Switchcraft – by Dr. Elaine Fox

How do we successfully balance “a mind is like a parachute: it only works if it’s open”, with the importance of also actually having some kind of personal integrity and consistency?

Dr. Fox recommends that we focus on four key attributes:

• Mental agility
• Self-awareness
• Emotional awareness
• Situational awareness

If this sounds a little wishy-washy, it isn’t—she delineates and explains each in detail. And most importantly: how we can build and train each one.

Mental agility, for example, is not about being able to rapidly solve chess problems or “answer these riddles three”. It’s more about:

• Adaptability
• Balancing our life
• Challenging (and if appropriate, changing) our perspective
• Developing our mental competence

This sort of thing is the “meat” of the book. Meanwhile, self-awareness is more a foundational conscious knowledge of one’s own “pole star” values, while emotional awareness is a matter of identifying and understanding and accepting what we feel—anything less is self-sabotage! And situational awareness is perhaps most interesting:

Dr. Fox advocates for “trusting one’s gut feelings”. With a big caveat, though!

If we trust our gut feelings without developing their accuracy, we’re just going to go about being blindly prejudiced and often wrong. So, a whole section of the book is devoted to honing this and improving our ability to judge things as they really are—rather than as we expect.

Bottom line: this book is a great tool for not only challenging our preconceptions about how we think, but giving us the resources to be adaptable and resilient without sacrificing integrity.

Click here to check out Switchcraft on Amazon and level up your thinking!