own ‘fixed ideas’ and develop greater flexibility in your everyday life. You can develop greater choice over how to respond to the world by better understanding the way you think. You can then perhaps start to do things you did not previously consider possible.

Once upon a time, I worked for a large US-based corporate company, and a great deal of time was spent on ‘strategy’. What this usually meant was that someone had an idea for a new product or a particular way of cutting costs or some other notion they thought would be helpful which would involve a lot of work to implement and take a long time, so was ‘strategic’.

Along the way, I learned that none of this is strategy. True strategy is about the choices you make to do one thing or another, and the reasons why. You can choose to make a product cheap, you can choose to make one with lots of leading features – but crucially you probably can’t do both and be successful.

In everyday life, too, we are often presented with similar choices that are frequently in conflict. This can be every day things like “Do I leave work on time and enjoy a longer evening with my family, or stay at work an hour or two extra to get this project task completed? ” or can be a big decision like “Do I leave work in a job I hate and study for three years so I can do one I think will make me much happier?”.

So how do we choose? According Steven Hayes PhD, the developer of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), the answer lies in our values:

“…you can keep walking towards that beacon in the distance. That process, that journey, is called life. And if you’re moving towards the things that you value, life is more vital, flowing; it’s more empowering.”

Whenever we make choices and act in accord with our own personal set of values (for example, “Being a loving mother”, “Telling the truth”, “Acting with integrity”) we are much more likely to be happy with the outcome, even if things don’t turn out as we might hope. Values-based action is always open to us, and is the thing that fundamentally makes us who we are. It is the act of choosing what we do that makes us “us”.

When Viktor Frankl was in a Nazi concentration camp in the Second World War, he realized that although his choices were severely limited, and the wrong one could bring instant execution, he nevertheless still had freedom to act in ways that were aligned with the kind of man he chose to be. The small act of giving up part of a daily food ration or a kind word to another prisoner were things he chose to do to live life in a values-based way, and contributed to his emergence from his truly awful experiences with his fundamental self intact.

Our personal values provide a sort of “blueprint” for an ideal life – perhaps not in terms of outcome but crucially in how we act, both everyday and when faced with those “moment of truth” choices that present themselves just a few times in our lives. They give the direction to our Life Strategy, and if we allow them to guide our actions will mean we can lead a more authentic life, less conflicted and with a clearer understanding of where we want to be,

Of course, we are often not completely clear what our personal values are, and it can take some self-reflection to come to a better understanding of the things we hold most dear, and how they relate to each other. A useful place to start is by making a list of the things that matter to us, and there are several example lists of commonly shared values available as a starting point – for example this Values Questionnaire from Author Russ Harris’ book “The Happiness Trap”. This particular approach also invites you to compare the importance of your values with the degree to which your life is taking you towards them, which can help identify where your life is taking you away from the things that matter to you.

A Life Strategy is always a direction, not a particular outcome. It may take a long time to achieve a result you want, but if you are headed in the right direction, you are much more likely to achieve your goals. Using your values to guide you like a compass can be an important part of making your life a success on your own terms.