Emotional Agility for Personal Growth: Own Your Emotions Before They Own You

“The Only Constant in Life Is Change.”- Heraclitus.

Change is the only constant in life, as wisely stated by Greek philosopher, Heraclitus; and the basis and essence for personal growth and development. Negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, shame, regret, and anger can be powerful impediments to life change. Coaching clients have often expressed that their negative emotions get acutely triggered, such as frustration, or the fear of failure, whenever they feel that they are unsupported, not competent enough, or out of their comfort zone, and it is habitual for them to retreat back to status quo, where the “old ways” of doing things are familiar and seemingly “safe”.

Most of us use default maladaptive behaviours to deflect or disguise our negative emotions so we don’t have to face them, whilst others settle deeply into these feelings and struggle to get beyond them, or we try to cope with difficult emotions with cynicism, irony, humour, or avoiding or ignoring our feelings, numbing them or attempting to rationalise them away, at the expense of our true well-being.

Negative emotions not only influence our mental and physical health, but it can also be killing us, on a cellular level, theorised and researched by psychiatrist, David Hawkins, that all emotions carry energy, and negative emotions such as anger, shame, and despair corresponded with cellular death, concluding that emotional fitness is fundamental not merely for its own sake, but to preserve our physical health.

Fortunately, growing research on neuroplasticity demonstrates the remarkable ability of the brain to reorganise itself. and gaining control and leveraging our emotions can enable us to flourish.

The Science Behind Our Emotions

Our sympathetic nervous system gets activated when we are under stress and duress, also known as our fight-or-flight reaction, which is our brain’s physiological means of instinctively being on alert to protect us in times of danger. Controlled by the limbic system that gets us into survival mode, you may be familiar with an increased heart rate, surge of energy and heat-flush rising to your neck and cheeks when you are angry, or sweaty palms and butterflies in the stomach when you are nervous before a presentation.

The prefrontal cortex is our more evolved, conscious, rational part of the brain, governing reason, impulse control, emotional recognition, processing and deriving the meaning of emotions, as well as guiding our actions and cognitive functioning.

Our personal development is dependent on our capability to regulate our emotions, learning how to re-evaluate a tricky situation to reduce anxiety or anger, or focusing on reasons to create a sense of calm. This is the responsibility of the prefrontal cortex, acting like the brain’s brakes to decelerate the limbic system’s throttle to recalibrate our emotional responses.

The prefrontal cortex can go offline and trip you up if you compulsively focus on the possibilities of what might go wrong. For example, you are about to give a presentation and all you focus on, are the mistakes you fear you might make, hurtling you into heightened anxiety, shutting your prefrontal cortex down. This is when you end up stumbling or actually making mistakes; we all have undoubtedly been there. What is happening here is that your primitive limbic brain is organising your body to deal with the potential threats it is imagining – humiliation and embarrassment – fuelling your body with a surge of neurochemicals to prepare you to fight or flee from these perceived threats. This could be useful for real situations of survival, but it can really bungle your presentation! To prevent your prefrontal cortex from going offline and tripping yourself up, focus on how you want the presentation to end up and the positive benefits of the experience instead.

The Art of Emotional Agility

If emotional regulation and preventing a negative response through positive thinking or distraction is a science, then mindfully engaging our emotions and strategically harnessing them, as what Harvard Medical School professor and psychologist Dr Susan David coined as “emotional agility”, is an art. David explains that we live in a tyranny of false positivity and repressing or denying our emotions will only make them stronger and lead us to deadlock. Psychological research by Dr James Erskine has demonstrated that blocking negative emotions merely represses and amplifies them, where smokers ended up smoking more when trying to avoid thoughts of smoking, and similar research on eating behaviour where thought suppression triggered a subsequent increase in eating, showing that it is a poor method of achieving self-control.

While it can be tempting to fake positivity to distract ourselves from uncomfortable emotions, such avoidance disconnects us from ourselves. David proposes mastering the practice of processing, navigating and getting comfortable with the full range of our emotions in order to be resilient. By building the ability to face our emotions, labelling them, understanding them, and then choosing to act intentionally in a way that is congruent with our personal values and aligned with our goals, we can strategically leverage our emotions for personal and professional growth.

The Four Common “Hooks”

Do you find yourself getting trapped in a repeat pattern of negative emotions and thoughts? The four common knee-jerk “hooks” or automatic responses that hijack our behaviour that are actually unhelpful to our wellbeing are:

1)? ? Thought-blaming – treating thoughts as ultimate truths and facts.

2)? ? Monkey-mindedness – conjuring up scenarios rather than experiencing reality in the moment.

3)? ? Depending on old and obsolete patterns to navigate and resolve present issues.

4)? ? Stubborn self-righteousness, hellbent on proving that we are right at any cost.

Which of these have you experienced lately, and how aware were you of them as they occurred? How did you choose to respond and act on them? Do you find yourself frequently experiencing any of these particular hooks, and do you normally react in the same way? Have you examined the possible antecedents for these? By acknowledging these hooks and deliberating on them, will you be able to better detect and manage them and consciously choose better responses?

Getting Real with our Emotions

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” – Victor E. Frankl

Neurologist, psychologist and Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, ingeniously described the practice of emotional agility in his quote, referring to the self-awareness and management of our emotions by recognising them before reacting, pausing and expanding the mental space to allow ourselves the choice to respond in alignment with our values and in our best interest.

Learning from this, one has to be careful not to buy into positive thinking to stave off negativity, this being a potentially dangerous way to avoid necessary action, as argued by psychiatrist, Dr Mark Banschick. Overconfidence in the power of positivity can be perilous, with the overselling of the claims of positive psychology deemed as “saccharine terrorism” by psychologist, Dr Lisa Aspinwall. Negative emotions have an inherent value, facilitating increased focus and analytical thinking, and allowing us to learn from mistakes and assess social situations better. By being present to our negative emotions and mindfully examining the experience to detect what areas in our life needs care and attention, we can better establish and build our emotional resilience.

Psychological wellbeing is not defined by the presence of a singular kind of emotion but rather the capacity to experience a rich diversity of both positive and negative emotions. The ability to recognise, express and modulate one’s emotions and have the flexibility and ability to cope with adverse life events and function in social roles are important components of mental health that contribute to the state of internal equilibrium.

How to Practice Emotional Agility

1)? ? Recognise your repeated patterns and when you get stuck.

Try to spot when you might find yourself trapped in a rigid mental loop in one of those emotional “hooks”. When does this loop happen and what familiar situations in the past have also triggered similar reactions? It could be that you are telling yourself you’re not good enough hence you’re not even going to try, or that you’re rejected and unlovable again by your parent, lover, or friend, or you don’t attempt to get out of a bad situation because in the past you learned that you were helpless. Freud referred to this human seeking of comfort in the familiar, as repetition compulsion. It will be useful once you gain self-awareness of this repetition so you can begin to address these patterned emotional “hooks”.

2) Identify your thoughts & feelings and label them.

Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett proposes applying “emotional granularity” and identifying and interpreting our emotions appropriately to empower us to realistically evaluate their power and effect, reframe them to feel less threatening, and be aided to find potential solutions. For example, understanding that you are dejected and disappointed by your manager’s reaction to your presentation is more manageable than an ambiguous sense of sadness. Dr Marsha Linehan, creator of dialectical behavioural therapy promotes the mindfulness practice of validating your thoughts and emotions by accurately observing, describing the event, how you are thinking and feeling, and how it feels in your body, as opposed to interpreting it or creating assumptions, which can invalidate your internal experience. Distinctively create emotional distance and generate clarity of the emotional data. Instead of thinking “I’m going to fail” and being inundated by the fear of failing, you can say “I am noticing that I am feeling this fear of failure, and I tend to feel this sinking sensation when I feel this way”. Create enough space to observe the data, understand that your feelings and thoughts are merely transient sources of data that may or may not prove useful, instead of being the absolute truth of a situation, try to pinpoint its purpose as a measure to guide you towards a solution. You will then be prepared to create concrete steps to alter the situation.

?3)? ? Accept the thoughts that are occurring in your mind.?

Appraise your thoughts and emotions with curiosity and an open attitude. Directly experience them, pay attention to them, relinquish your need to react rashly to the thought or feeling. Take the middle path between repressing the thought or feeling, and getting hooked by it. Be present to them even if they are not aligned with how you think of yourself. You can practice box breathing to check in with yourself and to create the space to observe your raw emotions unravel. How would you describe the energetic quality of your feelings? What is your fear of failure signalling to you about what truly matters to you, that you could respond contrarily and constructively to? Are you repeating an old narrative that is no longer useful for you? Is your fear stemming from an insecurity that can actually be acted on? Can you compassionately and courageously confront your fear, practice self-acceptance and self-approval, understand your limitations and strengths and recognise what can be changed to improve?

?4)? ? Change your old narrative.

Underneath each emotion is a story, embodying the negative core beliefs that were established much earlier on in our life history. What is your “primal story” and its origins of feeling like you’re not good enough? When was the first time you felt this way and what was the event that caused it? By understanding our original stories and their related negative feelings, challenging the belief that they are the ultimate truth or facts, and gaining awareness of present-day triggers, we can overcome the automatic rote feelings and behaviours by reframing how we feel and think about our primal stories.

5)? ? Act in alignment with your values.

When you can recognise and act on your emotions as data, you can choose your responses on the basis of your core values and convictions. Your emotions can be fleeting and transient, but your values remain constant. Allow your values to guide your actions, instead of being reactionary to your emotions. Contemplate the actions that are aligned with your values and those that bring you away from your values. Choose the actions that bring you towards your values and allow you to act like the person you want to be.

Mindfully Choosing Values-based Growth

“The hero and the coward both feel the same emotions, they just take different actions.” – Cus D’Amato

It is impossible and in fact, ineffective to avoid or ignore challenging thoughts and emotions. David aptly describes life’s beauty as inseparable from its fragility. Being alive comes with the dichotomy of both good and bad and that involves making mistakes, failing, and getting hurt. We need not seek perfection, and instead embrace our evolving identity and enjoy the process of loving and living. The objective of emotional agility is to approach our inner experiences in a mindful, values-driven and productive way, and harness the power of embracing the full spectrum of our emotional lives. To acknowledge and attend to our fears with compassion, courage and curiosity, and to generate constructive choices for growth and development in our relationships and work. This enables the constructive utility of our internal resources to commit to actions that align with our values.

This practice of course doesn’t occur overnight and you may continue to find yourself “hooked” by your old patterns of thoughts and feelings, however, a satisfying and successful life is defined by how you can embrace your blemishes and flourish in spite of them, radically accepting your humanness and imperfections and acting in a manner that is led by your personal values that will allow you to thrive in a manner that is uniquely you.?

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