Emotional Agility with Dr. Susan David

This is the In Myland Show. Welcome. Thank you for having me and being open to my message. I love your message.

As you know, we were talking off camera. So let's start out with something basic. Emotional agility. I read that book in a day and a half, a while ago.

And it's one of those books where most of my recollections have stayed very fresh. And so even preparing for this, it stayed with me. Because frankly, some of the things you said in that book made me rethink some of the things I teach. And I'm always open to growing and getting better.

But why don't we start with a basis. What is emotional agility to begin with? Well, I'm going to start with a very short definition and then I'll do it a little bit longer. Okay.

The very short definition is that it's about being able to be healthy with yourself, with your psychology, your thoughts, your emotions, your stories, the stuff that's inside of you. And really emotional agility is the critical skills that help you to be a healthy human being. And why is this important? Because how we ultimately deal with our inner worlds is everything.

Drives everything. Drives how we love, how we live, how we parent, how we come to our relationships, how we build our businesses and even our healthy behaviors. So it's about being healthy. But if I have to break it down a little bit more, it's about skills that enable us to be curious and learning with our emotions and our difficult experiences, to be compassionate with ourselves and also have the courage to do what's difficult when it's aligned with what matters to us.

Yeah. I also, as beautifully said, and since you wrote the book, you should be able to say that the best. But I have to say that one of the things, and we'll dive into this a little bit later is, you know, the concept of being a little bit more agile and not rigid in your emotions, meaning to be willing to embrace the ones that most people connotate as negative ones. We don't always have to be chasing happiness.

And I want to talk about that. But I picture this beautiful little five-year-old girl when I think of you and where this was sort of born from. And I'd like you to share that. So your father seemed like such a special man and had really multiple defining moments that you talk about him.

But this idea that we all have one shared, I heard you say that we all have one shared experience in our lives that we share the most, which is death and our thoughts of death. And I talk about this. It's amazing we're just meeting now because I talk about this so much that I believe that conversation to some extent is going on in our minds almost all the time, the contemplation of that event. So would you take them back to the five-year-old you?

Because that leads to this incredible, someday this book and these breakthroughs. So would you share that? This journey, this journey. So yes, I, as you can hear by my accent, I am not American or Australian.

I grew up as a white South African in apartheid South Africa. And it was very much a country, a community that was committed to denial, you know, to not seeing the other. And as you'll see in my work and my TED talk, this idea of seeing the self, seeing the other plays a really important part. So I recall when I was around five years old, when you are five, you start becoming aware of your own mortality.

And I recall night up to night finding my way into my parents' bed, in between the two of them. And I would say to my father, I'm worried that, you know, one of you isn't going to be here in the morning. I'm worried that something's going to happen. And this is very normal.

People as five-year-olds, they start becoming aware that, you know, that there is an end at some point. Wow. And so I'm lying between my parents and I'm saying to my father, promise me you'll never die, promise me you'll never die. And my father, you know, could have done what so many of us with beautiful intentions do with our kids, which is to say, don't worry about it.

Everything will be okay. I'll be around. My father didn't. He comforted me with soft pads and kisses, but he never lied.

He didn't try to build some false buffer, some false positivity between me and reality. What he said to me is, Susie, we all die and it's normal to be scared. And one of the things that you'll find is the capacity to, even in the face of fear, be courageous. So now I want to fast forward 10 years when I'm having these conversations.

I don't know that 10 years later when I'm 15, my father will actually be diagnosed with terminal cancer. And I recall my mother, it was a Friday and I recall my mother coming and saying to me, go say goodbye to dad. We knew that that was his last day. And I go into this room where my father's lying and his eyes are closed, but I know that he knows that I'm there because I have always felt seen with him.

And I kiss him goodbye. I tell him I love him. And I then go off to school because my mother has, with good intentions said to me, you want to keep things as normal and routinized as possible. And then this is where it kind of segues into, I think what so many people's experiences, which is I go up to school and my father dies and the, the months go and the seasons go.

And I'm this little 15 year old, not dropping a grade, trying to put on a brave face. People ask me how I'm doing. And I say, I'm okay. I'm okay.

But you know, in truth, we were struggling. My mother had lost the love of her life. She was raising three children. We had financial difficulties and I started to spiral down fast.

And so then the last little strand of this, which, which then breaks into my career is I was firing. I was not doing well psychologically. And one day we had this English teacher who handed out these blank notebooks to the class. And she said, write, tell the truth, write like no one's reading.

And it was such a remarkable experience because I felt like for the first time, I was actually, instead of doing this forced positivity, the master of being okay, but inside I'm crumbling, actually I felt invited to show up to the authenticity of my experience. And this was revolutionary for me in a way that actually shaped my entire career. I started to become aware of and interested in what the narratives that we have in society about positivity, positive emotions, negative emotions that sound good on the surface, but that are actually devastating to our capacity to be healthy with ourselves and also healthy human beings in the world so that we can deal with others pain and the reality of a fragile and beautiful world. My gosh.

So that just even the concept of an emotion is positive or negative. I can be honest with you. I've repeated that sentence thousands of times, kind of unconsciously. And I think, I think when you wrote the book, obviously it made an impact on me, but probably little did you know that it may be required reading during a pandemic like this.

And one thing you said there, I just want to say to the parents that more and more people that I know that have five and six and seven year olds have been telling me that their children have been telling them that they're concerned about death. And then maybe they can go through a bout of unhappiness at that age for no explained reason. And I'm wondering now that you said that I sort of a deeper understanding, but I want to ask you these times we find ourselves in there's, there's racial reckoning and unrest happening and social justice going on. There's COVID.

There's all this noise about the election, unemployment, stress, anxiety. There's not a whole lot of positive things on social media, certainly not a traditional media. And I'd like you to talk about, you know, I want people to consider this thought because I think it's so powerful that there are two types of emotions, I guess you would say, but how should someone deal with, think of emotions that aren't happiness, that aren't success, that aren't bliss, that are, that are, that are fear, anxiety, worry, maybe even depression. How would you, what would you say to people who are experiencing a lot of those emotions and maybe avoiding them thinking they're negative?

So, yeah. And let's explore these narratives more because I think they're so powerful. But what I would say is two things. Number one, emotions of teachers.

Okay. Even your most difficult emotions are teachers. And what I mean by this is if you're feeling bored at work and you can be as busy as anything, but still bored, same old, same old. That emotion of bored might be a signpost that you value more learning and growth and that you don't have enough of it.

If you have a difficult emotion of loneliness, that loneliness might be signposting to you that even in a very busy household, because we all at home more than ever, that you value intimacy and connection and that you need more of it. So the most difficult emotions signpost the things that we care about. And when you push aside these difficult emotions, not only does it not work, not only does pushing aside difficult emotions actually contribute to lower levels of wellbeing, high levels of depression and anxiety and lower chance of success in the things that you're trying to do, but pushing aside these difficult emotions stops us from navigating the world as it is, which is a world in which you might be feeling bored or lonely. And so it's stopping you from learning.

So the two things I would say is our emotions are teachers. And that's very different from a world that would have us believe that if we just think positive that we can manifest everything that we think. And then the second thing I would say is emotions are teachers, but it's really important to also recognize that emotions are data. So they contain signposts of the things that we care about, but they're not directives.

Just because I feel bad with, you know, my colleague in this business that I'm trying to grow doesn't mean I need to have it up with him. Just because I am feeling really frustrated with, you know, my partner, myself doesn't mean that I then need to leave the room. So our emotions are data, not directives. Wow.

I want you to hear this. This is like, for me, this could be a life breakthrough for a couple million people right now, but I think this positive negative thing, and again, it's just occurring to me as I was rethinking your work, that I think we think happy people are successful people, meaning they should have high self-esteem. And I think we've actually attached in our lives that if I feel more anxiety, fear, or worry, that somehow I'm less than these people who are experiencing these other emotions. Don't you think so?

So this is exactly the issue that we are facing, which is we have this narrative that conflates happiness and success. And what happens is that when people feel normal, these are normal human experiences, they are normal to the extent that Charles Darwin wrote about emotions, including difficult emotions, as being core to our ability to adapt and thrive in the world. That when you experience difficult emotions, they help you to communicate with others, but they also help you to communicate with yourself in terms of how you should shift things, whether there's a dissonance between you and your values, whether you're feeling distant from what matters to you. And so what has happened is this, I think, just remarkably sad and challenging experience that we have with emotions that I think is actually contributing to the extraordinary statistics that we have around depression and anxiety, which is that when people experience normal emotions, they are now seen as good or bad, positive or negative.

So what do we then do? We then try to push them aside. We say things like, I'm unhappy in my job, but at least I've got a job, so I should just get on with it. I need to put on a brave face.

There's this narrative of what I call the tyranny of positivity, where even people who are dying of cancer are told to just be positive, which takes them away from their experience. And what you spoke about earlier, how do we possibly have conversations around racial justice and showing up to the pain of other people if we have a narrative that that pain is somehow weak? What that then does is it creates a complete divide where only if you are being positive, then are you allowed in my inner circle. If you're being negative, then you're toxic, and I'm going to cut you off.

And so this is very, very difficult. I actually don't believe that we are going to be able to heal society effectively. And I know that sounds like a very wide-ranging proclamation, but I think that social healing comes about through our ability to be with difficult emotions more, our own difficult emotions and others, because internal pain always comes out. So it's amazing.

That's an amazing statement. That's an amazing statement, because I must say to you, I think people also conflate what toxicity is. So people that experience a broad range of emotions aren't necessarily toxic. Toxic is someone who's intentionally out to hurt you, intentionally antagonistic towards you.

That's somebody perhaps you want to remove from your life, but not somebody who experiences a broad range of emotions. In fact, they're more interesting people. I like the contradiction. I actually often say, my best friends aren't all very wealthy people by any means, but they're all pretty complex people.

I love people that have a complexity of emotions, a complexity of personality. And I think we suppress our personality. I think we attach our self-esteem to having positive emotions. And when we have negative ones, we think we're less than people that we see celebrating all the time.

But I wanted to ask you something specific was, and your work's helped me so much. I have a program I did a long time ago, blissful dissatisfaction. It basically says something similar. You just say a lot better than I do to what you were just describing.

But I think there's one of the reasons we, and I want you to help people with this. I think the other reason we avoid these emotions that have been labeled as negative is that when we experience an emotion, typically it triggers a behavior in us. And oftentimes, because we have this false belief, this emotion we're experiencing somehow reduces our self-esteem. It typically triggers a negative pattern of behavior from us.

And then we suppress the emotion even more. And so is there something someone can do that the unraveling doesn't start to, what I call the stacking, where the emotion triggers a behavior that we then want to avoid. Is there something someone can do strategically? Yes, yes.

So there are so many powerful strategies. These are things that people can learn. And you know what you spoke to earlier, which is so often when people are struggling, they'll say, I just want this to go away. I want the difficulty motion to go away because somehow there's this idea that difficulty emotions point to the fact that we're not successful.

And one of the things that I think about so much is, you know, if you think about the only people who never experienced disappointment, the frustration that comes with failure, the only people who never have their hearts broken, they are dead. They are dead. So thinking that you want to live life in a way that is just happy, that is a dead person's goal. We don't get to have a meaningful career or leave the world a better place or raise a family without stress and discomfort.

You know, discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life. So to your question then, how do you start to capture this practically? The first thing I would say is that often when people have difficulty emotions, they start to engage in, as I mentioned, these type one emotions and type two emotions. The type one emotion is, I feel sad, I'm feeling stressed, I'm feeling angry, I'm feeling lonely, that's type one.

Type two is when you start layering a judgment about whether you should or shouldn't have the emotion. I'm unhappy that I'm unhappy. You know, I'm so stressed about the fact that I'm stressed because I'm worried that being so stressed is going to cause me to die prematurely or whatever it is. So a very important first part of emotional agility is quite simply, and it is actually a fairly simple choice, which is to end the struggle with your difficulty emotions by dropping the rope.

And what I mean by this is, is to move away from the space where you second guess or basically guess like yourself as to whether you should or shouldn't be allowed to feel something and just notice that this is what you're feeling. And especially to try to notice that feeling with compassion. It's tough to be able to run a business or grow a business in a pandemic. I'm feeling anxious in the shadow of illness and death.

It's normal to be anxious. So if you can adapt a level of compassion with yourself, that can be really powerful. And compassion is often thought of as being, oh, it's letting yourself off the hook. It's being weak.

It's being lazy. But, you know, we've all been in restaurants. And I look forward to today when I can go into restaurants again. But we've all been in restaurants.

And I'll describe this. And I can talk to more practical strategies as well. But we've all been in a restaurant where we've seen a very beautiful interaction. And that is you see a little toddler running away and exploring the restaurant.

And the toddler turns around, looks, sees the parent or the caregiver there, giggles, and runs more. So in other words, what they do is they keep turning back, making sure that their parents are there. and Then they go and explore more and explore more and explore more. Now, what is it that is going on here?

One of the most beautiful psychologists, John Bowlby, described how what parents are really doing in the situation is they are providing what is called a secure base for the child. It's the fact that the child knows that if there is trouble, they can come running back and they will be looked after. It's that that allows them to explore, take risks, learn and grow. Now, take the same idea and apply it to yourself.

When you are kind to yourself, when you have your own back, when you know that even if things don't go well, you will still love yourself and hold yourself because there is a five-year-old in you that needs love and nurturance. When you do that, what do you do? You are basically creating a context in which you are able to take risks, to put your hand up for a new opportunity. And so that's where this myth of self-compassion, which is self-compassion is about being weak and lazy, is so wrong.

People who are self-compassionate are actually more likely to take risks, more likely to explore and grow and learn because they know if something goes wrong, they will be there for themselves. So that's one. Those are some strategies. I'm going to help with other very practical strategies if you like.

So you let me know. So good. I'm just – have your own back. I've never heard anybody say that before.

We booked this interview quite a while ago, and so I was refreshing myself on your work during an interesting time for me. I just want to share this with you because it helped me, and I want to validate what you're saying, and then I'll ask you another question, but I just want to share this. So my dad's been sick for a very long time. He's had cancer, and his health has deteriorated pretty substantially recently in some scary moments.

About that same time, I had somebody that I care about very much let me down, almost a form of – by the way, no one in my family, if everyone's watching this show – but a friend of mine, kind of a form of betrayal and sort of reveal part of them that I was just shocked existed and very hard on me. Normally what I would do as an achiever, right, would be I'm going to power through this. I'm going to be better on the other side. I'm going to be stronger, especially men I think oftentimes are wired to have to do this.

And I was actually prepping for this during that, even though it was a little bit ago. And I said, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to sit with these emotions and experience them. I hadn't done that in a long time.

I even cried, which I very rarely cry, and I want to cry more now. I actually cried in front of a group too. And you know what I found on the other side of it? It was an unbelievable peace about things, an unbelievable comfort about everything will be okay.

I learned some things about myself, and ironically, the strength that I wanted to find that I thought if I just kind of shoved this stuff to the side, I found through letting myself sit with these emotions and not feel less than because I had them. People know my work. I'm not a mamsy-pamsy-foofy dude at all. I'm telling you that that made a huge difference for me.

And I want you to address the part that did. Go ahead. I can see you want to jump in on this. No, no, no.

It's beautiful. Continue, and I'll add. Well, what I was careful of, and I want you to talk about this in your reply, was I didn't say I am during it. I'd like you to talk about that and anything else that occurred to you when I was saying that.

Yes. So firstly, really what you are doing is the equivalent of what that teacher did. Write to tell the truth. Write like no one's reading.

And the false narrative that we have is that we will be stronger and better through positivity. But actually, we become stronger and better through going through and sitting and learning from the difficulty motion. We generate a sense of insight about ourselves, a sense of resilience, a sense of what you need to do in the situation. And I'll describe what this means from a practical perspective.

The first is what you point to, which is I am. So when often we feel a difficult experience, like we will use language that basically says I am. Okay. I am sad.

I am angry. I am stressed. But think about what you are doing in your language. What you are basically doing is saying I am all of me, 100% of me is defined by the emotion.

But you aren't your emotion. You are a person who has emotions, but you aren't your emotion. You also contain your wisdom, your values, your insight, your intention, your breathing, your groundedness, your love. There's so much that is beyond that single defining I am.

So what I would say to listeners is if you're feeling that you are having a difficult emotion, it can be really powerful to create space between you and the emotion. Because, of course, when you say something like I am sad, it's almost like the sadness is a cloud in the sky and you have become the cloud. You know, you have become the sad cloud. But you are not the cloud.

You are the sky. You are, as every human being, is capacious and beautiful and complex and able enough to experience all of their emotions. You know, the sadness is one cloud in the sky, but there's other parts that we can bring. So what is a way that we can do this?

The first is instead of saying I am sad, I am angry, see if you can just label your thought, your emotion, your feeling, your story for what it is. And here's an example. I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. I'm noticing that this is my I'm not good enough story.

I'm noticing the thought that I'm being undermined. When you notice your thoughts, your feelings, your stories for what they are, they are thoughts, feelings, and stories. As I mentioned earlier, data, not directives. What you do is you open critical linguistic space, but actually emotional, psychological space so that other parts of you can come forward.

And, you know, I'm sure you've brought up at some point in your podcast, but I think it's beautiful to I think one of the most powerful ideas in human history is this idea that was first spoken to in this very particular way by Viktor Frankl. Between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space is our power to choose. And in that choice lies our growth and our freedom.

When we are hooked by a difficult thought emotion and story, then there's no space between stimulus and response. I am sad. I'm going to have it out with this person. I'm angry.

I feel betrayed. I'm going to just ignore them now. But when you start using this, like I'm noticing that this is what I'm feeling, what it does is it helps you to create that space between stimulus and response so that you can bring other parts of yourself into the space. And ultimately, instead of acting out of your emotions, you are moving into your values and being able to bring the best of who you are forward in the situation.

So that's a practical example. I can give so many, but let me know if that's helpful. It's so helpful. A couple things occurred to me.

One, everyone listening to this, I think, would love to wake up with your voice in their ear every morning. It's so soothing and pleasing. It's easy to feel at peace and happy listening to you. So we've talked a lot about personal stuff here.

You know, one thing about Susan you don't know is that she's a highly sought-after business and management expert. In fact, Emotionally Julia, I think it was a Harvard Business Review, called it the Management Idea of the Year. And so we need a little granular on business, too. So we know a lot of entrepreneurs listen to this.

So I'd like you to talk to the leaders, and then also, what if you just find your company in an environment where, justifiably, employees are scared, right? Just profits are down. I own a restaurant, and everybody knows we survived the summer because we could sit outside, but here comes the fall and the winter, and we don't know what we're going to do. So maybe to the leaders and just overall culture, what would you say to somebody?

Yeah, so these critical principles of emotional agility apply across contexts. They apply to us as individuals, but also, you know, to the way we parent and to our organizations. So often what happens in organizations is people have, again, this idea of, you know, just be positive. Of course, organizations don't call it just be positive.

They call it just getting on with it. Or they call it you're either with me or against me. You're either on the bus or off the bus. You know, it's this idea that you've just got to forge forward.

But when you think about this example that I gave earlier with the child running off and it's a secure base, what the leader is doing, the effective leader is doing, is they are creating that same context for their employees. And they're not doing it by faking. They're not doing it by pretending that everything will be okay. They are doing it by saying, it is normal to be scared.

Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is fear of walking. It is normal to be scared. And so there's this remarkable, you know, if you can bear with me nerding for a little bit, there's this remarkable work on this idea in very practical ways in organizations.

Imagine you are someone who is going to hospital for a very complex procedure. And you decide you want to go to the hospital that is the most safe hospital. So you want the hospital with the lowest levels of error reporting. And in your mind, you've decided that's a safe hospital.

But actually, what the research shows is you would be wrong. The hospital with the lowest levels of errors reported is often the most unsafe hospital. And here's why. Because there are people in that hospital setting who are often seeing things that happen where they are worried about the way of procedures being done or they feel that, like, something's risky.

But where they feel that they are unable to speak up, they are unable to bring their emotional truth to the workplace, what do they do? They just keep quiet. And so the hospital is now not able to actually understand errors, learn from errors, and put in place systematic change. And so all organizations are saying things like, oh, we want people to be agile.

We want people to be innovative and creative and all of these things. But, you know, innovation is in an intimate relationship with failure. Collaboration is in an intimate relationship with conflict. You don't get to have innovation if you are completely closed off to the difficult emotions, the frustration, the challenge that comes with maybe not succeeding.

And so you don't get to have, you know, an agile organization or be an agile leader unless you're actually open to the emotions of the people around you. So what is this? Practically, again, it looks like doing away with the idea that people should just feel something because you're telling them to feel it, but rather letting people know that their emotional truth matters. And also, as leaders, and this now comes to your question about, you know, restaurants, for instance, or the experience that we're all having, trying to do the, everything's going to be okay, you know, brah, brah, brah, actually just makes people trust you less because they can see what's going on.

And so what is so powerful is when you have a leader, a human, a parent who says, I don't have the answers. It's normal to be scared. Who do we want to be even in the midst of this challenge? How do we want to come to one another?

How do we want to team together? How do we want to be together as a family? And so what you're bringing is your values front and center in this context. Unbelievably, unbelievably great.

I love you. I just think this is so great. I love you. You can talk to us.

I don't want to keep going. I have to say that I went and spoke recently to a sports team, and they asked me to come in and kind of move the troops and also just do an assessment of how they can improve. So I said to the head coach, let me tell you the good news. We have no conflict, no problems.

Everybody's on the same page. Everybody gets along. Everybody's fired up. And I said, coach, that concerns me.

He said, why would that concern you? And I said, there ought to be, you know, a collaboration of ideas. Innovation, creativity, teamwork comes with a little bit of I think this, no, you think that. Here's why I believe this.

And you said something with your father earlier. And father and mother is the ultimate leader while we're here on earth. And so if you're the things that work of being a great father or mother, I believe work as being a great CEO or executive of a company. And you said this sentence earlier, and I want to just make sure everybody hears it.

Because I tried to do this as an entrepreneur. I didn't do it when I was young. Because when I was young, everything had to be fired up and positive all the time. And when you do that, you violate this principle that you said so beautifully about your father, which is I always felt seen with my father.

And that's such a beautiful thing to say. And I want to do a better job of that with my daughter. When you said that, I went, Bella needs to feel seen with me more often. And I believe that's a great leader in business, that people feel seen.

And if you're just always fired up and positive, that suppresses these other feelings people have. And they know you don't see them. And so that's huge when you said that. Sorry.

Yeah, because your experience is real. And because being positive all the time is unsustainable. And being positive all the time is a form of denial. And only allowing, whether it's in society or in our family, only allowing so-called positive emotions is not helping us to deal with the world as it is.

It's rather hoping that we deal with some imaginary version of the world. And so, you know, one of the words, and you mentioned this before, a conversation that I spoke to in my TED talk is this beautiful word, sabubona. And sabubona is a Zulu word. You hear it every day on the streets of South Africa.

It means hello. Sabubona, yeah, what's sabubona? But sabubona, literally translated, means I see you. And by seeing you, I bring you into being.

And it is, you know, body chills. Because what does it take then in the way we see ourselves that helps to bring us into being? And how can we see our children? And what this, again, looks like practically is that very often we have very good intentions.

You know, our child says something like, you know, Jack didn't invite me to his birthday party. Now I'm not going to invite him to mine. And very often, you know, as parents with great intentions, our heart is breaking because we never wanted our child to be rejected. And so what do we do?

We jump in and we say things like, oh, don't worry, I'll play with you. You know, let's speak together. I'll phone Jack's parents and I'll talk to them. But what are we basically texting to our children?

What we are letting them know is that some emotions are good and some emotions are bad and that emotions are to be feared. You know, we need to do away with some of them. Only when we're happy is everything fine. But here's the fact.

Our children are going to grow up in a complex and fragile world in which their hearts will be broken multiple times. And the greatest gift that we can give our children is helping them to deal with emotions that are going to come with the reality of love. Because ultimately, their capacity to deal with their emotions is going to be the cornerstone of their mental health and well-being, but also their ability to self-regulate, to motivate themselves, to motivate others, to influence, to stay the course. And so here's what I think is really helpful from an emotional agility perspective with children, is when a child is experiencing pain, instead of, you know, with good intentions, we often jump in, but instead of jumping in, see if you can sub-warner your child's experience.

You know, I see you. I love you. I see you. The second thing that is really helpful is help your child to label their emotions.

So we know that children as young as two and three years old, but going right up into the teens and young adulthood, children who are more able to label their emotions accurately have high levels of well-being. And just by the way, we haven't applied this to adults, but it applies as equally. If you use language like, I'm stressed, I'm stressed, I'm stressed, and you use this big umbrella to label what you're feeling, there is a world of difference between stress and, in your case, with the example you gave earlier, betrayal, stress and disappointment, stress and that gnawing feeling of, I'm in the wrong job, in the wrong career, or this business that I've invested into is not going according to plan. When you label everything as stress, it doesn't actually help you to put parameters on what it is you now need to be doing.

And as I've said already, our emotions are data, not directives. So when you experience a difficult emotion, instead of using a big umbrella term, see if you can be more granular. You know, what are two other options underneath what you're feeling? And what I know is, in children and adults, when we label our emotions more accurately, it actually helps us to understand the cause of that emotion and what it is you need to be doing.

This thing that I'm labeling as stress is actually depletion, and what I need to do is now engage in greater levels of care. This thing that I'm... calling anger is actually disappointment i need to have a difficult conversation so with our children so we'll want to help them to label their emotions but another thing that's just so powerful is our emotions signpost our values our emotions signpost our values lonely often connection grief is often love looking for a home a child who says mommy jackson invite me to his birthday party is often a child that is signaling friendship is important and so you have this powerful capacity to then talk to your child about what does being a good friend look like how do you want to be a friend and what you're doing is you're helping your child to develop their character their moral compass their values and when the world is changing around us as it is and as it will be it is those values that keep us on an even keel and keep us grounded you know just as the gymnast is able to be flexible and agile because of a stable core i'm sitting here to see i i've never heard someone connect emotions and values i've just never heard that before and it's absolutely completely true you know i started the show people my audience is every show right i'm sitting here a little bit longer if you don't mind because i'm emotional a little bit just because i started the show with the idea of impacting people's lives and to some extent changing their lives and i just know what we're talking about right now given this time is changing lives i know this is changing my life it's improving my life and and um this idea that you're better i want to unpack one thing you're a better parent when your children feel i see you you're a better spouse when your spouse believes i see you you're a better business leader when the people within your stewardship believe i see you these are significant things the one thing i haven't asked you about that i have to ask you now though is personal relationships meaning spouse intimate relationships how do i know this is a tough one if these emotions aren't negative or positive necessarily how do i know if i'm with somebody who is not regularly enough generating the emotion for me of connection and love bliss acceptance but i am regularly experiencing anxiety fear worry anger from someone so these are signals in relationship as well right so in a relationship how do i know i've been a healthy one if all of these emotions are okay or in the context of that i know it's a hard question that at some point you should be experiencing the other types of emotions as well if you're getting a complete dose all the time of anger and stress i would feel like i'm in a not good relationship true well so this is it's really interesting i i um one of the things that i've done and spoken about a bit in my work is how very often when we have difficulty emotions often what we do is one of two things we either bottle those emotions where we push them aside we force positivity and so on um but sometimes what we do is we do the opposite which is what i call brooding and brooding is when you get so stuck in our emotions we get victimized by our news feed we get victimized by what's going on in the world or what our day's been and um blocking and brooding actually looks so different the one is pushing emotions aside and the other is um really getting stuck in them but neither of these is effective from the perspective of mental health and well-being and both of these as it turns out are associated with lower quality in relationship we've already spoken about the bottling where people don't feel seen they feel like you're not coming to them authentically but brooding is often the person so concerned about how their day is terrible their day that it then is a um context that it's created that's very very difficult so if you are someone who is doing this in other words if you are the person who is giving off either the bottling or the brooding see if you can instead come to your emotions with greater levels of compassion labeling the emotions thinking about your values and so on if you are the person who's in the experiencing of it this is often where having this sense of you know as partners we often get so hooked in i'm right and you're wrong you know and you're saying this and i'm right and you're wrong and and we've all had that experience where we become so rigid or filtered about what we are seeing in another person that it starts to color everything we've all had that experience of you know we have an argument and we go to bed that night and we finally turn off the lights and then something compels us to turn on the lights again and tell the person why they are wrong and we are right as human beings we get so hooked on the idea of being right and wrong and this is especially so in relationships and so what i would ask is imagine the gods of right came down and said you are right you are right you are right you know this person is creating a difficult environment for you you are right you know this person betrayed you you are right okay your organization is treating you badly you are right you are right you're right you still have the opportunity to think about okay i may be right but is my response serving me okay i may be right but is my response serving me because you might be finding that in that interaction your your partners become so needy and you started to withdraw withdraw withdraw and they become more needy in the context of your withdrawal so i may be right but is my response serving me and is it serving the life and the love that i want this is why when you said at the beginning what is emotional agility and i said it's about being healthy with yourself it's about the compassion it's about the curiosity but i also mentioned the word courage it's the courage to take values connected steps because sometimes the answer to your question i may be right but is my response serving me sometimes the answer to that question might be a very difficult answer it might be that actually being in this relationship is discordant with my values and that's where you may need to have a very difficult conversation it may be that you've written on your mental chalkboard from when you were five or six years old um this idea of who you are and what kind of love you deserve and you've now outgrown that story and yet the partner that you with is still part of that story and so it may be that the relationship is no longer working or it may be that the two of you are able to come together and talk about you know separate from being right who do we want to be with one another yes and if you know we we all know this like we all know you can be in a relationship for years and still be lonely you can feel as your partner comes into the kitchen how you on your phone and that person's doing something else and you know they reach out for a hug and you can literally feel the guard going up and so one thing that can be very powerful in relationships is thinking about what i call tiny tweaks what are some small values aligned changes that you can make that bring you closer to being who you want to be in that relationship might be that you you know come in for a real hug even if it's in that moment but you do it every every day you know that you're not getting that opportunity go it may be that you're leaving your cell phone in the drawer rather than bring it to the dinner table so it's like what are values aligned changes that you can make and you know what's so powerful is a lot of times people think that in order to make a big change in their lives they've got to make a big change in their lives but the most powerful changes can often be tiny tweaks you know two degrees when you're sailing a boat and two degrees and two degrees and you land up in a very different part of the bay tiny tweaks matter this whole idea oh so wonderful this idea of values something i want to explore even more with myself um and that idea and relationships friendships too oh that i have these values and you know and this relationship delivering on they understand what they are have i expressed them to them i must say one thing to you and i'll ask you one last question because this has been so good but when you know how your work did help me about seeing people and i really i don't know obsessed is the right word i've really pondered it and so in this friendship recently where i had this sort of let down betrayal thing whatever you want to call it i let myself sit in those emotions and one of the great things that occurred to me in that was you know what is my part of this and part of what occurred to me was this person didn't feel loved and accepted and seen by me enough that they felt comfortable telling me something very difficult and it caused in them a behavior that then created another emotion in me well they weren't truthful about it but the fact is that my part of this is as a friend had they felt completely loved and seen and accepted they would have felt that i would protect them and they could have told me this difficult thing and so that's my part of it and it's made me in my other relationships more cognizant of making people making sure these beautiful people know i love you i see you i care about you you're accepted by me the good and the bad the things you're not proud of the things you are proud of if i only love you as a friend when you behave as a perfect human then i don't really love you and so that's true in all relationships this was true in my friendship so i just want to share that with you it made a big difference for me it's so it's so powerful and and it's a place that you got to by not just skimming over but by actually recognizing again that emotions are teachers and emotions are signposting what you care about and then having the courage because it does take courage you know emotional diversity is not just about oh being different emotions it's actually about values that get expressed on the ground you know values often feel like they are are abstract you know people talk about what are your values but values are qualities of action every day you have hundreds of choice points you know do i if my value is one of health do i go towards my value which is a brute or away from my value which is a muffin if my value is one of being inclusive then am i going towards the value of enabling voice or away from the value in shutting people down because they're so-called toxic so values are qualities of action and um and that's what you're allowing yourself to do you just answered my last question about value so you know that means we're in some kind of a flow state for sure because you just answered my question i have uh loved our time together today and i know my audience is going to go absolutely crazy and i can just i can feel some of their tears now i can feel some of i'm healing i can feel some of the leaders going i need to make some changes in the way i lead my organization you are remarkable and you're brilliant and you're so giving and generous and i just want to acknowledge you i think you're such a special human being and you really change people's lives and i'm so grateful if they want more of you where would they go to get more of you first you have to get emotional agility guys get the book i mean i know you all know that now but number one get the book where would they go get more is it your website is it social where would they go so thank you i feel so passionate about these ideas i'm so passionate about how these ideas are critical in terms of our bringing our power as human beings to the world so that we are wholehearted um where can people find me they can find me in emotional agility they can find me of course on social media um my ted talk the gift of power of emotional courage and then last one thing that a lot of people find really helpful around 140 000 people have taken a free quiz that i've got online uh it's a couple of questions and you get a free 10-page report and if you like or are interested it's very practical as well connecting with how you deal with your emotions and what your values are you can find that at susandavits.com forward slash learn all with a south african accent that's wonderful and by the way go take that quiz and go watch that ted talk you will not move what it's 16 minutes of like heaven you will love this ted talk so thank you so much susan thank you and everybody else make sure you're following me on instagram because i run the two-minute drill every day i make a post at 7 30 pacific time you make a comment you're in a drawing pick somebody every day they get all kinds of great rewards they fly my plane with me they get coached by me maxed out here they meet my guests my book all kinds of great stuff so follow me on instagram engage with me god bless you max out this is the environment show