Dr Susan David 'Walking Your Why.'

July 18, 2016. Interview with LeadersIn

Mar 27, 2024

Carer Mentor Summary:

"Walking your why" is the practice of aligning your actions with your values. As Susan David discusses, this concept is crucial for emotional agility, well-being, and success in life. Values are fundamental in helping us be resilient in daily life, protecting us from mindless decisions and social contagion. They also shield us against unconscious societal biases. Walking your why involves making choices that move towards your values, even in the face of fear or doubt.

Link to the video. An interview with Dr Susan David by LeadersIn on YouTube (July 18, 2016): https://www.youtube.com/@Leadersin

LeadersIn showcases the inspiring leadership and success philosophies of some of the world’s most senior leaders, thinkers, CEOs and entrepreneurs.

Choosing to Walk Your Why is choosing to walk towards what's important to you, sometimes EVEN despite your thoughts and emotions. - Susan David.

Time-stamped transcript of Dr Susan David’s evidence-based insights.

0:38 Susan David discusses Values, as a critical part of emotional agility. It’s critical to know what is important to you for your overall well-being and your life success. Success is defined by the way you actually live your life in a full way.

0:59 There's fascinating research showing that values are not simply nice to have but that they are fundamental in buffering us and in helping us to be resilient in the changing context of day-to-day life.

1:16 Two examples: first we engage in a lot of mindless activity and a lot of mindless decision making we might go in directions in our career because everyone else in the firm is doing it or because we've been told that that is the route to go and we might look back on our lives 10 or 15 years later and think what was I doing?

1:42 The idea of ‘Walking Your Why’ is being able to define what is personally important to you.

1:52 Research that has been done on what we call social contagion is the idea that we literally catch other people's behaviours when we just mindlessly go through the world. (Examples given of evidence from large epidemiological studies: Sweets, putting on weight and divorce)

2.43 Social contagion is the phenomenon whereby particular behaviours become normalised and then adopted in your own life.

2:55 This is very powerful and what we know from the research is that having a clear sense of what your values are, protects you so it's not just a nice to have it protects you from these kinds of mindless outcomes.

3:16 Research and very important organisational conversations about unconscious bias e.g. gender equality

3:38 Individuals take on the unconscious bias of society.

3.46 If I'm a female working in an all male environment I might unwittingly have absorbed the unconscious bias that I'm in the wrong profession.

Females who are in professions that have high levels of bias against females in that industry - when they experience hardships, career setback and experience failings they’re more likely to give up. However, if they've done a simple exercise of articulating WHY it is that they are in that profession, why they believe in the work that they do, when they experience those hardships and failings, those values protect them from giving up.

4:40 Values are not just nice to have, they’re critically important to our life effectiveness.

5:03 What's your thoughts on how we get to a world where there is equality and how do we overcome unconscious bias.

5.36 I feel very strongly about this issue. I see women's rights as human rights I don't see them separately. Women's rights are human rights because I don't believe that it is good for any of us to exist in a world in which people are discriminated against raped tortured and so on simply for being female.

6:04 I think that this conversation is actually a conversation that happens very early - it’s important to have these conversations in organisations, but we should be having these conversations at all levels of society.

It's critically important to have conversations with our sons as equally as with our daughters about the individual qualities that a person brings to the table that are not about who they are in terms of their gender but who they are as people, and I think that this is critically important.

6:49 One of the things I talk about in emotional agility is the idea of rigidity. Part of rigidity is going to ‘QUICK biases’ and assigning people into categories like male or female. It's a sign of rigidity.

I've got an eight-year-old and a two-year-old, and I'm very, very mindful to not have conversations about that's a boys thing or that's a girls thing in any aspect because I think it can just as easily harm boys when you start saying those things.

8:11 In my book, I discuss a number of activities for people to start discerning what is important to them. What are your values?

8:30 One of the most important things is that values are not something that you have on the proverbial wall, but they are qualities of action. So what I mean is that if your value is inclusiveness, when you go into your next meeting, you can make what I call a ‘toward move’, which is a move toward your values or an ‘away move’.

8:58 They are ‘Qualities of action’ so one of the things that I talk about in emotional agility is the concept of ‘Choice points’ that when you are for example an individual who believes in learning and contribution and you're sitting in that meeting and you have that sense of oh I'm just a fraud or gee I've just been undermined

9:20 You are at a choice point the choice point is do you move toward your values so even though you're having this thought even though you're having this voice do you still continue to contribute or do you move away from your values and shut down?

9:42 So values are qualities of action - in the moment you make a choice that is toward what is important to you, or away?

10:21 Choosing to Walk Your Why is choosing to walk towards what's important to you, sometimes EVEN despite your thoughts and emotions.

Five Ways to Walk Your Why

Susan David Resource

This resource is part of those freely offered by Susan David on her website (click the button).

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).

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