How do you support your coachees to develop emotional agility and flexibility?

Every moment requires a certain kind of response. Emotional agility and flexibility allow us to work like martial artists, sensing and attuning to any situation and responding in a way that creates satisfaction, progress, and impact. By helping us become present with what's happening, we make meaningful contributions more often and find greater happiness, success, peace, and delight in our work.

Emotional agility and flexibility empower individuals to navigate the complexities of their emotions effectively. By recognizing, understanding, and accepting their emotions, they can make conscious choices aligned with their values and goals. The ability to shift emotional states and perspectives in response to different situations enables them to adapt and thrive in the face of stress, uncertainty, and ambiguity. Emotions become valuable sources of information and motivation, enhancing overall well-being and personal growth.

Emotional agility empowers executives to recognize, understand, and accept their emotions without judgment, fostering a deeper understanding of their impact on actions and decisions. By consciously aligning emotions with values and goals, executives can take values-driven action, ensuring their choices are in line with their desired outcomes and long-term success. The ability to adapt and shift perspectives through emotional flexibility equips executives with the resilience to navigate challenging situations with ease and effectiveness, enabling them to thrive amidst stress, uncertainty, and ambiguity.

Absolutely! Emotional agility and flexibility are fundamental to emotional intelligence and resilience, which play vital roles in the success and satisfaction of your coachees. Strengthening emotional intelligence enhances their leadership effectiveness, teamwork, communication, creativity, and problem-solving skills. Resilience allows them to bounce back from setbacks, learn from challenges, and grow personally and professionally. By cultivating emotional agility and flexibility, your coachees can improve self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and optimism. This development enables them to become more confident, adaptable, and agile leaders and professionals, ready to tackle any obstacles they encounter.

Emotional agility enables us to handle complexity with grace in a brittle, anxious, non-linear, and seemingly incomprehensible world. The world is changing, and organizational dynamics are becoming more complicated as different forces in the 21st century overlap and impact one another. As leaders and organizations face challenges around diversity and inclusion, climate disaster, and societal transition and collapse, emotional agility will be vital to making more intelligent decisions for our people and planet.

A dual approach is needed to assess a coachee's level of emotional agility and flexibility - internal and external views are required. The internal view is accomplished through self-assessment. I like Myers-Briggs because is ask an exhaustive set of questions all aimed at tickling out a person's preferences for how they behave in a variety of situations. We argue the merits and science. Regardless, when you're done with a MBTI self-assessment we have a good handle on how you prefer to operate. The external is done through 360 F/B. By polling co-workers, we can see how others view the coachee's behavior - with all of its warts and blemishes. Together, these views paint a picture of one's current level of emotional agility / flexibility.

Assessing coachees' emotional agility and flexibility is vital before providing support. Use tests like the Emotional Agility Quiz, Emotional Flexibility Scale, or Emotional Intelligence Appraisal. Seek 360-degree feedback from peers, managers, and clients. Self-reflection and observation are also useful. Coachees can rate themselves and observe how they handle emotions. This assessment informs targeted coaching interventions to enhance emotional skills and promote growth.

There's wisdom in using a combination of testing instruments and professional observation. Testing instruments can be helpful at any level of an organization but remember: no testing instrument can compare to the level of intelligence and attunement a human brings.

Designing a coaching plan to enhance coachees' emotional agility and flexibility involves several strategies. Teach the four steps of emotional agility, expand their emotional vocabulary, foster a growth mindset, cultivate curiosity and compassion, and encourage experimentation with different emotional strategies. These steps increase emotional awareness, reduce reactivity, and enhance flexibility. Viewing emotions as data, reducing bias and judgment, and evaluating the effectiveness of strategies enable coachees to adjust their emotional state effectively. The goal is to support their development in handling emotions with clarity and adaptability.

Emotional agility is built through practice and understanding. While it can involve the methods mentioned, at a certain level, it is energy work. It's essential to recognize that people must work through deeply unconscious content to avoid projecting their emotions or interpretations onto a situation, and we often need the right tools or people to do that more effectively. After all, our lives are not run by our conscious beliefs; they're run by our unconscious beliefs. Once we develop emotional agility and self-awareness, we can more easily bring emotional agility and attunement into our work.

Measuring the progress and outcomes of coachees' development in emotional agility and flexibility is crucial for effective coaching. Repeating assessment tools, journaling experiences, gathering stakeholder feedback, and reviewing goals and action plans are effective measurement methods. Comparing results, reflecting on learnings, and celebrating successes provide valuable insights. By continually assessing progress, you can track growth, identify areas for further development, and ensure coaching remains impactful in enhancing emotional agility and flexibility.

Outcomes are observable phenomena that can be generated and embodied consistently or more frequently, and it's magic when this happens. There are several ways to measure outcomes, as long as the process stays honest, which is in everyone's best interest. Celebrating success is particularly important! I tell my clients not to let it get to their heads while celebrating their achievements along a specific dimension of their development.

To support coachees in developing emotional agility and flexibility, create a safe and non-judgmental space for open exploration of emotions. Encourage self-awareness, mindfulness, and reflection on emotional triggers. Help coachees identify and challenge unhelpful thoughts or beliefs. Explore strategies for emotional regulation and coping. Foster empathy, self-compassion, and acceptance. Encourage experimentation with new perspectives and behaviors. Provide ongoing support, feedback, and accountability to foster growth and resilience.

We must be able to work with complex narratives in ways never seen before as we deal with the converging crises of the 21st century, and only by doing whole-person, whole-systems work will we be able to shape the organizations and societies we genuinely want. Don't sleep on emotional agility and what it will ask of you as a human being!