Business and Life Skills
How to Increase Cognitive Flexibility and Emotional Intelligence
No job is the sexiest job of the century. Positions change quickly, but essential skills sustain.
When people ask me what vital skills to invest in life, I’d say cognitive flexibility and emotional intelligence without hesitation. These are both professional and life skills.
Creating mental flexibility by changing our perspectives and re-framing situations can be a lifesaver. By understanding our emotions and other people’s, we can distinguish ourselves in any profession.
Even though we use cognitive flexibility and emotional intelligence skills in all walks of life for physical and mental health, in this article, I only focus on career-building journeys as these two capabilities are cornerstones of acquiring new knowledge and gaining skills with a high retention rate.
A combination of cognitive flexibility and emotional intelligence is vital because they serve us as our superheroes in the most challenging situations in life, whether for personal or professional reasons.
Cognitive flexibility allows us to adjust our thinking when we face multiple new variables. In other words, it enables us to think on our feet.
This ability is remarkable because it is a source of acquiring new knowledge and gaining new skills. But we also need to feel on our feet. This is where emotional intelligence plays a critical role.
When we don’t have cognitive flexibility and emotional intelligence, everything looks complicated, more complex, and less meaningful in life. We lose our purpose, self-confidence, and meaning in life.
Hence, we might feel anxious or depressed. So fundamentally, we add meaning to life by applicable thinking and feeling.
Mental flexibility and emotional intelligence are two timeless skills. Having a sharp and flexible mind is critical to acquiring essential knowledge and talent. However, we also need emotional intelligence to understand our emotions and other people’s emotions.
Our mental flexibility and emotional maturity act like yin and yang. The lack of either one can be too problematic.
People with sharp intellects lacking emotional maturity might experience a life crisis. Life does not make sense to them. Emotions run the show in our lives. People make decisions based on their feelings.
Since our childhood, we have fancied different careers. Some of us want to be astronauts, medical doctors, police officers, celebrities, and even imaginary characters like superman or wonder woman.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with these childhood aspirations. But, as we grow, our desires change.
For example, when I was a child, I wanted to be an orchestra chief as classic music symphonies deeply touched my mind, heart, and soul.
In my imagination, I conducted many orchestras. It was satisfying. However, growing up, I noticed that being a professional conductor required significant effort and time.
So, my aspiration slowly died and led me to technology. It was my next passion to be an engineer and a scientist. The effects of mental exercises stayed with me as they improved my cognitive flexibility.
With my passion for technology and the brain, I decided to enter the cognitive science field. Learning about artificial and natural intelligence satisfied my career goals and personal aspirations.
As a giveback in technology and cognitive science fields, I mentored many friends, colleagues, and tertiary students in their career-building journey. I still do. While mentoring them, I modeled the mentors who helped me.
During this period, one interesting term proteges used was “sexy” for some positions. Jobs in technology evolve, and new ones emerge. Once upon a time, coding was in demand. Representing our thoughts in machines was interesting. Recently data science has been seen as the sexiest job of this century.
Interestingly, Steven, one of my proteges, is a system engineer. One day he mentioned that he wanted to be a data scientist. When I asked him for his reason, he said it was the sexiest of the century. According to Steven, the job ads were full of data scientist positions.
I told him whether he was interested in a seasonal job. I told him the market would be saturated in a few years’ time. And even in ten years, we might not need data scientists as AI will be doing this job for us. Steven’s perspective changed. He asked more.
I explained to him the term sexy is an indication of disaster or disappointment. In my experience, there was nothing sexy about data science. In fact, I found it very dull, even though I loved dealing with data. Frankly, I don’t see data science as a science. It is a misnomer.
With due respect, some people, even with no college degree, attend a few weeks of crash courses learning a few analytics tools and call themselves data scientists. However, being a scientist in a few weeks is almost impossible unless one is a prodigy.
Another job category considered sexy by another protégé, Josephine, was entrepreneurship, which looked desirable from the outset. Nevertheless, her point of view changed when I exemplified some problematic situations in entrepreneurs’ lives.
She understood that entrepreneurs struggle with many challenges, tolerate ambiguity, and deal with so-called failures. My aim was not to discourage her but show the reality as some of us make career decisions based on hype.
I think a job giving us freedom and more time to enjoy life could be the sexiest job. For example, freelancing in any discipline can be remarkable. After working many years in the corporate world, some proteges value being their own boss as consulting contractors and content creators in niche areas.
Cognitive flexibility and emotional intelligence helped those people to achieve career goals. Let me explain how mental flexibility and emotional maturity helped some people transition from working for someone to working for themselves. I introduced emotional maturity in this article.
While working in the corporate world, these people improved their skills and developed insightful perspectives. These skills and attitudes helped them become free to take full responsibility for their outcomes.
Even though they physically reported a boss in a company, they created their own projects. We call it intrapreneurship which means a corporate entrepreneur.
Mental flexibility and emotional intelligence helped these leaders transition from intrapreneurship to entrepreneurship roles later when they gained more self-confidence by understanding business rules and market conditions. Intrapreneurs still work for other organizations, but they create new initiatives and fully own them.
Their mental flexibility and emotional maturity help them start with such unique positions, allowing them to transition into entrepreneurial roles successfully.
Mental flexibility can be improved using various techniques. The most common ones are reading, writing, self-conversations, social engagements, and design activities. High achievers strive to survive and thrive at the same time. Mainly intellectual development is for survival, and emotional maturity is for thriving.
Learning and teaching look like traditional tasks, and their power is underestimated. But we can distinguish ourselves by learning quickly and teaching what we learned with passion. These leaders achieved their goals by using cognitive skills and emotional intelligence.
Putting ourselves in the learners’ position can empower our emotional intelligence. These leaders wanted to learn faster. I introduced them to learning how to learn a meta-cognitive skill similar to thinking about thinking.
Therefore, one of my recommendations to my proteges was to focus on accelerated learning for developmental flexibility. Education does not necessarily provide us with what we need to learn. We can accelerate our learning and understanding by developing our cognitive flexibility in both formal and informal ways. The best way of implementing accelerated learning is to have a passion for a subject.
Learning about ourselves is a critical mental and emotional skill. As I successfully used journaling, especially in a therapeutic writing format, I recommended this form of writing to my proteges. Like me, they reaped many benefits in developing their cognitive and emotional capabilities using these simple techniques.
The best part of therapeutic writing is its contribution to our cognitive reserves. Cognitive reserve is developing the brain by making various parts of it denser. So, as we age, we prevent mental decline and reduce the risk of debilitating diseases like dementia to some extent. I introduced daily activities as brain boosters in an article. And I elaborated on creativity and productivity in another article.
In the business world, decision-making is a critical process. Our decisions determine our success. An optimal way of making timely and quality decisions depends on our mental and emotional capabilities. While logic is essential to decision-making, our emotions play even more critical roles.
In another post, I plan to write a complete article about developing cognitive flexibility. Now, I want to mention a few techniques to give you an idea.
We don’t need expensive courses and spend hours on mind games. Instead, we can use a few simple exercises to create new neural pathways by building habits.
There are many tools to improve cognitive flexibility and emotional intelligence. Mindfulness is an excellent tool to improve mental flexibility and gain emotional maturity by making us more empathic and compassionate.
Meditation is another proven technique for gaining cognitive flexibility and developing emotional maturity. We can also rewire our brains using various other methods.
An effective way of creating mental flexibility is by increasing its capacity. Focus, attention, memory, and task-switching exercises can help us improve these skills and contribute to enlarging the brain’s capacity to process better.
In addition, challenging the status quo is an excellent way of creating cognitive flexibility. Through this capability, we change our bad habits and gain better functioning habits.
Games are great ways of improving flexibility because they are full of uncertainties. We safely practice enhancing our focus, attention, working memory, and task-switching exercises. There are offline and online games. Based on our interests and lifestyle, we can include both types.
One of my favorite games is chess. If I can’t find a friend to play with, I play with computers. Even though I usually win when playing with friends, I always lose when playing with computers. That’s fine by me, as winning is not my goal. My goal is to increase my cognitive flexibility, which is more important than winning a game.
As I mentioned in previous articles, one of the most effective techniques is writing interchangeably with the right and left hands. Writing with a non-dominant hand is a great way to improve mental flexibility.
Same for brushing teeth with a non-dominant hand. Initially, these exercises can be very frustrating, but we feel more comfortable and even find them more enjoyable after a while by creating new neural pathways. These are low-risk and no-cost techniques to improve our cognitive flexibility.
Life is unpredictable and inconsistent. It is not fair, either. But our cognitive flexibility gives us clarity when we face unpredictability and inconsistency. It is critical for our mental health.
Cognitive flexibility is like physical flexibility. By stretching our brain muscles, cognitive flexibility and emotional maturity prevent us from emotional injuries. We can cope with stress and anxiety better by responding to life situations flexibly.
Here’s How I Train My Brain Daily for Mental Clarity and Intellectual Productivity.
Here’s How I Optimized My Emotional Brain for Mental Clarity and Physical Vitality
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