We all have our dreams. The nature of those dreams may vary—setting up a new business, landing a promotion, or improving our clients’ satisfaction ratings—but one thing remains constant: we will all face challenges trying to make those dreams a reality. When empowering business leaders and workers to navigate professional challenges, cultivating a ‘flexible mind’ can be transformative.
Fifty years ago, Steven Spielberg’s dream rapidly turned into a nightmare. It’s 1974, and he is directing his 2nd major movie. Bruce, who’s playing the lead role, is causing all kinds of problems—unreliable, no stranger to a breakdown, and frequently responsible for delays in filming. But Bruce isn’t a tantrum-throwing prima donna. Bruce is a 25-foot-long, 1.2-ton, mechanical shark—named after Spielberg’s attorney Bruce Ramer—and the movie is Jaws. The duration of the shoot is running way over schedule (the planned 55 days eventually turned into 159 days), and the budget has rocketed ($3.5 million spiralled to $10 million). But the biggest problem is the mechanical shark. It spends more time out of the water being repaired than it does in it. Spielberg is convinced that the studio is going to fire him. How does he solve a problem like Bruce?
Amidst the stresses and strains Spielberg was experiencing, he and his production team retained an ability to think and act flexibly. Whilst seeing the shark was one way to evoke terror in the audience, Spielberg knew that terror could also reign by implying the shark’s presence. Underwater cameras provided the viewing public with a shark’s eye view. John William’s masterful film score also did a great job letting them know that Bruce was about—daah-dun, daah-dun, daah-dun, dun-dunh, dun-dunh, dun-dunh…. Bruce has only 4 minutes of screen time across the entire movie.
This was subsequently heralded as a Hitchcockesque master stroke of dramatic storytelling, but it was by necessity rather than design. But, one challenge remained—how would the film’s characters be alerted to the shark’s presence? Unlike the audience, they couldn’t see what the shark could see or hear the movie’s soundtrack. The answer came from an unlikely source: three yellow barrels. The movie’s script was altered so that Quint could fire harpoons, roped to the empty plastic barrels, into the shark’s body to tire out the shark and bring it to the surface. Hey presto, three yellow barrels dragged rapidly across the water’s surface became a proxy for the shark’s presence. Unlike Bruce, Spielberg stayed afloat, seeing the job through to its conclusion.
He was worried however that the film would be a disaster. “I felt that Jaws would be as great a defeat as Waterloo had been for Napoleon,” he said. “I had terrible, despairing days where I could see nobody hiring me again…but I wanted to finish Jaws because I had never stopped believing in the movie.”
But on its release, Jaws broke all box-office records. It became the highest-grossing film up to that time and was nominated for the 1975 Academy Award for Best Picture, losing out to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In a 2014 interview with Empire, Spielberg remarked, “I just love that all the boys and girls on Jaws had to use initiative and be crafty to figure out how to make that movie”. To get the job done, the production crew had to think and act flexibly to find a way through the stresses and strains without being consumed.
How to Develop a “Flexible Mind”
In my work as a clinical psychologist, I help clients develop what I call a Flexible Mind so that they can thrive no matter what storms life throws at them. I rely on evidence-based approaches, including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, to help them develop a Flexible Mind by enhancing their ability to be:
- Anchored – entirely situated in time and place, and able to recognize that our thoughts and emotions are momentary experiences that come and go.
- Willing – able to accept our mind’s story-generating tendencies and being prepared to turn towards, rather than away from, the emotions associated with those stories.
- Empowered – able to act in accordance with our purpose and personal values.
Staying with the aquatic theme, I wanted to share a technique called cognitive defusion, which will help you practice the Anchored element of a Flexible Mind. Let’s imagine that you are visiting an aquarium. It’s an incredible sight, up there with the world’s finest, such as the Georgia Aquarium in the USA, or L’Oceanogràfic Aquarium in Spain. The centerpiece of this aquarium is a huge tank filled with millions of liters of water surrounding a tunneled walkway snaking around the tank’s floor. Imagine that you are walking through that bright and airy tunnel. The water is a beautiful translucent blue as the sunlight shines down from above. Large rocks and colorful corals litter the aquarium floor to your left and right. As you advance, you can see fish of various shapes and sizes swimming into view. Imagine that these fish represent the myriad thoughts you experience; you have entered the Thought Aquarium.
Smaller tropical fish, including colorful clownfish and butterfly fish, catch your eye as they swim into view, only to disappear with the flick of their tail quickly. These are the joyous thoughts that accompany good news or moments of success. Their appearance can be fleeting and all too infrequent. Then there are medium-sized fish – think of mullets and snappers – that swim casually into view. These represent your ‘run-of-the-mill’ thoughts: tasks you need to remember to do, opinions you hold, news stories that have piqued your interest. And then there are the larger, more menacing fish—the manta rays and sharks… You can feel the sense of foreboding as they swim into view and linger overhead. These fish represent the more challenging thoughts you experience and the shadow of cold emotions they can cast – health concerns, financial stresses, regrets about the past, fears about the future, concerns about your ability to cope… Thoughts that can stop you in your tracks.
Now let’s pause to appreciate that no matter how beguiling, attention-grabbing, or threatening the fish in an aquarium might be, the tunnel walls ensure that they are separated from you. Despite how it may seem, they can’t consume you, nor can they block your path as you make your way through the aquarium. So, too, with your thoughts. Whilst being inquisitive and curious about thoughts is essential, we must appreciate that these are transient elements of our experience that come into view before passing on. Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so“. By adopting an attitude of detached curiosity, we can notice that whereas thoughts come and go, we prevail. We have thoughts; thoughts don’t have us.
Looking carefully towards the top of your Thought Aquarium, you might occasionally see three yellow barrels skimming across the water’s surface. Those yellow barrels represent the pragmatic and inspired ideas that will help you overcome challenges as you strive to realise your dreams, just as they helped Steven Spielberg realise his dream of entertaining audiences with Jaws over the last 50 years.
