Switch Craft: The Hidden Power of Mental Agility

I lay on my bed sobbing uncontrollably.

Crying was rare for me, but I was overcome by the enormity of the mistake I had made. I was seventeen years old, and several weeks before, I had decided not to apply for a university place. Instead, my plan was to train as an accountant so that I could make enough money to travel the world. But after several weeks as a work-experience trainee in a local accounting firm, I knew I had made the wrong decision. It felt like I had destroyed my future.

Everyone was perfectly friendly but I found the office staid and the work soul-destroying. Every day I would stare out the window, counting down the minutes until 5pm so that I could leave. I knew I could not stick with accounting but, coming from a low-income, albeit very supportive, working-class family in Dublin, my options felt very limited. Education seemed like my only escape, but I had realized too late, and the application deadline for university was tomorrow at noon. The Central Applications Office, which handled applications for every university in the country, was in Galway, on the other side of the country, and the final date to mail the forms had long passed.

I buried my head back into the pillow, until a gentle knock on the door jolted me out of my misery. My parents had never seen me so upset, as I told them how I had missed my opportunity.

“Well, actually, you haven’t,” my mother said.

I was stunned when she suggested we get a late train to Galway, stay overnight, and deliver the forms by hand the next morning. This positive thinking was completely out of character for my mum, who typically zoned in on problems rather than finding solutions, but my genuine distress seemed to push her into action. Before I knew it my dad had driven us to Heuston station on the other side of Dublin, and I was sitting on the Galway train filling out my application forms. My mother and I stayed in a tiny B&B that night and we had fish and chips in a busy restaurant overlooking the sea that evening. I still vividly remember the joy I felt the following morning when we found the applications office and handed over my sealed envelope.

Six months later, following much intense study to make sure I got the grades, a letter arrived to offer me a place in general science at University College Dublin. And that began an incredible journey into academia that I am still exploring. When I look back over those forty years since leaving school, it’s incredible to reflect on the many twists and turns my life has taken along the way. I have had many highs and also many lows. Every transition has required multiple adjustments that forced me to change as a person—both internally and externally—in order to cope and adapt. For instance, as a shy teenager I would rarely take center stage and was terrified about speaking to groups of people. I had to work hard to overcome this fear of public speaking to become a university teacher, science communicator and life coach to numerous elite athletes and businesspeople to help them reach the top of their game. There is little doubt that my interest in studying the psychology of adaptability and resilience, which has become a lifelong passion, was forged by these early experiences. And of course, I now realize that even if I had missed that deadline for university, there would have been a way around it, or I could have taken another path altogether. Life is often about opening up to new possibilities and being able to see routes around obstacles and setbacks.

Navigating your future

There are always choices to make in life, and they are rarely “right” or “wrong.” Whatever the situation you might find yourself in, there will almost certainly be many options that are hard to choose between. This natural uncertainty is a fact of life. Even when you look back, you can never be truly certain that you made the right decision. You might be grateful that you married the person you did, for instance, because you have such great kids and a happy life. But if you had married that other girl or guy, you may have had equally great kids and may have been even happier. You will never know. And this can be liberating.

Whether it is to do with career paths or personal decisions, there are lots of pathways and rarely a clear “right” choice, even with the benefits of hindsight. This is very different to when you take a test in school or college, where there is a right and a wrong answer and your ability to figure out which is which is a mark of success. Everyday problems are different; there may be “wrong” answers, but it’s likely that there are also several “right” solutions.

Uncertainty is the only certainty. Accepting and adapting to this is crucial. The world can feel like an uncertain place, and it is. Unless we can learn to live with not being sure, it’s very easy for us to become overwhelmed. What my research in psychology and neuroscience has taught me is that getting used to the intrinsic uncertainty of the world is essential for success: the people who thrive are those with the ability to accept and adapt to constant change and uncertainty.

The good news is that we can improve our ability to adapt. It takes practice and we often need to push ourselves outside our comfort zone. I managed to overcome my reluctance to speak in public and adapted over time to the demands of being an academic psychologist.

Harnessing the benefits of an agile mind—what I call “switch craft”—can be transformative. It’s important to remember that we are active stewards of our own well-being, rather than passive victims of change and so we must actively manage our approach to life. Switch craft refers to those natural skills that are necessary to help us navigate a complex and unpredictable world. I have seen time and again how developing an agile mindset—the capacity to flex our thoughts, feelings, and actions—can transform our lives and bolster our resilience. In this book, I have brought insights from decades of work together in one place to uncover the mental talents we need to help us thrive during times of uncertainty as well as during more settled times. You will learn how to find ways to become more agile, find out what really matters to you, gain a deeper understanding of your emotions, and ultimately sustain your fulfilment, curiosity, and zest for life.

Maintaining a flexible mind allows us to thrive amid change. The first step on your switch craft journey is to accept that change and uncertainty are an inescapable part of life. Our lives will change, many times, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. It is how we navigate those shifts that shape our present and our future happiness. If you are reluctant to change, or wary of trying out new things, this is something you need to work on—trust me, it will transform your life.

Agility is built into our DNA and supports our resilience. The good news is that nature has provided us with all the tools we need to become agile. While we may think that our own times are particularly unstable, most periods in history have been characterized by tremendous upheavals and uncertainties. People have always had to deal with wars, famines, floods, earthquakes, political upheavals, and pandemics. This is why we are actually intrinsically much more agile and resilient than we might think.

The key to resilience is our capacity to be agile and flexible in how we adapt to challenges and change. Our ancestors, alongside all the other creatures on planet earth, have always had to cope with a world that is constantly changing. We often lose this fluidity and become stuck in our ways as we grow older, but our built-in agility can still be released in a crisis or when we work hard to become more open to new ways of doing things.¹

Our brains have evolved to operate as “prediction machines.”² Think how frustrating it can be when a is missing in a sentence. Why? Because your brain predicted that a “word” should be present and its absence causes a surprise, or what’s coded in the brain as a “prediction error.” While we feel like we are reacting to what is happening around us, the way it actually works is that your brain constructs what is likely to happen next drawing on your rich experience of what’s happened before. The latest science tells us that our every waking moment is dominated by predicting which actions we need to take next. As a result, our brain gives us a subtle heads-up about what’s likely to happen from moment to moment, and this helps us to interpret our surroundings as well as the signals coming from within our own body. This continuous process gives each of us an exquisite biological capacity to adapt and respond, as long as we know how to harness it. Each prediction informs the body of what resources are needed, and the body then elegantly apportions its reserves to ensure that we are ready for whatever action is needed.

Our emotions are at the heart of our mental agility. Although these predictions generally occur outside our awareness, we can access them by what mindfulness teachers call “feeling tones.” A surprising finding in the science of emotion is that each emotion does not have a specific feeling.³ Instead, what we feel is a general sense of pleasantness or unpleasantness—a feeling tone—and this informs us of what’s going on around us before our conscious brain has had a chance to catch up. Feeling tones are a subtle window into our emotional life and provide us with a continuous readout of whether any action feels neutral, pleasant, or unpleasant. It is the feeling tone that gives a sense of urgency to every possible action and thought. In the noisy modern world, we often fail to listen to the signals coming from our own body and miss the wisdom that is contained within those feelings. This is why developing our emotional awareness and our intuition is so important. They help us to access the agile system that will help us to navigate all of the complexities in our everyday lives.

Paradoxically, our agile biology can also make us more rigid in how we behave. That’s right: this agile, predictive system is also what makes us reluctant to change. While the system allows us to adapt, fast, it requires a lot of energy. Many of the actions that we predict actually never happen and this can be exhausting. Our tired brain can become preoccupied by worries and thoughts—in an ironic twist, the resulting unpleasant feeling tone infuses us with negativity where an inner critic can find evermore inventive ways of telling us that we are failing in some way, that we are not good enough. A vortex of negativity is released that keeps us more and more stuck in our ways as our brain tries to preserve energy and stick with old habits as often as possible.

This is why most of us inherently don’t like change. I’m willing to bet that you have often resisted altering your well-established ways of doing and thinking about things. But ignoring change and doggedly trying to keep things the same will gradually, and inevitably, undermine your energy and vitality.

To stay agile and resilient we have to work at it.

An inflexible mind leads to anxiety and depression.⁴ In my decades of research in psychology and neuroscience, and in my coaching of countless business professionals and elite athletes, I have come to realize something as simple as it is extraordinary: an agile mind drastically improves your chances of success and happiness. But the flip side is also true: an inflexible mind fuels anxiety and stress and a “stickiness” that can torpedo your life.

The kernel of this understanding began early in my career, in a tiny testing cubicle where I obsessively measured the microsecond decisions made by our brains. I have always been fascinated by how our attention is captured by negative information.⁵ A spider on the wall, a creepy-crawly that runs across the floor, shocking news on the radio—all grab our attention. Being alert to danger is a hangover from the past, and we can only imagine how precarious life would have been for our ancestors. We all tend to focus on perceived threats—but for those who are anxious it is far worse.

For years scientists have grappled with the question of what happens in the brain, especially the anxious brain, when we are faced with threat. When I entered this field, the collective wisdom was that we have a threat-detection system deep in our brain that is constantly on the lookout for danger. When we become anxious this system goes into hypervigilant mode and for some people stays on high alert, even when they are safe. This is the essence of anxiety, it was thought, and means that we are constantly scanning our environment for potential danger. Lots of evidence fits well with this assumption.

I was never convinced that this “high alert” theory was the whole story.⁶ In some of my own studies I was noticing that the main problem for anxious people was not actually scanning for threat, rather it was in struggling to pull attention away from a threat once it had been detected. This difficulty in disengaging attention from a threat is very different from an enhanced ability to find threat in the first place.

What I call a “sticky” attentional system can lead to a rigid mind. It’s like when you notice a spider and it’s impossible not to keep checking back to see what it’s doing. The same goes for our innermost thoughts, emotions, and actions. Once we think of a distressing thought it’s often difficult to pull our mind away from it. This mental stickiness flows through our brain, leading to repetitive worry and rumination that keep us stuck, destroying our well-being and undermining our capacity to seize opportunities.

Self-help doesn’t always help. In the developed world we have shelter, food, and a bewildering array of life-improving gadgets. What’s more, decades of work in psychology labs around the globe have yielded many effective ways to help us thrive and reach our potential. Yet, many of us trudge through our daily routines rather than enjoying life. When I conduct workshops with successful businesspeople, the majority admit that they are neither as happy nor as fulfilled as they would like to be. What’s gone wrong?

Endless self-help approaches claim to have the answer. It’s important to be mindful, we are told, and to stay in the moment. Sometimes, we are advised to keep going no matter what, to be “gritty.” Others tell us that adopting a “growth mindset” is key. These recommendations are backed up by solid science, and millions have improved their lives with these techniques.⁷ However, the complexity of the science is often oversimplified. The truth is that there is no “one size fits all” solution to dealing with life. Telling yourself to be mindful, or gritty, to banish your fixed mindset or to nurture positivity can be a little like telling a golfer to focus only on putting or to practice just the long shots; the match between your situation and the tool you are using gets lost in translation. There’s little point in changing tack when grittiness is required, just as perseverance is useless when it’s essential to make a change.

The more important factor in determining our happiness and success, I would argue, is knowing how and when to switch between different approaches. There is much evidence that we need a range of approaches on hand to deal with life’s challenges.⁸ But range is not enough, we also need the agility to choose the right one for the right moment. This is the essence of switch craft.

The power of switch craft

Because the world is uncertain and complex, many different types of skills are required to deal with it. To return to our golf analogy, this is why a large number of different clubs are required to deal with the varying challenges of eighteen holes of golf. While I don’t play myself, I have always found that golf is a perfect metaphor for life. Golf is peppered with problems—you may end up in a bunker, in the water, or even out in snake-infested woods. No matter where your ball lands you must deal with it in some way to get to the end point. And designers have been very inventive in designing golf clubs for every eventuality. It is similar in life. Finding the right approach for the moment is key. Learning several different ways to cope with challenges, and nurturing agility, so that you can choose the right approach for the right moment is the essence of thriving.

Building an agile mindset will help you to cope with change, and help you make better choices about how to approach any challenge or decision.

I am a cognitive psychologist and affective neuroscientist. I study the science of what makes us thrive at the Oxford Centre for Emotion and Affective Science (OCEAN)—a lab I founded and direct at the University of Oxford. We take into account people’s genetic makeup, their brain functions, and what they tell us is important as we try to deepen our understanding of resilience and thriving. I also cofounded a company—Oxford Elite Performance—along with my husband, Kevin Dutton—another psychologist—to use cutting-edge psychology and neuroscience to help those in the sporting, business, and military elite reach their full potential. Having now coached many people to improve their performance in both sport and business, I have seen the benefits that improving agility can bring time and again. This has also dovetailed with what I am finding in the science lab. I have coined the term “switch craft” to illustrate this essential psychological talent, and the evidence for its effectiveness is growing all the time.

The four pillars of switch craft

There are four pillars of switch craft; each of them is important in its own right, but together they pack a real punch and will help you get through whatever life throws your way.

• Mental agility: The capacity to be agile and nimble in how you think, act, and feel so that you can navigate your way through all sorts of terrain, the rough as well as the smooth, and adapt well to changing circumstances. The science shows that agility is made up of four distinct components—what I call the “ABCD of agility”: Adaptability, Balancing our life, Changing or challenging our perspective, and Developing our mental competence.
• Self-awareness: An ability to look inside yourself so that you can gain a deep self-understanding and appreciation of your core values and capacities. This will help you to become more aware of your hopes, dreams, and abilities.
• Emotional awareness: Part of self-awareness, but so important in our lives that it becomes a pillar on its own. Learning to accept and nurture all your emotions, those that feel bad as well as those that feel good, is vital. As is the ability to regulate your emotions and harness them in service of your values and goals rather than letting them boss you around.
• Situational awareness: This feeds off two of the other pillars, self-awareness and emotional awareness, but also incorporates the capacity to understand your immediate surroundings—to look outside—so that you gain a deep intuitive awareness of the context as well as your own “gut feelings.” This mix of inner and outer awareness informs you as to how well you can operate in that environment.

Switch craft is like a compass that keeps you pointing in the right direction as you navigate your way through life. It can be learned and improved throughout your life. Whether it is coping with a difficult boss, managing a complex team, dealing with hyperactive children, resolving a dispute with a friend, or boosting your energy, your internal compass helps you choose the right strategy for the moment. If this compass is off even slightly, you can veer a long way from your course. Switch craft combines four vital psychological talents into a potent mental weapon to help you make the decision to stick or to switch to another approach, and to get that decision right more times than you get it wrong. Ultimately, that will help you to operate at the top of your game.

It is my hope that this book will bring inspiration from the frontiers of psychology and neuroscience to help you tackle the inevitable challenges that life will bring. Drawing on cutting-edge research in science, Switch Craft sets out a practical framework for how you can nurture the mental talents needed to live a successful, fulfilling, and resilient life. You will learn how to identify those thoughts and behaviors that are keeping you stuck in the past. You will learn the importance of nurturing a more open mind and how to make the adjustments and changes that allow you to become more agile. You will learn how to develop a deeper acceptance of uncertainty; it is only by loosening the shackles that are holding you back, by freeing those invisible patterns of thoughts and behaviors that fuel fear and anxiety, that you will be set free to find a more satisfying and fulfilling future.

Using this book

I would suggest that you make a journal part of your daily routine. There are lots of exercises and tests scattered throughout the book that will help you to become more flexible, learn more about yourself, regulate your emotions, develop your intuitive powers, and learn to prepare yourself mentally for any eventuality. Many people find that writing these exercises and thoughts down in a journal can be hugely helpful. Personally, I prefer an old-fashioned notebook, but you can start an electronic journal if that suits you better. Either way, your journal will allow you to keep track of how things are going, and the simple act of writing down some thoughts and exercises can be transformative.

The book is set out in five main parts. We start with the fundamentals of why switch craft is important, looking at the reality of change in our everyday lives and the importance of finding ways to manage the uncertainty and worry that can come with change. We explore the fascinating science showing that flexibility is a fundamental part of nature and finally we will see why agility is essential to building resilience.

We then move on to look more closely at each of the four pillars of switch craft. In Pillar 1 (Mental Agility) we explore the benefits of being agile; we examine the nuts and bolts of agility in the brain from an area of psychological research called “cognitive flexibility”; and finally, we explore the four key elements—the ABCD—of agility. In Pillar 2 (Self-Awareness), we discover why paying more attention to what your body is telling you is so important, and we take a deep dive into ways to find out who you really are and what really matters to you. Pillar 3 (Emotional Awareness) explores the nature of our emotions and how we can learn to understand and regulate them more effectively. The final building block of switch craft, Pillar 4 (Situational Awareness), examines the nature of our intuitive sense of the world, then we see how being exposed to many different life experiences can bolster our intuition and our understanding of the outside world.

At the end, I gather together some key principles of switch craft from across the book. My hope is that these switch craft skills will help you to learn to thrive and manage your well-being, especially in constantly changing and uncertain times.

Enjoy the journey!