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Sometimes it seems like flexibility is the key to happiness, doesn't it? If you could touch your toes (and hold on to them), you wouldn't have strained your hamstring. If you would move some things around on your calendar, you'd be able to see your friends more often. If you hadn't been so specific about what you wanted to eat, you would have found something to order already. And if you hadn't been so focused on your monthly objectives, you might have come up with that brilliant, counter-intuitive solution before your coworker did.

That's why we're so taken with this advice from Marlo Fisken, a flexibility coach who is also the 2010 American Pole Fitness Champion and 2011 Aerial Pole International Champion (and who appears in the new movie Rock of Ages). When asked how the average person can become more flexible, here's what Fisken told the health and fitness newsletter Vital Juice:

"Start by exploring. The first part of improving flexibility is finding all your limitations."

She's talking about physical flexibility here, as in splits and back bends, but we could also apply this to rigid thinking, taking a little bit of time to explore why we think or act the way we instinctively do... 

Read more of Fisken's astute advice for physical and metaphysical flexibility here.