Navigating with Emotional Agility: 'A map, compass and signposts.'
Navigating with Emotional Agility: 'A map, compass and signposts.'
Preparing for the onward journey.
Summary:
Improving emotional agility in ‘in the moment’ situations is one way to navigate with value-led actions. Another is to step back and give yourself more space to get a big-picture overview of what’s happening in a broader context. Reframing and journalling these two perspectives help me navigate my journey, especially when I feel lost.
Three tools to facilitate the big-picture view:
1. Your map
'The Timeline Exercise' for an up-to-date Frame of Reference. This places historical events into perspective.
Click through to this example of why recalibrating the map and your frame of reference matters: Personal Opinion: 'Working within an outdated Frame of Reference?' Do your reference points and measures need recalibration?
This is my Frame of Reference (August 1988 to August 2023)—a significant dip before University and a challenging career climb before seismic caregiving activity.
Each point on this map is an event, and each event meaningfully impacted me in some way. I’ve unpacked my strengths and weaknesses and delved into why I scored something very high or low. There are no simple explanations, but there have been many personal insights.
This exercise has enabled some clients to describe their ‘ideal’ job by identifying the drivers of the high ‘work’ scores.
Some people can see from the illustration that personal life and work lines have opposing scores at some points. This insight helped one client embark on a journey to recalibrate his career expectations so that he was less conflicted.
2. Your values are your compass.
Resource: Dr Susan David 'Walking your Why' Interview with LeadersIn. (July 18, 2016).
Here are two books to support a review and exploration of your values:
‘Walking your why’ is the art of living by your own personal set of values – the beliefs and behaviours you hold dear and give you a sense of meaning and satisfaction. Identifying and acting on the values that are truly your own – not those imposed on you by others, not what you think you ‘should’ care about, but what you genuinely do care about – is the crucial next step of achieving emotional agility.
David, Susan. Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life (pp. 110-111). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Values are the unique attitudes and beliefs that motivate and drive us. They are what make you ‘you’, so it might help to think of them as being a bit like your career DNA. They are a fundamental part of who you are, as they reflect what matters to you most. Values can sometimes feel like a vague and abstract concept but there are practical actions you can take to discover your values and apply them in your day-to-day life at work. In this chapter, we’re going to show you how.
Tupper, Helen; Ellis, Sarah. The Squiggly Career: The No.1 Sunday Times Business Bestseller - Ditch the Ladder, Discover Opportunity, Design Your Career (p. 48). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
3. Your emotions and feelings are your signposts and data points on your journey.
This is why it’s essential to decipher what your emotions are telling you despite the discomfort or ‘yuck’ that may accompany the discovery. This discomfort, in itself, is a learning. To paraphrase the work of Dr Susan David, we can hold our emotions lightly, with curiosity and without judgment. We may realise we’ve deviated from our true values, and we’re not ‘walking our why’.
'Wholehearted living: Avoid Toxic Positivity and Rethink our beliefs around Emotions.' Showing up to our Emotions. Adam Grant & Susan David.
‘Decoding Emotions and Experiences’. Emotional Granularity. Drs. Susan David and Brené Brown help us decode our emotions.
In the next series of articles, I’ll introduce you to the work of other experts.
Personal reflection:
From the perspective of work and corporate career: By using the timeline map, I could define ‘leadership’ in terms of my personal experience, a personalised definition. It enabled me to share positive and negative examples of where I failed and where I thrived. This was how I curated a narrative for interviews.
From a personal perspective, these tools have helped me become more self-aware. I’ve been able to decipher ‘early warning signals’ of when I’m burning out by using my 2007 experience leading a team through a crisis.
The big picture has enabled me to see how I’ve lived more life over the last years than in the previous decade. Life is not the amount of time; it’s the diversity, amplitude, and intensity of events that counts. I know I’ve lived more between the pendulum swings and throughout all the seismic activity. What does your timeline journey look like?
Lifequakes and disruptive changes1 pushed me to journal to make sense of what was happening. Meaningful insights within this broader context have kept me sane while living the caregiving rollercoaster. Your time, schedule and events may not be within your control as a caregiver. However, these tools have helped me reclaim some agency.
The timeline exercise provides a map, but it’s also a personal Rosetta stone. Because it uses relative scoring of events, it can help you make structured historical comparisons with past events and feelings.
As your narrative evolves, you won’t react precisely the same way again, but this will give you a better ‘Frame of Reference’ to navigate your current context.
Navigating life’s uncertainties can feel bewildering, especially if you encounter other people’s emotional drama or new big crises. These tools can give you back more agency and control.
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