Emotional Agility
Susan David
Things do not always go the way we’d prefer. We may be sad, angry or depressed as a consequence – and this is not always helpful or good for us. Maintaining 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.* Emotional agility does not lead to constant happiness; that is an unreasonable expectation. It is not positive thinking or controlling your thoughts. It is essentially choosing how you respond to events.
When the author was five, she became angry with her parents and decided to run away from home. She grabbed some food and took off down the street. At the end of her street was a very busy street. She knew that she could not cross that street alone, so she made a right turn and continued running away – all the way to the next block, which was a very busy street. For the next few hours, she ran away from home making right turn after right turn and ending where she started. We walk (or run) around the blocks of our lives over and over, obeying rules that are written, implied, or simply imagined, getting hooked by ways of being and doing that don’t serve us. We get hooked by negative patterns and rigidly respond using these patterns. Emotional agility is the result of a process that centers on being in the present and choosing how to respond to the present based on your values and your intentions.
Notice that this says nothing about ignoring negative emotions – negative emotions provide very useful information. We have many “negative” emotions for practical reasons and we waste a valuable resource if we ignore them. It’s about holding those emotions and thoughts loosely…and then moving past them to make big things happen in your life. The author suggests that improving emotional agility comprises four things:
- Showing up – embracing your thoughts and emotions as valid and appropriate at the moment.
- Stepping out – stepping away from the emotions and accepting that they are just emotions. This is the space that Frankl is talking about.
- Walking your why – recognizing how our core values or goals should apply to choosing our response. These may be small or large decision points, but they represent chances to advance towards your goals (or not).
- Moving on – taking the desired action to advance those goals or values.
The focus of this book is understanding emotions and our reactions as individuals. Through this understanding, we can build agility in ourselves.
Showing up
People constantly create meaning from their experiences and these narratives organize miscellaneous events into our ongoing life story. The trouble is, we all get things wrong. We think we are the main characters of the story and that events center on us. What’s more, we think that our experiences represent the truth of the way things are. A bad test means we are not smart enough. A spouse who is too busy for us at this moment means they are never there for us. Single events become things that are universally and unchangeably true (or false). These judgments become invisible to us and drive our reactions to events through our emotional responses to them. The author uses the term “hooked” to represent the effect of these hidden stories on our reactions.
The problem with these hooks is that we typically do not test them to see if they are true. We assume and act as if they are true. If I say, Mary has a little ______, you instantly know what comes next. This is what happens when one of these narratives is triggered – you instantly fill in the “rest of the story” except that you don’t do it intellectually. You do it emotionally. The origin of this emotional response is thought to be versions of our early fight-flight reflex. We learn from past experiences (including being told) that certain situations are dangerous/painful/unproductive and we then reflexively react with fear/anxiety/dismissal when exposed to that situation again. Similar processes lead to a whole suite of reflexive emotional responses to situations, both positive and negative. These processes also are the core of System 1 thinking or the fixed mindset that others have written about. We have a well-developed ability to make snap judgments with a high degree of validity. These reflexes help keep us safe in an unpredictable and dangerous physical world. We use the narratives that we write about our lives to explain why we react the way we do.
These narratives become traps. They may or may not have ever been true, and they may not be true anymore or in the current situation. The first step in developing emotional agility is to recognize the emotion and the thoughts that arise from the emotion without assuming that the thoughts are true. This is easier said than done. While in some ways we are incredibly observant, in others we are oblivious. There are numerous demonstrations of the fact that when we are thinking about something even slightly complex, we develop tunnel vision. In one example, an experimenter stopped a student on campus to ask for directions. During the conversation, two helpers carried a door between the student and experimenter. The experimenter was replaced by a helper so that the student was speaking to a new person. In the majority of cases, the student did not even notice. You may have seen a video of a man in a gorilla suit passing through a group of people throwing a ball and not seen the gorilla. When we are confronted with a situation that links to one of our narratives, we develop the same tunnel vision and don’t notice things as easily.
Becoming emotionally agile involves being sensitive to context and responding to the world as it is right now. We can’t stop the thoughts or emotions, and we should not. They provide valuable information that brings important events to our attention. Four common traps to look out for are:
- Thoughts related to future self-blaming. I thought I’d sound stupid, so I didn’t ask my question.
- Monkey-mindedness. I’m angry about xxx. I’m going to tell him so, he will go yyy and I will go zzz, and it will just get worse.
- Old, outgrown ideas. I was punished for showing initiative at my old company, so I will lay low here are the new one – even if they ask me for my ideas.
- Wrongheaded righteousness. I’m in the right here, I know I am, and I want everybody to agree with me.
To avoid these traps, we need to look at events with a “beginner’s mind” and consider the events in their current context. Our experiences can help us understand the events, but our experiences are only one source of information. Gaining agility involves recognizing traps like these and avoiding the sort of “trained incapacity” that pre-programmed responses create.
Emotional agility is not emotional avoidance or suppression. …suppressed emotions inevitably surface in unintended ways, a process that psychologists call emotional leakage. In other words, you may think those feelings go away, but they simply find another way to get expressed. Some of our problems come from “display rules” that compel us to deny our timely emotional expression. When we are told that we can’t express our anger or fear, this is a display rule – and display rules are usually implicit and undiscussed. Advice to be positive or happy adds to the problem of emotion suppression (there are few problems with display of positive emotions, only negative ones).
If negative events and emotions are inevitable, denying the emotion does not work, how can one become more agile in the face of the emotion? The process is easy to describe but harder to execute.
One, show up! Whatever the situation that invokes the emotion, acknowledge the situation directly. And with that acknowledgement, acknowledge the existence of the emotion. A common component of a negative situation, is some form of self-blame. This can magnify the emotion, so to counter that effect, practice self-compassion. Accept that you are an imperfect person and forgive yourself for your mistakes. Don’t deny your role in them; just forgive yourself. This acceptance of your human fallibility is a prerequisite for change because that is part of a wider acceptance. You must accept that the world is the way the world is. It is imperfect, sometimes unfair and sometimes working against you. You don’t need to like any of that, but you should accept it.
Two, step out. The intent of this step is to “voice” the feelings you are experiencing. One classic approach is keeping a journal that records the thoughts and feelings as they are being experienced. The purpose is not to analyze them so much as to convert them from abstract to concrete (however imperfect a representation). The act of reporting is the first step in creating a separation and allowing you to see the emotions as a thing that is not you. And this is a big part of the whole process; it is important to realize and accept that you are not your emotions. Journaling, is one of a group of activities that can be thought of as mindfulness activities. These activities allow you to examine yourself, and over time help build the vocabulary, understanding and acceptance of yourself and the world.
Once the feelings are expressed, they become a separate thing and you can create a space between you and them. They become something that you can decide how to act about. Emotional agility means having any number of troubling thoughts or emotions and still managing you act in a way that serves how you most want to live. The book provides a fascinating example. In 2010, the basketball player LeBron James was trying to decide where to continue his career. In the process, he gave an interview where he said, “One thing I didn’t want to do was make an emotional decision. I wanted to do what’s best for Lebron James and do what makes LeBron James happy.” What looks like an egotistical expression is actually a way to stepping back from the emotional content of the decision to see the issue more unemotionally. What decision would make his future self happiest? This was a very effective way to assign the emotional energy to one box while giving other components of the situation equal or greater prominence. A variety of techniques can help in stepping out including:
- Think of yourself as being in a process going from the present to the future
- Embrace the contradictions in the situation
- Laugh about it. If you discover the funny side of the situation, it loses some of its power.
- Get a different perspective by looking at your situation from another’s position
- Call it out by recognizing the emotion involved.
- Talk to yourself as if you are another person
Much of the hold of emotions is the meaning that we add to them. We assume that there is a reason that the bad things that we sense are happening to us; there is malicious intent. That is an egotistical interpretation of the situation. Letting go usually means just accepting that events cause feelings.
Three – walk your why. Most people have some set of life goals or principles that form the background for their choices. Sometimes people are very aware of these principles, but sometimes they are not. “Walking your why” is the art of living by your own personal set of values – the beliefs and behaviors that you hold dear and that give you meaning and satisfaction. Identifying and acting on the values that are truly your own – not those imposed on you by others. An emotional reaction can be a clue that the situation that you face, and thus your emotional reaction, contains a contradiction to your values. Recognizing these overarching values or goals can give you the motivation or support to make a choice.
Our lives are sensitive to the wants and needs of others. Much of our social interaction is controlled by these expectations. It can become a habit to go along and induce a kind of mindless decision making. In many aspects of life this can be efficient and effective, but there are decisions that need to be mindful. This is where you need to be guided by your own priorities and not others’.
Values can be characterized by being:
- Freely chosen
- Ongoing
- Guide, not constraints
- Active
- Useful for bringing you closer to an ideal life (in your terms)
- Free of social comparisons
Some people in high school are asked to write a letter to their future self to provide advice or a reminder of what had been important to them at a younger age. Of course, the true purpose is to reveal what is important now as a guide to decision making during the coming period of developing independence. This “continuity of self” is at the heart of the why that should be driving your decisions. Living by these values may not be easy, but it does not cause the sort of emotional toll that living contrary to them does. Often decisions become much clearer and the emotion drains away from a situation when you can recall your own values and goals. I have paired values and goals, but the book makes clear that goals are subordinate to values in this framework. I have suggested that understanding your “why” can make choosing easier, but it does not always make it easy. Every choice creates a loss and humans are averse to loss. “Walking our why” permits us to accept this loss in service to a greater gain.
Four – move on. This is the stage where the grounds for the decision have become clear and it is time to decide and act. However, it is not necessary to take dramatic action. It might be much more practical take small actions. An undercurrent in this book is that the sort of situations that create emotional distress tend to be more chronic than acute. Something that comes to a head may be the result of accumulation of small things. Undoing the situation can be done by accumulating small things too. A small thing, repeated routinely, becomes a big thing. Doing small things allows you to experiment and find better ways to achieve your purpose. If you try to make it into a big thing, you might be reluctant to try things until they are perfected. It is easier to get started when the change is small. In interpersonal contexts where you value the relationship, you can think of these small actions as turning towards the other person – as opposed to turning away.
A barrier to people using a “tiny tweak” approach is a fixed mindset, the belief that things can’t be changed. The alterative approach is called a growth mindset and supposes that most basic qualities of people are capable of evolution. It is a version of the nature versus nurture debate. With respect to change, we often think of change in before/after terms. If we recognize change as a process, it is much easier for us to see that small steps are how we get started, and results from small steps can make it easier for us to make more small changes
A malleable sense of self is a cornerstone of emotional agility. People who have a growth mindset and who see themselves as agents in their own lives are more open to new experiences, more willing to take risks, and more resilient in rebounding from failure. They are less likely to mindlessly conform to others’ wishes and values and more likely to be creative and entrepreneurial. All this adds up to better performance, whether that’s in the C-suite, R&D, Ranger training, or relationships.
A malleable sense of self increases autonomy. Autonomous people must be able to change and they can’t be dependent on others to “fix” things. When they want something, they make it happen – and sometimes they fail. They must accept the failure, and decide how to continue. This is one facet of moving on.
A second facet relates to “competence” in the broadest sense and its relationship to practice. There are parts of our lives where we are over-competent and others where we are under-competent. Over-competence puts us on autopilot, which means we stop paying attention. When we are under-competent, we avoid engaging with those areas. In other words, we are no longer exposed to conditions that involve potential failure and we stop practicing our emotional agility. To develop our capacity for agility, we need to experience the challenges that involve risks. The author calls this the teeter-totter principle and suggests that our lives should contain activities where we are balanced between competence and challenge. We practice and maintain our resilience by using it.
An extended portion of the book illustrates the effects of practice in different parts of life. Suffice to say, to become a person who is thriving, you want to focus on expanding both the range of what you do and the depth or skill with which you do it. It is the practice in dealing with emotional shocks that makes you better at it.
So to review, we can develop greater emotional agility by practice. Step 1 is acknowledge the emotion. Step 2 – create some distance between “you” and the emotion. Step 3 – remember your intention and choose actions that reflect your intentions. Step 4 – engage in activities that increase your breadth and depth of experience; practice.
The final section of the book discusses some stress situations. A common sort of stress, related to emotional resilience, is speaking up. For example, it is common for nurses to observe doctors making mistakes but not feel that they have the right to speak up. Co-pilots remain silent and subordinates do not challenge their supervisors. Though the people in lower status positions know that they need to say something, they are gripped by anxiety or fear. More broadly, people are reluctant to speak up when a group seems to approach consensus. In all these cases, it pays to ask if it OK to keep quiet (because the issue does not really matter) or speak up (because your values do not let the issue go). For a nurse dedicated to the health of patients, recognizing the higher value of speaking up makes speaking easier.
A second kind of stress relates to the feeling of overwork. People feel reluctant to refuse requests for effort or to report later that they will be unable to complete work previously promised. In one sense, this reflects our inability to judge our capacity in the future meeting our desire to please others meeting our desire to feel useful. When we feel this stress, remind yourself that “stressed is not who you are. When you say, “I’m stressed,” you conflate your whole self…with the emotion. This is how we step away. We can then prioritize based on our “why”. When you explain your decision to others, based on this “why”, there often acceptance of the logic and you can act with greater ease.
A final source of stress is seeing problems that you can’t solve. This can be a trap; we can’t solve everything. Accepting this fact lowers the tension between your ideal and your actual state. Unrealistic expectations are a source of stress, and becoming more realistic is a form of stepping back.
The summary of this book is that becoming emotional agile is a process. It requires experimentation to discover what works. There will be set backs and apparent mistakes. You will survive these mistakes and become more capable. Agility is not the same as immunity; it is the same as resilient or recovery. It is like playing through minor pain and learning that the pain was just pain.
Comment and interpretation
- Experts have a kind of tunnel vision based on their expertise that has been called “trained incapacity”. The consequence of this incapacity is that they have a number of pre-formed responses to problems that they rapidly access when presented with a problem. In the context of this book, these experts begin to hear an explanation of the problem, stop listening and substitute a narrative from their own experience, and describe the solution from that case. They did not hear the problem actually being presented and thus may offer an inappropriate solution. This is an interesting observation in the context of problem solving. How do we set aside our own narratives so that we can listen and understand THEIR problem rather than our own?
- This book is full of interesting examples that illustrate the main story. The author comments that a group of employees can be sent to a “ropes course” to develop leadership or team skills. How often does the highest ranked employee assume that they are the leader? Would they do this even if a member of the group was newly out of the Army and had recent experience with the activities involved? It is not just a narrative after a while but an identity that gets built. In our work lives, these identities also trap us.
- One of the paradoxes about negative emotions is that they may make us more effective. We develop better arguments, become more determined and more attentive when we experience negative emotional states. It is not an argument in favor of negative emotions as much as a recognition that they serve a functional purpose.
- In the section about showing up, the author described the importance of developing a vocabulary to talk about emotions. When you don’t have a vocabulary, you can’t give a name to your emotions and you can’t recognize them for yourself. In the world of fantasy, it is well known that knowing the true name of something gives you power over it. Nowhere is this more true that in confronting your feelings. The better your vocabulary, the greater your power.
- Many people hate being alone with their thoughts. The book describes an experiment where people were asked to sit quietly for 10 minutes with no distractions. Some people in this situation preferred to give themselves mild shocks rather than waiting. Learning to sit quietly is both easy and hard. The easy part is to do nothing for a bit. The hard part is to accept that your mind will wander and that will you will feel like you must be doing it wrong. Like many practices, this is one you build up. In the beginning, devote a few minutes. With practice, extend the time a bit. It is not a contest with yourself or others. Ten minutes is plenty (there is nothing wrong with longer either).
- When I was very young, I was very underweight and relatively weak. This meant I was not good at sports (not the most helpful thing for a young boy) and was generally picked last (not that great for self-image either). I wanted to be better and I soon realized that proficiency in sports can be changed by practice. I practiced and practiced. By junior high school, I was not picked last. By college (we are talking strictly club and pickup sports here), I was picked in the upper half and I was competitive in a number of individual sports. This is not a Michael Jordan story of going from good to great. This is a Michael story of going from bad to good. I learned that patience and persistence pays. If this sounds like I have it altogether, other parts of my life are much more fixed. It is in the fixed parts of my mindset that I need to continue working, acting on my values and taking tiny steps. It has worked before and can work again.
- The book takes an aside to discuss the concept of grit. Grit, or the capacity to persist in the face of defeat, can be valuable. But, it may also be sensible to consider goal adjustment. Blindly persisting in an effort is not resilient – it is pig-headed. Giving up at the first sign of resistance is just as non-functional. Sometimes, goal adjustment restores the balance of sufficient challenge.
- Organizations are seeking to become more agile. This book explores a general approach to agility. A sub-text of the book that I have given less attention to is that bravery has a role in agility. Agile people become able to take more risks because they know they can handle the backlash of failure. For an organization to become more agile, its members must become more agile and this means more autonomous. People can hide in the herd and be autonomous. So it is a bit of a reinforcing cycle that brave behavior creates moments that build agility that enable more bravery. When you see someone stepping out, get behind them to help move ahead. If their effort fails, praise the attempt and do a post-mortem. They are not the failure, but have a chance to improve (just like you do).
*text in italics is directly quoted from the book
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