Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life

Think about how your feelings fluctuate during the average day. You may start off feeling calm and happy. Then you get frustrated when you can't find your car keys. Anxiety mounts as you get stuck in traffic and, thinking you're going to be late for a meeting, you feel stressed. But then you receive a text from a colleague to say your meeting has been rescheduled for tomorrow. Serenity is restored.

During 20 years of research into how people respond emotionally to triggers, David has found that, all too often, they don't think about their response and how it might affect others. People generally operate on autopilot.

You can probably think of someone whose reactions in certain circumstances are so predictable and inflexible that it's difficult to broach certain topics with him or her. That's what autopilot looks like.

But, no doubt, you also have colleagues who, although they have strong feelings about a topic, take a step back, listen, consider, and explore. They are emotionally agile.

The secret to becoming more emotionally agile is to become more aware of our emotions, and treat them as valid and valuable. We can then learn to create a space between stimulus and reaction, which gives us room to decide on the most appropriate response.

In this way, emotionally agile people are able to tolerate a lot of pressure and endure setbacks while remaining engaged, open and receptive. Surely this is desirable in every area of life?

The book "Emotional Agility" is for everyone who wants to have more control over their reactions to everyday events and to different personalities. Although not directly work related, it does include a chapter called "Emotional Agility at Work" and there are job-related examples throughout the book.

Through following David's advice, we'll recognize when our emotions are about to lead us into familiar but unhelpful patterns of behavior, so we can choose to respond differently. This can improve all our relationships, whether we're the CEO of a multinational company or a regular team member.

David is highly qualified to lead us on this journey into emotional agility. She has a PhD in clinical psychology, did postdoctoral research at Yale University, and is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School.

She was prompted to study emotion through growing up in South Africa under apartheid, where people lived with the constant fear, anxiety and pain of segregation and violence. David wanted to understand how people dealt with this trauma and still carried on with their lives.

She is now a sought-after speaker, consultant and writer, working for major international organizations such as Ernst & Young and the United Nations. Her work has been published in the Harvard Business Review, Time and the Wall Street Journal.

So, keep listening to find out how brooding and bottling can ruin relationships, why we need to improve our emotional vocabulary, and why tiny tweaks are more effective than drastic action when going through transitions.

It's best to start with Chapter One, as it gives an overview of emotional agility, briefly defining it and identifying the four essential steps to becoming more emotionally agile. These are: Showing Up, Stepping Out, Walking Your Why, and Moving On. David explains each of these in detail in subsequent chapters.

So, what is meant by emotional agility and what stops us attaining it?

Emotional agility is a process that enables you to be present in the moment, aware of your emotions but holding them loosely, facing them courageously and compassionately, and then deciding on the most beneficial way forward.

But emotional agility doesn't come naturally to us. Human beings are wired to make sense of billions of bits of information at any given time, by categorizing and organizing them into their personal narratives.

The problem is that sometimes our perception isn't right, often based on things that happened years ago. If we were told we were no good as a child, we'll jump to the conclusion that we're not good enough whenever we encounter a setback.

So we'll take the fact we didn't get that promotion we wanted and imbue it with all kinds of negative judgment, meaning and opinion. And, as we all know, internal critics are relentless. This process can be exhausting and limiting.

David calls the experience of being locked into old patterns of thinking and behavior "getting hooked." But you can "unhook" yourself – and the book explains how, with some effort, we can ditch unhelpful patterns. The first step is to "show up."

This means to recognize and accept the full range of our emotions that can be loosely categorized as joy, anger, sadness, fear, surprise, contempt, and disgust. You'll notice that more than half of these are uncomfortable. Since emotions like anger, fear, disgust, and contempt are perceived as negative, we tend to hide or deflect them – in processes called "bottling" and "brooding."

Bottlers push unwanted emotions away and get on with life. They never get to the root cause of why they're feeling angry, frustrated or fearful, but their feelings will leak out anyway, directly or indirectly. And, as you can imagine, because bottlers don't communicate what's bothering them, colleagues or loved ones are left wondering what's wrong. This creates anxiety for the people around bottlers.

Brooders, on the other hand, are very aware of their feelings and obsess over a hurt, perceived failure, shortcoming, or anxiety. They're the type of colleague who moans and, if you're willing to listen, you become a co-brooder – a role that won't benefit you or the brooder.

Ultimately, bottling and brooding are both unproductive and exhausting, and they don't help us get to the bottom of our difficult emotion. Plus, they have a detrimental effect on people around us.

But, with emotional agility, it's a different story…

Emotional agility involves being present in the moment, facing your uncomfortable feelings with compassion and accepting them. It means putting your personal history and current situation side by side, acknowledging your thoughts but recognizing they are just thoughts, not truths.

For instance, if you've been laid off in the past and you learn your organization is considering a restructure, your autopilot response could be to think you'll lose your job. Fear, anxiety and anger kick in, and you begin putting out feelers for a new position, even though there's no evidence that your job will go.

So, in this case, your strong feelings have been influenced by the devastating experience of having been laid off. Once you recognize the root cause of your fear and anxiety, you can calm down and carry on. Studies show that people who are aware of their emotions and accept them cope better when the heat is on.

Another crucial element in helping you become emotionally agile is the extent of your emotional vocabulary. If we can accurately label what we're feeling, we can communicate well enough to get the support we need.

So, instead of thinking "I'm stressed" – a more accurate wording might be, "I thought my career would be more satisfying than it is and I'm disappointed with my life." This detailed description gives us material to work with. We could start to audit our career by asking ourselves: "What aspects of my job am I dissatisfied with? What changes would make this aspect more satisfying?"

The key point in "showing up" is that we accept that all our emotions are valid, whether they're comfortable or uncomfortable. They give us valuable information, which puts us in a better position to improve our situation.

The next move is to "step out." This involves recognizing that there's more than one way of perceiving and responding to a situation.

One way of stepping out is to put your experience into words – either written or spoken into a recorder. This helps you develop insight into your hooks, allowing you to gain perspective and move forward. Stepping out creates that gap between stimulus and response, so you can become more emotionally agile.

OK, so you've acknowledged your emotional response neutrally, created a space in which to consider your past history, and recognized there are many different ways to perceive any situation.

You now have choices about how you respond. And, inevitably, your decision will be based on your personal set of values. Chapter Six, Walking Your Why, focuses on determining what's important to you, the crucial next step in attaining emotional agility.

Personal values act as signposts, helping you make decisions, and you feel comfortable when you act in alignment with them. Your personal values are freely chosen by you, rather than based on others' expectations. To determine your values, ask yourself, "Deep down, what really matters to me? What situations make me feel most vital? What do I want my life to be about?"

David recognizes that becoming emotionally agile isn't easy. It takes courage, time and effort. The final chapters in the book are dedicated to tips on how to manage the process.

For instance, the book suggests using the Tiny Tweaks Principle to help you become emotionally agile. Small tweaks to your motivation and habits are more effective than a dramatic overhaul.

So, if you're feeling a little stale in your career, instead of a complete change, consider how you might develop an area of your current job that you enjoy. Let's say you work in marketing and have made a couple of suggestions that have been taken up. Ask if you could sit in on the weekly marketing strategy meeting.

Making tiny tweaks to your motivation works wonders too. David says we can find a hidden positive by tweaking "I've got to" to "I want to."

For example, if you tell yourself you have to stay at work late to finish a report, you'll likely feel resentful. But, if you position finishing the report as a "want to," by reminding yourself it's an important research document that will help your team and the company, you'll be energized.

Another useful tool to develop emotional agility is the See-Saw Principle.

Being competent in a skill can lead to complacency and disengagement. At the other end of the scale, over-challenging ourselves can make us stressed. Either way, our emotional see-saw becomes unbalanced. We need a balance between the comfort of competence and the excitement of challenge. To achieve this, we should aim to tackle things that are just beyond our grasp.

Striving toward emotional agility is a process we undertake for the benefit of our whole lives – in every role we play, whether it be parent, partner, colleague, or leader.

David recognizes that practicing emotional agility at work might be particularly challenging, due to the stresses and expectations placed on us. But it's also essential if we want to succeed and flourish.

As managers, we can step out of our focus on tasks and make our team feel good by congratulating them on a job well done.

As an employee, sometimes the anxiety and fear of giving an opinion that won't be liked can keep us silent. But, if we practice emotional agility, we can recognize that uncomfortable feeling and voice our opinion anyway. It could be that by speaking up, by practicing your personal emotional agility, you save the company from venturing into an unworkable project.

This topic has wide and deep resonance. When David published her findings on emotional agility in the Harvard Business Review, the report stayed on the publication's "most read list" for months and was downloaded by nearly a quarter of a million people.

This broad audience is reflected in the style of the book, which uses a reassuring and friendly voice throughout. And, although academic research and studies are referred to in the body of the text, few details are provided and there are no footnotes. However, for those who want detail and further reading, a full bibliography is available in the Endnotes, at the back of the book.

To illustrate concepts, the book often uses analogies from film, art, children's stories, or David's own experience. Most of these are helpful, but it was a little confusing to find them at the beginning of chapters, illustrating points that had not yet been made.

Despite this, the book is successful in providing tools to help you make peace with even your most difficult emotions, if you have the courage and stamina to work through the book and make the changes it suggests.

"Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life," by Susan David, is published in paperback by Penguin Books.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.