Invest in You: Flexible Thinking
Chapter 3 - Flexible Thinking What happens between the event and the response?
This chapter explores how our interpretation of events influences how we feel and what we do next. Using the ABC model, participants learn to slow down and separate facts from interpretation.
They explore common habits in thinking and learn to create more space between an event and their response.
The focus is not on “positive thinking”, but on developing flexible and realistic thinking that opens up different perspectives and more choice in what happens next.
Learning Outcomes
Outcome 1:
• understand how interpretations and beliefs influence emotional and behavioural responses;
Outcome 2:
• use the ABC model to separate an event from the beliefs and consequences that follow;
Outcome 3:
• notice common habits and shortcuts in thinking, including catastrophising, blame and treating interpretations as facts;
Outcome 4:
• practise more flexible and realistic thinking to create greater choice in how to respond.
What's included
A quick look at the classroom-ready resources that come with this lesson.
Available after purchase
Contributing Experts
People who helped produce this lesson.
Lucy Bailey
Lucy Bailey is Founder of Bounce Forward and Healthy Minds for Parents. With two decades of experience in mental resilience and emotional wellbeing, and training 1000s of teachers, parents and other adults around children and young people. Lucy is proud of her early career in youth work and children services. Lucy had a poor experience of school and that has driven her passion to influence UK policy to form a positive system of change with psychological fitness at the core. Lucy has directed national research projects (including the Healthy Minds five year study), is certified by University of Pennsylvania, has an MSc in Practice Based Research, a BSc in Social Policy and Criminology, and a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education. Her published book Raise Resilience: Teach your teenager well has led to the creation of the Psychological Fitness Nana bridging old school wisdom with modern psychology for parents of the 21st century.
About the Organisation
Bounce Forward is the UK’s psychological-fitness charity.
We help children and young people — and the adults and environments around them — develop the understanding, skills and shared language to regulate, recover and adapt through challenge, change and everyday life.
Our work brings together mental resilience and emotional wellbeing, shifting the focus upstream: building capability before crisis, rather than waiting for something to go wrong. We translate evidence from psychology, resilience research, cognitive behavioural approaches and positive psychology into practical learning that can be taught, modelled and used in real life.
From evidence-informed curricula and staff development to family support and whole-community approaches, our work recognises that young people do not develop in isolation. What happens around a young person shapes what becomes possible within them.
Everything we create is practical, grounded in evidence and designed to build something that lasts — psychologically fit people and communities, better prepared to meet life.