An Interview: Dr. Susan David 'Emotional Agility'
Train ourselves to live better lives with our emotions. (December 21 2019)
Dear Reader,
Hello, Dear Reader! Welcome to our new Carer Mentor community members!
I’m Victoria. You can read why I’m publishing Carer Mentor here: Who Started Carer Mentor and Why?
This article is part of a series focused on ‘Emotional Agility.’ The mindset and tools have been essential to me, and I advocate their benefits to my mentoring clients and other caregivers. Here is the series section: Emotional Agility on Carer Mentor.
This interview is from Dr Susan David’s website.
Carer Mentor Summary:
Emotional agility is the ability to healthily engage with our thoughts, emotions, and stories to lead a life congruent with our values. It involves four steps: showing up, stepping out, walking your why, and moving on.
Embracing the discomfort of negative emotions is crucial, as they are often ‘signposts’ of what we care about. Emotional agility is a critical skill set in navigating life's challenges and changes, and it can be essential to foster this skill in children to help them adapt and build resilience in a fragile, changing world.
After I saw Dr. Susan David’s TED Talk in 2017, I read Emotional Agility every year and completed the Microskills course she established last year. I have felt better equipped to navigate uncertainty. Caring for Dad at home and now Mum, I’ve experienced a huge range of emotions whose amplitude, intensity, and complexity I could never have predicted. This is why I’m passionate about sharing Dr. Susan David’s work. Moving forward through difficult emotions is part of being human. Having emotional agility skills can help us in our journey.
Susan David, Ph.D.
Susan David, Ph.D. is one of the world’s leading management thinkers and an award-winning Harvard Medical School psychologist. Her TED Talk on the topic of emotional agility has been seen by more than 10 million people. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal and often appears on national radio and television. #1 Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author. Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award Winner. Harvard Business Review Management Idea of the Year. Cofounder of the Institute of Coaching (a Harvard Medical School/McLean affiliate).
Table of Contents:
What is Emotional agility
From the book: Emotional agility is a process that allows you to be in the moment, changing or maintaining your behaviours so that you can live in ways that align with your intentions and values. The process isn’t about ignoring difficult emotions and thoughts. It’s about holding those emotions and thoughts loosely, facing them courageously and compassionately, and then moving past them to make big things happen in your life.1
The 4 Steps of Emotional Agility
Showing up
Stepping out
Walking your Why
Moving on
Key Time Stamps and Notes:
‘It is the ability to be with our thoughts, our emotions and our stories in ways that is healthy. To be with these inner experiences in a way that helps us to live lives that are values congruent.’
2.52 Emotional Agility
3.59 What is the goal of Emotional Agility
6.19 Emotional Rigidity
7.58 The Difference between Emotional Agility and Emotional Intelligence
8.56 Idea behind Emotional Intelligence
10.04 Controlling Emotions
11.23 Main Ways of Managing Emotions
18.42 Struggling with Our Emotions
21.02 Self Compassion
28.43 Toxic Positivity versus Authentic Happiness.
Embrace discomfort, and understand negative emotions. The world is fragile and beautiful. So much of our beauty comes from loss and longing. So much of our grief comes from the fact that we have loved before.
30.35 We don't get to choose just positive experiences. Life will give me difficulty, and I can't pretend the difficulty doesn't exist.
So what is the skillset that I need to live in the world authentically happy, in the world as it is and NOT how I wish it to be
31.06 Research evidence has shown: People who chase the idea of being happy, who set goals of being happy, actually over time become less happy.
There’s a number of studies showing that when people have constant expectations on being happy they become more unhappy over time Why?
Because of the fragility,
Because the reality of our experience is that there is sadness
But also, something more beautiful and profound. Beneath our difficult emotions are signposts to the things we CARE about.
E.g. a signpost emotion of loneliness may mean that you value connection and I don't have enough of it at the moment
Guilt maybe you value presence with your children but you're not getting enough of it
Boredom at work, I value growth but I'm not getting enough of it at work
Even Depression and Anxiety:
Depressed could be a signpost for 'how do I be better in the world'
Or someone who's got social anxiety: How do I better connect with people
32.28 When we just push aside our difficult emotions we are also pushing aside this nugget of beautiful learning that comes with high emotions
Every difficult emotion has a value that is packaged beneath it. We tend not to get angry about stuff that we don't care about
When we push aside our difficult emotions in the service of forced positivity (Toxic Positivity) we are also pushing aside learning about our values.
It's our values that help us to adapt and be agile because as human beings we are going to change and we need to be learning. ‘That thing that used to work for me but that I'm now feeling upset or frustrated with, it's no longer working what do I need to do?’
Being able to be with our difficult emotions is a fundamental gift it doesn't feel good. It feels uncomfortable but it's very powerful.
As human beings people often say things like “you know I don't want to be disappointed, I'd love to put my hand up for this job but I don't want to be disappointed or I don't want to be stressed I just don't want to be stressed anymore I don't want it.”
I said, "you know I understand but you have dead people's goals. You have dead people's goals because only dead people never get stressed only dead people never experienced the disappointment that comes with failure only dead people never have their hearts broken.”
You know you don't get to have a meaningful career or leave the world a better place or raise a family without stress and discomfort.
Discomfort is actually the price of admission to a meaningful life. it's only when we open ourselves up to ‘what this emotion is telling me’, that might be important here’, that we start finding the pathway forward of how you might on the ground then, make the changes that you need to make.
35.28 Why did you feel the need to have a chapter specifically for children.
I'm a parent, as a psychologist I am stunned and heartbroken by the statistics showing that you know not only do we know as adults that depression is now the single leading cause of disability globally outstripping cancer and heart disease but we've seen rates of depression and suicide as examples significantly increase in children including in children as young as six years old
So our children are growing up in a society in which they will have their hearts broken they will lose their jobs and in which there is probably more than ever the need to be adaptive and agile and what is fascinating to me is that it doesn't matter how much geography you know and how much mathematics you know ultimately how we deal with our inner world drives everything.
It drives whether we can sustain ourselves in the service of a goal in our careers for instance it drives how we come to our relationships, our mental health and well-being, our health every aspect of our lives.
Yet there is so little in our schools in our society in our education that helps our children to develop the most important skill set so I wanted to write a chapter in my book emotional agility really focused on what is emotional agility look like in how we raise children who are able to be adaptive in a fragile changing world
37:33 I always feel all of us as parents are doing the best we can so that's my caveat
There are a couple of things that we know:
We know for instance that when children come home from school for instance and they say you know mommy no one would play with me today we often with very good intentions try to do the false positive we try to say don't worry I'll play with you I'll phone the Mean Girls parents and I'll organise a playdate.
What we are doing is trying to solve the problem FOR our children? And we're doing it with good intentions, but we are teaching our children that there are good emotions happiness and bad emotions sadness anger that these bad emotions are to be feared, they should be pushed aside. [there’s no good and bad, emotions just are - signals, signposts, data].
38:43 How do we develop emotionally agile children?
How do we help our children to develop skills with their emotions by practice.So the child who is allowed to feel sadness who's allowed to feel sadness is a child who recognises this is what sadness feels like they start getting more comfortable with the experience of sadness it's not to be feared they start developing skills around sadness 'oh I did this and it helped my sadness to pass'
39:17 They also, develop one of the most critical skill sets that we can have as human beings which is the ability to recognise that all of our motions are transient
39:30 Our emotions pause so when people are depressed often what they're doing is they're stuck in the emotion. This emotion feels difficult it's not going to pass it's tough and there's no future here. But all of our emotions are transient.
How do we learn that? We learn that by feeling sadness and then recognising I did this thing, I don't feel sad anymore this is what is called being able to take a meta view of emotions we've all had this experience.
40:25 Helicopter above it and say I feel angry but what is the right effective way for me to be in the situation
40:38 This is critical because what it allows if you think about children the child feels tempted by drugs the child feels tempted to be popular by being one of the team and letting the air out of the principal's tires but there's a little voice inside the child's head that says I feel this but I don't need to be driven by it.
41:03 Our emotions are data they contain really important information but they're not directives.
So this being able to helicopter above is a very critical skill set and when we allow our children to feel their emotions they start developing the skill set of recognising that some emotion feels transient it's going to pass and I can make effective choices
Now how can we help them? How can we help them learn the skills of emotional agility that I've already touched on are
41.26 Showing up
I've already spoken about how we it's not about saying to them you're not really upset or actually you think you're upset but I think you hungry
We might not understand why the child is feeling sad or angry.
What we know from the research is that when a teacher or parent simply shows up to the child basically says 'I'm here I see you I'm not trying to push it away. I see you.' You immediately have a de-escalation of that emotional experience so that's showing up
42.28 Stepping out
we've already spoken about stepping art as adults you know you're creating a little bit of distance you're writing you're trying to get insight into your emotions.
We can help our children to do this as well an example very often as adults we use labels like we say I'm stressed you know I'm stressed that's the most common label we use I'm stressed but there's a world of difference between stress and disappointment or stress and I'm in the wrong job so we know that when as human beings we label our emotions more accurately it helps us to activate this readiness potential helps us to understand and get a sense of why am I feeling what I'm feeling what I need to do about it
43:14 The same is true in children as little as two years old. Children who are more accurate in labelling their emotions have better mental health better outcomes
43:44 what is the emotion that's there and of course this depends on the age you might use simpler labels whether two-year-olds than a 16 year old but it's very powerful it's helping them to understand what the exact cause is.
44.00 Third part of emotional agility is ‘walking your why’
44.37 What are my values here? There's importance of understanding our values. it's critical to us the same with our children how do we start developing their sense of character their moral compass the idea that when everyone's telling them to do stuff they've got the sense of 'this is what I'm choosing to do from a wise place in my heart'
How do we do this with our children so we're showing up we're helping them to step out to label their emotions
45.10 Start to ask them really critical questions. Curiously understand and diagnose
46.25 The fourth part is Moving on
What does today look like for you and what does tomorrow look like for you? What are you actually going to do tomorrow, that might be different? Something that helps the child to problem-solve about the situation
48.41 Real example of labelling emotions
51.45 Employing Emotional Agility
.
Please ‘❤️’ LIKE the article & consider subscribing!
Carer Mentor by Victoria is free to read. If you have the means and would like to support the publication, I welcome monthly (£6) and annual (£50) subscriptions. Thank you for your ongoing support.
Other ‘Emotional Agility’ articles:
David, Susan. Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life (p. 11). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
I appreciate your sharing this video and will pick up a copy of the book. I acknowledge the rollercoaster of emotions and the need to not rigidly live in them or deny them, but I need someone to answer: how do you find relief?
I love this book! It reminds me too of Susan Cain’s book Bittersweet, on how embracing “negative” emotions makes life fuller, richer. Thanks for sharing these highlights! A powerful reminder of how we can all grow more resilient!