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Hello everyone. Welcome to the 5 Minutes Podcast. Today I'd like to share with you a concept that is quite recent in my life, and it's called Mental liquidity. Honestly, I never heard this until a couple of weeks ago. And, of course, the concept that is behind I knew many times, but not with this name, mental liquidity, and the name. Think about mental. It's our brain, our ability to think, and liquidity means something that is flexible, something that changes, something that has this liquid state. And mental liquidity is our ability to change our own mind when it's needed without being stuck on a particular perception, worldview, or mindset. Many, many times, when we evolve as a project manager or in our professional careers, we tend to think that we know a lot. And because as we tend to think that we know a lot, we lose many times this mental liquidity. We are stuck in our point of view of what is right and what is wrong, what is expensive, what is cheap, what is late, what is ahead of schedule, and what is over budget. But mental liquidity allows you to understand this evolving nature of work, and this mental liquidity gives us the flexibility, creativity, and resilience to adapt to this changing environment. Because if the environment does not change, probably what is right and what is wrong will stick for a long time. However, when the world changes, if you do not have the liquidity to adapt your brain and to adapt your thinking to this, I would say a new environment.
You just don't go, and you just don't move. And this makes you make poor decisions. And why this is important because it allows us to become and remain adaptable and adaptability. Probably if you listen maybe the 20 best podcast episodes, you will hear me talking about adaptability, maybe in 90% of them. Why? Because the rapid environment requires adaptability and requires our mental liquidity requires that sometimes we go back and we challenge our own beliefs. What is right, what is wrong, what is fast, what is? For example, today, there is a massive discussion of what copyright is and what authorship is. When we see this generative AI like Chatgpt or BART coming. And many people say but this is just plagiarism. But I need to ask you what plagiarism is. Are you copying and pasting the same thing? But the tragedy is creating new text or new concepts around data that already exist, trying to guess what the next word would be. Is this plagiarism or not? Did you see that we need to have mental liquidity to understand what these trends are? And, of course, you may ask me how do I develop that, right? Because it's very easy to point out and say that this is important, but to develop this, you need to practice activities that require you to change your cognitive behavior. And this is reading, learning, new skills, and solving puzzles. Yes. Solving puzzles, trying to rewire your own brain in a different way. Have you tried to sleep with your head and the place where you usually put your feet? So just make a 180 degrees turn in your bed.
Have you tried to take a shower at a different time of the year? Have you tried to change your routine in a very big way? For example, for a week, for example, trying to sleep at a different time and trying to eat at a different time. Have you tried, for example, ketchup with ice cream? Yes. I promise you; you will not die from eating ketchup with ice cream. Maybe you will not have the best experience, but these are ways to improve your creativity. It's not something irrelevant. It's extremely because this is what will bring this mental liquidity to you. And mental liquidity is absolutely critical in project management because, you know, we need to respond to unexpected change. We need to adapt to changing requirements. We need to generate solutions for complex things. And it's only with mental liquidity and our strong capability of adaptation that we can truly succeed if you don't have flexibility if you don't have. Ability. If you don't have the liquidity to change and revisit your own beliefs, you will be stuck in the past. And when you are stuck in the past, you don't move, and you don't deliver successful projects. Think about that. I hope you enjoyed this concept. Take a look on Google or even chat GTP and check more about this set of beliefs that you need to revisit in order to be more adaptable in the future. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. See you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.
