Psychological Flexibility

A while ago I read a post in a parenting forum that struck me for a few reasons. It was by a mum who had taken her daughter to the library, and had watched while her young daughter very politely approached an older woman and asked whether she would move her bag so that she could reach the computer station. For whatever reason, this woman had reacted badly and chastised her – told her off for interrupting – leaving her feeling embarrassed and upset.

I was first struck by how hard it is when we want to raise our children to have a voice, and the world isn’t always kind. But the reason the post had caught my eye in the first place was because the mum finished it by asking: “How can I protect her psychological safety when things like this happen?”

And it made me think about how much we can inadvertently stretch the concept of psychological safety, especially if it’s the nearest psychological shaped term we have to reach for. Psychological safety, at least using the definition we work with, is a group phenomenon – a belief held by members of a group that that group is safe for interpersonal risk taking. It has to be co-created, it can’t exist unilaterally, and it certainly can’t be retroactively applied to a stranger in a library. Sometimes psychological safety is just not there. It actually wasn’t a safe context for the daughter to ask her question without fear of humiliation, and no amount of reframing or reflection changes that.

But reading through the replies, I noticed one commenter gently point out that there’s another concept – psychological flexibility – that might be more appropriate here, which I was immediately curious about. I’m not going to even attempt to teach you the origins of psychological flexibility here – the concept appears across several therapeutic traditions, though it’s perhaps most associated today with ACT, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy – but after going away and reading a little more, I think the commenter was right.

Psychological safety is about the environment, but psychological flexibility is about our inner response – the ability to stay present with difficult feelings and still act in line with our values. This is different from the kind of individual resilience narratives we’re rightly sceptical of in organisational settings – it’s not about toughening up or pushing through. It’s about being able to sit with difficulty without it always defining your next move.

For the daughter in the library, there was no way of pre-empting that interaction. We can’t turn back the clock and ask the older woman to respond with grace, or hold her accountable for the impact of her words. Interactions with strangers in libraries sit rather outside the scope of psychological safety work.

But developing the capacity to feel hurt, not catastrophise it, and move forward? That’s something the mum can actually work on with her daughter and it sits more firmly in the psychological flexibility realm.

And this isn’t just true for children navigating difficult strangers. I’d say the same is true of a lot of the work and interactions we manage out in the real world. We can do everything “right” – build better ways of working, foster more generous and supportive team cultures, model admitting mistakes and asking for help. And there will still be times when a grumpy email lands in our inbox, or someone reacts badly to a boundary we’ve expressed, or feedback arrives that feels deeply unfair. That will likely affect the psychological safety in that relationship – of course it will, that’s a reasonable response. But it might also help if we know that we can be ok anyway.

That’s what an awareness of the concept of psychological flexibility may offer alongside psychological safety work. We strive for better environments for people to work in (psychological safety) and know that having a steadier way of being in whatever environment we find ourselves in will still be valuable. This isn’t an argument for organisations to focus on individual resilience instead of doing the environmental work – if anything, it’s the opposite. But for us as individuals, knowing both concepts exist and what each one can and can’t do for us feels like useful knowledge to carry.

Sometimes to understand a concept (such as psychological safety) better, we have to know where its edges lie. The library incident wasn’t a failure of psychological safety – it was a reminder that no single concept can carry the full weight of how we navigate the world. Knowing which tool to reach for matters.

Further reading:

Kashdan, T. B., & Rottenberg, J. (2010). Psychological flexibility as a fundamental aspect of health. Clinical psychology review, 30(7), 865–878. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2010.03.001

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) 

Individual resilence