Mental Flexibility Quotes & Sayings

Flexibility is a learned mental skill. In today's dynamic world, your effectiveness as a professional depends
on your readiness to adjust quickly to the moments of need or opportunity, adversity, and change. — Jennifer Touma

Man or woman, you have to have the mental characteristics, the ability to concentrate, the focus, the flexibility, where women have the advantage, and strength-to-weight ratio. It does depend on the raw power. — Lynn Hill

The mental flexibility of the wise man permits him to keep an open mind and enables him to readjust himself whenever it becomes necessary for a change. — Malcolm X

Flexibility is a mental process which results in an action that tests a possible solution. — Pearl Zhu

What then are the benefits of being mentally flexible? Imagine a storm brewing. Intense winds are blowing hard. Stiff trees are breaking under the pressure while softer more flexible trees are bending and will rise again when the strong winds subside. Now turn this image onto human beings. People who are narrow minded, opinionated, stubborn and bullheaded are more likely to crack under pressure than people who take up a more flexible attitude towards life. It is the difference between bending and breaking under pressure. — Gudjon Bergmann

animals with more mental flexibility typically possess more complex sensory and nervous systems, suggesting that they are the most likely to have the neural hardware that underlies suffering. — Virginia Morell

Common sense in reflecting on these subjects, I assured my friend with some warmth, is merely a stupid absence of imagination and mental flexibility. — H.P. Lovecraft

What this means is that children, homemakers, executives, farmers, and long-living persons can all have high ego strength and good mental health if they possess the courage, humor, and flexibility of equilibrium between their rational and metaphoric minds. — Bob Samples

Another technique for fending off suffering is the employment of the displacements of libido which our mental apparatus permits of and through which its function gains so much in flexibility. The task here is that of shifting the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external world. — Sigmund Freud

The hallmark of creative people is their mental flexibility ... Sometimes they are open and probing, at others they're playful and off-the-wall. At still other times, they're critical and faultfinding. And finally they're doggedly persistent in striving to reach their goals. — Roger Von Oech

Of all forms of mental activity, the most difficult to induce even in the minds of the young, who may be presumed not to have lost their flexibility, is the art of handling the same bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one another by giving them a different framework, all of which virtually means putting on a different kind of thinking-cap for the moment. It is easy to teach anybody a new fact ... but it needs light from heaven above to enable a teacher to break the old framework in which the student is accustomed to seeing. — Arthur Koestler

Although neuroplasticity provides an escape from genetic determinism, a loophole for free thought and free will, it also imposes its own form of determinism on our behavior. As particular circuits in our brain strengthen through the repetition of a physical or mental activity, they begin to transform that activity into a habit. The paradox of neuroplasticity, observes Doidge, is that, for all the mental flexibility it grants us, it can end up locking us into "rigid behaviors."33 The chemically triggered synapses that link our neurons program us, in effect, to want to keep exercising the circuits they've formed. Once we've wired new circuitry in our brain, Doidge writes, "we long to keep it activated. — Nicholas Carr