Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive In

Susan David E M O T I O N A L A G I L I T Y Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life Contents 1. Rigidity to Agility 2. Hooked 3. Trying to Unhook 4. Showing Up 5. Stepping Out 6. Walking Your Why 7. Moving On: The Tiny Tweaks Principle 8. Moving On: The See-Saw Principle 9. Emotional Agility at Work 10. Raising Emotionally Agile Children 11. Conclusion: Becoming Real Endnotes Acknowledgements Follow Penguin ABOUT THE AUTHOR Susan David PhD is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, co-founder and co-director of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, and CEO of Evidence Based Psychology, a boutique business consultancy. An in-demand speaker and advisor, Susan has consulted to the senior leadership of hundreds of major international organizations, including Ernst & Young, the United Nations and World Economic forum. Her work has featured in numerous publications, including the Harvard Business Review, Time, Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal. Susan has a PhD in clinical psychology and a post doctorate in emotions from Yale University. To the love of my life, Anthony Samir, & to my darlings, Noah and Sophie, who know how to dance each and every day. 1. Rigidity to Agility Years ago, in the Downton Abbey era, a well-regarded captain stood on the bridge of a British battleship watching the sun set across the sea. As the story goes, the captain was about to head below for dinner when suddenly a lookout announced, ‘Light, sir. Dead ahead two miles.’ The captain turned back toward the helm. ‘Is it steady or moving?’ he asked, these being the days before radar. ‘Steady, captain.’ ‘Then signal that ship,’ the captain ordered gruffly, ‘Tell them, “You are on a collision course. Alter course 20 degrees.”’ The answer from the source of the light came back just moments later: ‘Advisable you change your course 20 degrees.’ The captain was insulted. Not only was his authority being challenged, but in front of a junior seaman! ‘Send another message,’ he snarled. ‘“We are HMS Defiant, a 35,000-ton battleship of the dreadnought class. Change course 20 degrees.”’ ‘Brilliant, sir,’ came the reply. ‘I’m Seaman O’Reilly of the Second Class. Change your course immediately.’ Apoplectic and red in the face, the captain shouted, ‘We are the flagship of Admiral Sir William Atkinson-Willes! CHANGE YOUR COURSE 20 DEGREES!’ There was a moment of silence before Seaman O’Reilly replied: ‘We are a lighthouse, sir.’ * As we travel through our lives, we humans have few ways of knowing which course to take, or what lies ahead. We don’t have lighthouses to keep us away from rocky relationships. We don’t have lookouts on the bow or radar on the tower, watching for submerged threats that could sink our career plans. Instead, we have our emotions – sensations like fear, anxiety, joy and exhilaration – a neurochemical system that evolved to help us navigate life’s complex currents. Emotions, from blinding rage to wide-eyed love, are the body’s immediate, physical responses to important signals from the outside world. When our senses pick up information – signs of danger, hints of romantic interest, cues that we’re being accepted or excluded by our peers – we physically adjust to these incoming messages. Our hearts beat faster or slower, our muscles tighten or relax, our mental focus locks on to the threat or eases into the warmth of trusted companionship. These physical, ‘embodied’ responses keep our inner state and our outward behaviour in sync with the situation at hand, and can help us not only to survive, but to flourish. Like Seaman O’Reilly’s lighthouse, our natural guidance system, which developed through evolutionary trial and error over millions of years, is a great deal more useful when we don’t try to fight it. But that’s not always easy to do because our emotions are not always reliable. In some situations, they help us cut through pretences and posturing, working as a kind of internal radar to give us the most accurate and insightful read into what’s really going on in a situation. Who hasn’t experienced those gut feelings that tell us, ‘This guy’s lying’ or ‘Something’s bugging my friend even though she says she’s fine’? But in other situations, emotions dredge up old business, confusing our perception of what’s happening in the moment with painful, past experiences. These powerful sensations can take over completely, clouding our judgement and steering us right on to the rocks. In these cases, you might ‘lose it’, and, say, throw a drink in the lying guy’s face. Of course, most adults rarely surrender control to their emotions with inappropriate public displays that take years to live down. More likely, you’ll trip yourself up in a less theatrical but more insidious fashion. Many people, much of the time, operate on emotional autopilot, reacting to situations without true awareness or even real volition. Others are acutely aware that they expend too much energy trying to contain or suppress their emotions, treating them, at best, like unruly children and, at worst, as threats to their well-being. Still others think their emotions are stopping them from achieving the kind of life they want, especially when it comes to emotions we find troublesome, such as anger, shame or anxiety. In time, our responses to signals from the real world can become increasingly faint and unnatural, leading us off course instead of protecting our best interests. I am a psychologist and an executive coach who has studied emotions and how we interact with them for more than two decades. When I ask some of my clients how long they’ve been trying to ‘get in touch with’ and ‘fix’ or ‘cope with’ the emotions with which they most often struggle, they’ll often say five, or ten, or even twenty years. Sometimes the answer is, ‘Ever since I was a little kid.’ To which the obvious response is: ‘So would you say what you’re doing is working?’ With this book, my goal is to help you become more aware of your emotions, to learn to accept them, and then to flourish by increasing your emotional agility. The tools and techniques I’ve brought together won’t make you a perfect person who never says the wrong thing or who is never wracked by shame, guilt, anger, or feelings of anxiety or insecurity. Striving to be perfect – or always perfectly happy – will only set you up for frustration and failure. Instead, I hope to help you make peace with even your most difficult emotions, enhance your ability to enjoy your relationships, achieve your goals and live your life to the fullest. But that’s just the ‘emotional’ part of emotional agility. The ‘agility’ part addresses your thinking and behaviour processes – those habits of mind and body that can also stop you flourishing, especially when, like the captain of the battleship Defiant, you react in the same old obstinate way to new or different situations. Rigid reactions may come from buying into the old, self-defeating story you’ve told yourself a million times – ‘I am such a loser’, or ‘I always say the wrong thing’, or ‘I always fold when it’s time to fight for what I deserve.’ Rigidity may come from the perfectly normal habit of taking mental shortcuts, and accepting presumptions and rules of thumb that may have served you once – in childhood, in a first marriage, at an earlier point in your career – but aren’t serving you now: ‘People can’t be trusted’; ‘I’m going to get hurt.’ A growing body of research shows that emotional rigidity – getting hooked by thoughts, feelings and behaviours that don’t serve us – is associated with a range of psychological ills, including depression and anxiety. Meanwhile, emotional agility – being flexible with your thoughts and feelings so that you can respond optimally to everyday situations – is key to well-being and success. And yet emotional agility is not about controlling your thoughts, or forcing yourself into thinking more positively. Because research also shows that trying to get people to change thoughts from, say, the negative – ‘I’m going to screw up this presentation’ – to the positive – ‘You’ll see. I’ll ace it!’ – usually doesn’t work, and can actually be counterproductive. Emotional agility is about loosening up, calming down and living with more intention. It’s about choosing how you’ll respond to your emotional warning system. It supports the approach described by Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived a Nazi death camp and went on to write Man’s Search for Meaning, on leading a more meaningful life, a life in which our human potential can be fulfilled: ‘Between stimulus and response there is a space,’ he wrote. ‘In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.’ By opening up that space between how you feel and what you do about those feelings, emotional agility has been shown to help people with any number of troubles: negative self-image, heartbreak, physical pain, anxiety, depression, procrastination, tough transitions, and more. But emotional agility isn’t beneficial just for people struggling with personal difficulties. It also draws on diverse disciplines in psychology that explore the characteristics of successful, thriving people including those like Frankl, who survived great hardship and went on to do great things. Emotionally agile people are dynamic. They demonstrate flexibility in dealing with our fast-changing, complex world.

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