Mental agility

Presentation on Mental Agility
By
Anand Vatsya

No! It’s certainly not this. Even I don’t know what is this.
Image credits – Google.com

There’s no exact definition of Mental Agility and it’s mostly
defined on the basis of certain things, an agile mind should
be able to do. The easiest way to judge how mentally agile
you are, is to grade yourself, on a scale of 1-5, with respect to
certain parameters [that we’ll discuss in this presentation].

We gain this by making our
body go through intense
exercises. The more we
press our body to do difficult
things, the more stronger we
become and the better
shape our body takes. This
makes us physically fit and
enables us to feel good
about ourselves.
Now, every single one of you knows what is this and how one can achieve this.

Why this is important?
On a daily basis, we come across new challenges. Things, which we’re expected to
solve. Things, for which we don’t always have a lot of time. And things, we might be
knowing nothing about. (And this is not just the scenario of our professional lives,
but our personal lives too.)
Hence, to help us to get through these situations, an “Agile Mind” is one of the most
important psychological traits to have.
It’s exactly the same thing with our brain. We need to make our brain do difficult
things as well. The not-so-usual-and-easy things. Once we do that, our brain
becomes more flexible to try and grasp new things, makes us a quick learner and
finetunes all of our mental abilities.

Parameters
In total, there are seven (7) parameters that we’ll discuss
today. And these 7 things are what you need to develop,
within yourselves, to make for a mentally agile person.

# You’re a curious person, eager to know about things and in
the habit of asking relevant questions.
(Yeah! Like this little guy here.)

 Curiosity is nothing but developing a mind which enables you to develop interest about
things and ask questions about those things. And let me tell you, neither it’s as easy as it
sounds nor everyone’s mind is equipped to do that.
 There’s an extremely simple approach to developing curiosity – you need to be genuinely
interested in things. And, at the same time, ask good questions. That’s it.
 Having a learning attitude can also help here. It means you’re open to learning and
knowing about new things, even if they do not particularly fall under your areas of interest.

Now, this might seem easy, but remember - “Millions saw the Apple fall, but
Newton asked why.”
It’s important that the questions are relevant to a specific situation and the quality of the
questions you ask, is good as well, as it’s often taken as the sign of a mentally agile person.
(This is not the
apple we’re
talking about;
hence, relevance
is equally
important.)

# You don’t panic when you come across the not-so-usual
things.
Like This guy! He
listens to something
on his phone, and
his reaction is
certainly not of
excitement. Rather
he’s PANICKING!

In our lives, we get used to the daily situations, the common problems, the
expected challenges, the repeated goals, etc. We get so habitual to our
schedule that when something unusual happens, we get frightened.
(Remember calling your mom at an uncommon time, and she being like, why
are you calling at this time? How are you? Is everything okay?)
The challenge is to accept what’s not normal. And trust me when I say this, it’s
all in the mind.

 Take an example of your Senior Manager, or better yet, the CEO of your company. They
don’t get the usual problems every day.
o When a company grows, they make sure that the company is aligned to every growth
phase.
o They meet a very diverse set of people every day.
o The grievances are structured in a different way of every other employee, which they
have to deal with.
o The market and the investors expect the company to do something differently, during
different times.
 And a CEO’s (or a Senior Manager’s) job is just not to embrace these but also oversee
each and every challenge, gracefully and successfully.

# You take some time in visualizing the problem,
before even thinking about the solution.

 Rushing to conclusions is a common problem with humans. Our mind is
programmed to make assumptions (mostly wrong) very fast, which then
pushes us to make conclusions (again wrong). And this is exactly what you
need to control.
(Please don’t
try to read it.
That’s not
the point.)

 An agile mind always takes some time to understand what is being
presented in front of him. Because until someone does not understand a
problem clearly, he’ll never be able to come up with a logical solution. (Not
doing this in a professional environment can actually sometimes be really
costly.)
 What needs to be done here is to think about the things that might have
resulted in a particular problem. And then approach the problem from more
than one ways.

 Make a resolution that until and unless you don’t have all the information
(whatever the amount), you’ll not proceed further. You’ll give yourself and your
brain ample time to take a call.
 Just like the other aspects of mental agility, even this can be learned. And once
you have learned to do that, the solution will take fairly less time, which would
not have been the case otherwise.

 Now, I did say earlier that you might not always have enough time or a lot of
data to reach the correct answer, but that does not mean you’ll jump to
conclusions.
 In such scenarios, you’ll be expected to make an educated guess, which will
not be too far from the actual solution. And this will come only by practice
and by putting yourself in diverse situations. Understanding bits of data and
then piecing them together, is not a skill people are born with.

# You understand the definition and the differences between,
Argument
Discussion
Disagreement
The three are so closely related that we often fail to draw a line between them. And
it’s not our fault actually. The thing is, not a lot of people know that there are big-
time and visible differences between these. And the reason why knowing the
differences is important is “to save yourself”. (You’ll get to know why I’m saying this.)

Argument
Argument, just like anger, is an enemy of ours. It
reduces our ability to think straight, to reason
and to give importance to others views. What
we fail to understand, while in an argument, is
everyone has their own set of experiences, on
which they base their opinions. And people have
their own reasons to believe or not to believe
something.

 The reason I don’t like cricket is the game runs for longer durations (let’s keep the
20-20s and everything aside). The reason I love football is it does not demand a
longer attention.
 The reason you love cricket is you’ve been playing it since your childhood, and it’s
one of the things in your life, you easily relate to. The reason you don’t like football
is you’ve never played it and you never seem to understand the offside rule.
 Now, neither am I incorrect nor you are. Hence, argumenting on why one should
be favoured over the other, is actually pointless, because in hindsight, all the
reasons are correct.

Discussion
Discussion has often been stated to be a very
heathy activity for our brains. Having
discussions enables us to broaden our scope
of thinking and teaches us to give value to
other’s views as well.
A healthy discussion can go a long way in
understanding people and their different and
unique methods behind how they think and
evaluate things around themselves.

 Discussion is all about sharing opinions while argument is more about impressing one’s
opinions on others. If the people in a discussion have become violent (even a little bit) in
stating their views, want you to believe them at any cost and are not even willing to
consider your point for once, then we’re having an argument. And arguments never
benefit anyone.
 Hence, the best way to deal with an argument is to agree to what the other person is
saying, and just leave. And if you’re planning on saying, “seems neither of us agree to
each other’s views, so let’s close the discussion here,” the 3rd segment will teach you
why that might not be the best thing to do always.

Disagreement
You might have heard this quite popular
saying, “Agree to disagree.” And in fact,
there’s nothing more to understanding
disagreement.
But this is a hard skill to master. Why?
Because everyone likes to speak (and not
talk), and this arises from our believes that
what we know, is ALWAYS correct. Which is
of course not true.

 The underlying principle behind learning to disagree with people, is developing a belief
that “my knowledge is not absolute” and “people always have the option of not
agreeing to what I’m saying”. And both of these things are perfectly alright to realize.
 Now, let’s return to the note on which I closed the 2nd segment - “seems neither of us
agree to each other’s views, so let’s close the discussion here” is not always good. You
see, a person with an open and an agile mind, will never get into/continue an
argument, in the first place. And the ones who’ll do that, you cannot get away by asking
them to close the discussion on a mutual front.

 The thing with the latter kind of people is that they’re so consumed by their own
knowledge and beliefs that they would force you to agree with them. And if you still
choose to leave, they might even start mocking you.
 Hence, the best way to deal with arguments is to agree with the other person and
move away. Remember, even if you’re trying to help someone with your information
(which you know has been scientifically proven), he’ll never use it because he’s not
open to taking it.

# Can derive inferences from situations and draw logical conclusions
even with less or at times, extremely less data/information.
(Inference is a logical solution or an educational guess and one cannot
be 100% sure of it. Conclusion is final, definitive and almost always
factual and will always be 100%.)

 Another reason why the work of the CEOs is so admired is because of their
decision-making capabilities. Often times, they’re faced with situations
where they’ve extremely less amount of data and they need to make a
decision based on this data. And all this when they don’t have the liberty to
go wrong. This is exactly what we’re talking about here.
 A lot of times you’ll have challenges in front of you, and you’ll be required to
infer logical assumptions and draw definitive conclusions. So, how can an
agile brain help you in doing that?

 When we train our brain for agility, we make it more open, flexible of moving
between things, having an eye for unnatural things and an ability to connect all of
this. This is what you need to do. By training your mind in different challenges, you’ll
make it more open to deriving inferences, say by recognizing certain patterns. You’ll
make it more accustomed to looking through and across hard and invisible things.
 There’s no other way to master the skill of making inferences and drawing
conclusions. You just need to practice doing the hard things, the hard way. But once
you get fairly comfortable with such scenarios, it won’t be hard anymore.

# You’re able to communicate to explain things to others
This is exactly what I don’t
want you to do.
This is called speaking and
not talking or
communicating. Where
everyone speaks for his
own purpose, and there’s
no role of listening.

There are two components of being able to communicate properly, in a way people can
understand.
 Via normal words and in a very
simple and direct manner
 If possible, then with real
life and daily examples
Image credits – Google.com Image credits – Google.com

Now, which of the two sentences are you more likely to respond to?
 Communication prowess is intrinsically linked to the gravity of getting
oneself acquainted with Mental Agility.
 Communication is important for learning Mental Agility.
(Until and unless you understand something clearly, you’ll never be able to explain it to
others properly.)

There’s this thing with us Indians that we feel good English means fancy or
high-profile words. Which is as incorrect as anything ever can be.
The art of speaking, or writing for that matter, is based upon simplicity.
Both the forms of expressions are practiced to talk about certain things,
with an expectation that the other person will understand.
Now, how can that happen if I use “gravity” rather than “importance”
(which is more easily understood by people).

• During this recent scandal regarding Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, one
of my friends asked me this little unusual question. He said, “if the
Government of India (GOI) accuses Facebook of something, via a written
letter, would it be mandatory for Facebook to respond?”
• Now, the straightforward answer could have been Yes. But that’s
straightforward and might not be able to convey the right thing at the first
instant itself, in the easiest manner. To put forward my point, without being
too much technical, this is what I told him. (And it’s completely unrelated to
the original context.)

I said, “Suppose you hire a maid to help with your household chores. After some days, you
found something expensive missing from your house. You assumed that the maid would
have taken it. You called her and accused her of stealing and told her that you want a
response, tomorrow. Now, she can do one of the followings.
 If she’s really the thief, she would not show up at your house the next day.
 If she’s really the thief, she might show up the next day and ask for forgiveness, with an
assurance that it’d never happen again.
 If she’s not the thief, and wants to prove her innocence, she’ll will give you a response the
next day.
 If she’s not the thief, but is disheartened by your accusation, she might not show up
again.” (The least likely option as per the original context.)
(My friend just smiled upon hearing this and walked away.)

# Once you have all the information or say all the answers to your
questions, you do not take a lot of time to process the information
(or connect the dots) and come to a conclusion.
(This final step is the easiest
one and will happen
automatically, if the rest of
the things are appropriately
taken care of.)

 Processing the information you have and not taking a lot of time in doing that, is
one skill, every single individual should possess.
 For example, you’re being presented, at one of your meetings, with a slideshow
of a small change, that the product team wants to make, in one of your
products. Now, you can say here that you want to have a detailed discussion on
it later, but what if the proposed change is not good enough or is flawed?
 In this case, the time the presentation took in the meeting and the time the
detailed discussion will take, will all go in vain. Hence, you need to be in a
position to decide whether this is at least good enough to have a second round
of discussion on it, or if it can be rejected at the same time only.

And that’d be all!

Mental agility

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to Mental agility

Similar to Mental agility (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (8)

Mental agility

Editor's Notes