Emotional Agility: How to Navigate All Your Emotions with Curiosity & Compassion

When Susan David, psychologist at Harvard Medical School was writing the book “Emotional Agility” she was driven by one question: “What does it take for us internally - how we deal with our ourselves, our emotions and our stories - to be successful in our lives?”

Drawing on more than twenty years of academic research, consulting, and her own experiences overcoming adversity, David has pioneered a new way to enable us to make peace with our inner self, achieve our most valued goals, make real change, and live life to the fullest.

As a workplace professional, it’s hard to know whether you should lean into your emotions and authenticity or maintain a stiff upper lip and project professionalism at all costs. The truth is, difficult and emotional situations pop up daily in the workplace: navigating personality clashes, handling the pressures of workloads, deadlines and high expectations, all within a whirlwind of constant change due to reorganizations, mergers, transfers, and individual job changes. Most of us are juggling multiple priorities, sometimes with limited resources. And the work force is more diverse than it has ever been, with a wide range of people of different ages, backgrounds, and beliefs working together. Some emotions that arise frequently are frustration, worry or insecurity, anger or feeling down.

“Life is full of diving boards and other precipices, but, as we’ve seen throughout this discussion of emotional agility, making the leap is not about ignoring, fixing, fighting, or controlling fear—or anything else you might be experiencing. Rather, it’s about accepting and noticing all your emotions and thoughts, viewing even the most powerful of them with compassion and curiosity, and then choosing courage over comfort in order to do whatever you’ve determined is most important to you. Courage, once again, is not the absence of fear. Courage is fear walking”, according to David.

The danger of suppression

Denying our emotions and putting a positive spin on things can often compound the problem and leads us to labelling our emotions as either good or bad. “In the same way suppressing emotions or only focusing on the good emotions undermine resilience in individuals, I also think they undermine resilience in large scale organizational resilience. This weakens the organization because it puts the organization in a position where they’re not actually able to learn from their people. If we can’t hear the concerns of people on the ground, then we lose incredibly valuable opportunities to identify issues or potential risks.”

“There’s this South African Zulu greeting—“Sawubona”—that basically means “ hello,” but what it means literally is ‘I see you, and by seeing you, I bring you into being.’A core part of emotional agility is being able to show up to our own emotions. And when we see ourselves, we help to bring ourselves into being, and when we see our children’s, our team’s, our staff members’ emotions, we help to bring those people into being.”

How can you build emotional agility for yourself and your team?

Susan shared the four core aspects of emotional agility:

• Showing Up: Instead of ignoring difficult thoughts and emotions or overemphasizing ‘positive thinking’, facing into your thoughts, emotions and behaviors willingly, with curiosity and kindness. 
• Stepping Out: Detaching from, and observing your thoughts and emotions to see them for what they are—just thoughts, just emotions. Essentially, learning to see yourself as the chessboard, filled with possibilities, rather than as any one piece on the board, confined to certain preordained moves. 
• Walking Your Why: Your core values provide the compass that keeps you moving in the right direction. Rather than being abstract ideas, these values are the true path to willpower, resilience and effectiveness. 
• Moving On: Small deliberate tweaks to your mindset, motivation, and habits – in ways that are infused with your values, can make a powerful difference in your life. The idea is to find the balance between challenge and competence, so that you’re neither complacent nor overwhelmed. You’re excited, enthusiastic, invigorated. 

The prevailing feeling of today’s business culture is that uncomfortable thoughts and feelings have no place at the office and that employees, particularly leaders should be strong, optimistic, dampening down any negative emotions. 

To truly show up at the office and in our own lives, we need to learn how to label our thoughts and emotions and see them for what they are: data not directives. “Choose courage over comfort by vitally engaging with new opportunities to learn and grow, rather than passively resigning yourself to your circumstances”.