Rigid Mindset Quotes

Om meditation eliminates rigid and fixed views about the world. It creates a spacious, flexible and open views about the world.

Entrepreneurs don’t usually fail from circumstance, they fail from what I call entrepreneurial rigidity—a fixed mindset and unwillingness to change the business model.

Change leads to growth. Resistance leads to rigidity. Rigidity leads to ...

Life is a dance more than it is an assertion and there is more health in dynamism or fluidity than there is rigidity and stasis.

The most difficult thing in the world is to decode mental rigidity and change the mindset of the people.

The tales told of the Cailleach can be seen as exemplifying the spiritual mindset, and changes therein, of the peoples of Britain, especially those of Scotland and Ireland. From being viewed as a benevolent pagan giantess who shaped the land, she became seen as a neutral figure by the early Christians, respected as part of the process of natural development, only to be demonized as time passed and Christianity became ever more rigid and unilateral.

In tense moments, explains the clinical psychologist Rod Martin, the purpose of pranks like Venanzi’s isn’t merely to elicit a chuckle; joking actually reformats your perception of a stressor. “Humor is about playing with ideas and concepts,” said Martin, who teaches at the University of Western Ontario. “So whenever we see something as funny, we’re looking at it from a different perspective. When people are trapped in a stressful situation and feeling overwhelmed, they’re stuck in one way of thinking: This is terrible. I’ve got to get out of here. But if you can take a humorous perspective, then by definition you’re looking at it differently—you’re breaking out of that rigid mind-set.

Joy discovered this, too. Like Alison, she’d been stuck in the prison of rigid thinking for years after her divorce, trapped in the mind-set of dichotomies: good/bad, right/wrong, victim/victimizer. Because she saw things in such stark and absolute terms, the stakes were always high—all or nothing, life or death, with nothing in between. This made any conflict, even a minor dispute, feel treacherous. Because there was no room in her mind-set for nuance or complexity, Joy couldn’t bear for anyone to disagree with her.

Let me explain. Say you have an eating disorder like anorexia - you’ve probably been hiding the condition for a long time. After months or years, you face your demons, with or without therapy, you admit you’re ill and eventually decide you want to recover. But this is only half the battle. Once start to eat again, once you begin to gain weight, it’s unbelievably stressful. Having gone from absolute control over every calorie which goes into your mouth, you’re now being forced to double, maybe even triple that amount. You’re being forced to consume unsafe substances like butter, oil, nuts. Every mouthful takes a colossal effort. In your rigid anorexic mindset, not being underweight equates to being overweight. Not being hungry equates to greed. Giving up an eating disorder is frightening. It is almost impossible to imagine that the process will ever be ok.

Pete has a few methods he uses to help manage people through the fears brought on by pre-production chaos. “Sometimes in meetings, I sense people seizing up, not wanting to even talk about changes,” he says. “So I try to trick them. I’ll say, ‘This would be a big change if we were really going to do it, but just as a thought exercise, what if …’ Or, ‘I’m not actually suggesting this, but go with me for a minute …’ If people anticipate the production pressures, they’ll close the door to new ideas—so you have to pretend you’re not actually going to do anything, we’re just talking, just playing around. Then if you hit upon some new idea that clearly works, people are excited about it and are happier to act on the change.” Another trick is to encourage people to play. “Some of the best ideas come out of joking around, which only comes when you (or the boss) give yourself permission to do it,” Pete says. “It can feel like a waste of time to watch YouTube videos or to tell stories of what happened last weekend, but it can actually be very productive in the long run. I’ve heard some people describe creativity as ‘unexpected connections between unrelated concepts or ideas.’ If that’s at all true, you have to be in a certain mindset to make those connections. So when I sense we’re getting nowhere, I just shut things down. We all go off to something else. Later, once the mood has shifted, I’ll attack the problem again.” This idea—that change is our friend because only from struggle does clarity emerge—makes many people uncomfortable, and I understand why. Whether you’re coming up with a fashion line or an ad campaign or a car design, the creative process is an expensive undertaking, and blind alleys and unforeseen snafus inevitably drive up your costs. The stakes are so high, and the crises that pop up can be so unpredictable, that we try to exert control. The potential cost of failure appears far more damaging than that of micromanaging. But if we shun such necessary investment—tightening up controls because we fear the risk of being exposed for having made a bad bet—we become the kind of rigid thinkers and managers who impede creativity.

In 2015, we see a rigid dichotomy between the traditional mindset of school district technology leaders and those leaders and teams who have shifted to a mindset that puts students - not technology - at the center of organizational decision-making.

Our physical bodies, minds, emotional bodies and egos can be strong or weak, flexible or rigid, agile or clumsy. When we are born, our field has certain capabilities in all four dimensions and as we live we develop or ruin those capabilities. Our goal should be to care for and develop all four to the best of our abilities. Since our world is so focused on body and mind, it is easy for us to understand the benefits of these being strong. Our academic and professional worlds revolve around these two. White collar jobs have to do with the mind and blue collar with the body. We all accept that we have emotions and ego but we do not know how to take advantage of them. A strong and mature emotional body is perfectly exemplified in the wisdom of native Americans. They keep reminding us that we belong to Earth and that if we kill all the plants and animals we will then realize that we cannot eat our money. It is a tough realization, but this is the role of a mature buddhi. Its purpose is to wake us up. We are so blinded by the day to day rat race that we do not realize what we are doing to the planet, which actually is the ultimate support to any economy. The basis of everything we enjoy in our lives comes from Earth. Man is not inventing the source materials but the way to combine them. Thinking that we can survive without Earth playing her role is foolishness. This is what our emotional bodies are here for; to remind us of the obvious our mindset is ignoring.

Consistent effort, over time, is one of the cornerstones of physical change, and everything you can do to encourage this is beneficial. In addition to physical training and changes in habits, mental work is necessary to align your goals with your actions and expectations. Your mindsets can either be positive or negative. More specifically, your mindset can foster growth and advancement, or it can be fixed and rigid. It is absolutely necessary to believe that you can get better, given consistent effort and time. If you don’t believe this, you can inadvertently

Nothing can resist a mind that consistently commits to a stated long-term goal with adaptation except rigidity and cynicism. Any seeming constraint is a result of a person's inability to broad-mindedly adapt to new ways of actualizing one's objective. Maintaining a rigid or cynical mindset in the face of obstacles to one's aim reduces the certainty of its long-term achievement.

Imperfection is a part of any creative process and of life, yet for some reason we live in a culture that has a paralyzing fear of failure, which prevents action and hardens a rigid perfectionism. It's the single most disempowering state of mind you can have if you'd like to be more creative, inventive, or entrepreneurial.

This rigid mindset, that success is narrowly defined by a certain income, position, or profession, means that anything short of that strict standard is viewed as failure. What an exhausting way to live.

Rigidity is the greatest impediment to growth.

The system needs to be managed, not the people. We don’t need to do more things or implement difficult frameworks, methods, or models; we need to learn how to allow people to give their best effort to the company by providing the correct structures. It’s a path of trial and error to find the best way for each company. The Agile principles and mindset can serve as a guide. The tools and practices work sometimes, but not every time. The only way to move forward is through continuous learning. The companies that learn faster than the others will be the winners. HR has the power to design the structures that either support people to perform or make it difficult to contribute in creative and innovative ways. If HR holds onto the old, traditional approach, the consequence will be rigid and fixed organizations chained to ineffective systems and processes. HR can either support or hinder the change toward a more Agile organization, which is why HR needs to go first! By providing different structures and focusing on customer value instead of rules, HR can lead companies through change that no other department is capable of.

The tranquility and simplicity inherent in the panda mindset can be the antidote to the stress and rigidity currently prevalent in our education systems.

The modern world exhausts and in doing so it makes everything rigid or turns it into a diffuse blob. Physiologically it promotes the stressors, estrogen, serotonin, hyperventilation, over-excitation, the hallmarks of energetic exhaustion. Loss of structure, form and differentiation follows, which was the intention.

Rigid brains and inflexible mindsets --- whereby individuals and whole organizations ignore what is different and even outright reject it if it doesn't fit their established pattern of thinking --- cause much of the world's suffering.

The entire French approach was defensive and negative – and a negative mindset takes hold in many counter-productive ways. The huge cost of the Maginot Line and the appeasement and non-aggression line of the French Government and political left also played an enormous part in formulating policy, but this endemic defensive attitude – this rigidity to the methodical battle plan – had ensured that there could be no French march into Germany when Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936, nor again when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Had the French done so on either occasion, the Second World War would almost certainly have never taken place.