Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 461: 4 Ways Not To Be Owned By Your Sh*t | Susan David

Episode Date: June 13, 2022

It’s completely natural when dealing with anxiety, depression, anger, shame, or any other unpleasant emotion, to just want it to go away.Guest Susan David says that these discomforts are the price of admission to being alive and offers an approach called emotional agility as a way to navigate them. Susan David, Ph.D. is a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of a book called Emotional Agility. Her TED Talk on the subject has been viewed more than eight million times. In this episode we talk about: Her definition of emotional agility The four skills of emotional agilityWhy she says our emotions are data, not directivesHow to move skillfully through a world that “conspires against us seeing ourselves”How to avoid emotional “fusion”The power of tiny tweaksAnd “emotional granularity”— what it is, why it matters and how to practice it Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/susan-david-461See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, it is completely natural, I assure you, when dealing with anxiety, depression, anger, shame, or any other unpleasant emotion to just want it to go away. But my guest today says that is a case of you having dead people's goals You may not feel anything when you're dead, but when you're alive she says discomfort is the price of admission So given those hard truths How are we gonna handle our stuff?

Especially in times of tumult like right now How are you gonna handle it denial compartmental, compartmentalization, self-medication. Susan David's answer is something called emotional agility. Susan David PhD is a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of a book called emotional agility. Her TED talk on the subject has been viewed more than eight million times. In this conversation, we talk about her definition

of emotional agility, the four skills of emotional agility. Why she says our emotions are data, not directives, how to move skillfully through a world that, as she says, conspires against us, seeing ourselves. How to avoid what she calls emotional fusion, the power of tiny tweaks, and emotional granularity, what it is, why it matters and how to practice it. Close listeners will recall that we talked to Brunei Brown about this very subject recently. Brunei gives a lot of credit and her work to Susan David. Heads up that we're dedicating this whole week on the show to helping you not be owned by your emotions coming up on Wednesday.

My friend Danny Goldman, author of the iconic bestseller emotional intelligence. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app.

It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10%.com. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family and experts the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where do memes come from? And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Dr. Susan David, welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm so excited to be with you today. Likewise, let's start here. What is

emotional agility? Emotional agility at its core is about being healthy with ourselves. It's about seeing ourselves, our difficult experiences, our thoughts, our emotions and our stories in ways that are compassionate, but still allow us to come to the world in action and in values. So, emotional agility in a deeper level is really the recognition that as human beings, we have every day difficult thoughts, thoughts about whether I'm good enough or whether we can cope. We have emotions, experiences like stress or disappointment or grief. And we have stories.

Some of our stories were written on our mental chalkboards when we were five years old. Stories about who we are, whether we're creative, whether we're lovable. And these thoughts, emotions and stories are normal. They're completely normal and they are the way that we as human beings make sense of the world. But we also know that we can get stuck in those experiences. And so emotional agility is the ability to be with those experiences in ways that are curious and compassionate and courageous and to still take values connected steps so that we come to our lives in the way

that we want and we are the people that we want to be. There's a lot to unpack there, but I guess my first response is it sounds like emotional agility either is or calls for a kind of fundamental foundational okayness. Yes, yes. When you ask that question, I'm reminded so much of this beautiful greeting that we have in South Africa. So you can hear from my accent, well, I live in Boston. I'm originally from South Africa. And there's a Zulu greeting that you hear every single day on the streets, and it's the greeting of Sauerbonna. And it literally means hello. But Sauerbonna, when you translate it in a little form, means I see you, and by seeing you, I bring you into being. And I think it's so extraordinary because if we think about this notion of seeing, how do we see our children, how do we see our spouses, how do we see others, but then also how do we see ourselves.

And so when you speak to this fundamental notion of OKNUS, it's not an OKNUS in a pretense. It's an OKNUS in love and self acceptance and an OKNUS in the recognition that as human beings, we have these experiences every day, experiences of grief and sadness and of pandemics and of fights and arguments and all the things that we have in life. And then there is also the essence of ourselves that has components of wisdom and values

and intention and that all of us have this okness in that we have the capacity to bring those parts of ourselves forward. So what is the connection between the okeness with all of your own chaos and cacophony internally and literally seeing somebody else and bringing them into being? Well, at a fundamental level, we can't really see other people if we cannot see ourselves. And we know we see in the world that internal pain always comes out. Internal pain comes out in the way we interact with our children in the way we love,

in the way we lead, in the state of the world. And so if we are unable to see ourselves effectively, if we engage with ourselves in a way that is maybe more about avoidance or denial and unwillingness to go to the difficult places in ourselves, then we don't actually develop the skills within ourselves to be in the world as it is, which is that the world also asks that we go to difficult places with others, that we are able to be compassionate with others that we are able to see others. And so a really important part of emotional agility is the recognition that if we are turning against the self, then that internal pain doesn't go away. That internal pain often comes out in the way we

treat the world and the earth and the connections that we have. You use these words in your phenomenally popular TED Talk. You say, how we deal with our inner world drives everything. Yeah, how we deal with our inner world drives everything. It drives how we love, how we live, it drives how we parent, it drives how we lead, and it drives how we interact beyond ourselves with our communities at large. And so it's interesting, Dan, because I think that when we think about emotional skills,

often we think about emotional skills in the social context, how do we have effect of conversations, how do we have difficult conversations, How do we have difficult conversations? But in truth, the most important conversations we will ever have are the ones we have with ourselves. And if we can have those conversations in ways that are curious and compassionate and courageous, then we become better equipped

at having the conversations that the world needs us to have. Right, we're in a constant exchange with the world. We may feel like we're isolated. Egos navigating a hostile world, but just to fall back on ridiculous cliches here, not ridiculous, but cliches nonetheless. We're stardust, right? I think that was Joni Mitchell has said that we love, love, Joni, love each other. My point is that it's hard to talk about this without lapsing into cliche, but we are part of the universe and we're always in exchange with it, even though that's both obvious and often overlooked.

If you don't deal with your own stuff, it's got to play out in your relationships with other people. Correct. Our internal pen always comes out. And to move from abstract into practicality, I think so much of experiences that I had when I was younger. I grew up as a white South African and a part of South Africa. And I was growing up in a community that was committed to denial, committed to not seeing. Because it's denial that makes 50 years of racist legislation possible,

while people convince themselves that they are doing nothing wrong. And so there we have a culture where there was denial going on, but it wasn't just denial of what was in front of us. It was also denial of the emotions that were coming up for people, the dissonance, the experiences. So I think we see this. We see the recognition that if we are unable to develop the skills that help us to be in the world, the world as it is, which is a world in which there is difficulty and pain, then we are unable to actually broker a more effective world. And I think this becomes profoundly important

because I've never met a parent who says, I wanna be a distant parent. I've never met a leader who says, I wanna go to work today and be a complete idiot. But what happens is people are stressed or people go to work and they feel undermined and there's all of these emotions that come up for them. And when we are not able to deal with those emotions effectively, then what do we do? We

take our cell phone to the dinner table and we are distant or we shut people down or we fail to have the kind of conversations that we need to have or we fail to lead in ways that actually match our intention. So, yeah, I mean the most important work that we can do, not in a naval gazing way, in an effective emotion processing way, is the internal work, which is that every day life is saying, who do you want to be today? Even in the midst of your challenge, even in the midst of your heartache, who do you want to be today, even in the midst of your challenge, even in the midst of your heartache, who do you want to be?

And we answer that question by how we deal with all of the stuff that is inside of us. The other thing that I would say, Dan, is when you talk about this idea of, you know, something that can sometimes feel cliched in a sense, we can also really examine some of the narratives that we have in our society about emotions. And some of these narratives are things like firstly that emotions are bad, that some emotions are good and some emotions are bad. So we hear people say things like, well, just be happy,

just be positive or good vibes only. And it feels innocuous on the surface, but when people say those kind, well, just be happy, just be positive, or good vibes only. And it feels innocuous on the surface, but when people say those kind of things, really what are they saying? They are saying, my comfort is more important than your reality. There's no space for your pain here. And what is this lead to when we have a narrative that says only so-called positive emotions matter. It leads to situations where our child comes home from school and says, Mommy, no one would play with me today. And we feel uncomfortable at our child's pain. And we want our child to be happy.

And so we jump in and we say things like, don't worry, I'll play with you. We paper over discomfort. And when we paper over discomfort, we don't teach our children the skills of seeing themselves, of seeing their difficulty motions and of navigating those effectively and in values concordant ways.

This is an error I have made many times throughout my life, not just as a parent, but also just as a human, that somebody talks to you about something that's going wrong for them and you immediately run into reassurance mode as opposed to as Brunei Brown says sitting in the dark with them. Yes, because we have this idea that wellness and well-being is about chasing the light, seeking the solution. And I think what we forget is, again, this power of this summer boner, which is either when you in your own dark tunnel, or when you in the tunnel with another person, you don't need to just push that person towards the light. What you can help them to do is to see better in the dark.

And when I say see better in the dark, I don't mean by pushing aside or by forced false positivity. I mean by holding space, by holding hands, by asking questions, by being there. There's so much that we can do in the dark. But again, we live in a culture that says things like, well, if you feel difficult emotions, those emotions are bad. And truthfully, I mean, when we look at the literature in psychology, what do we call

difficult emotions? We call them negative emotions. And so there is this idea that we have these negative emotions and we have these positive emotions and that actually normal, natural human experiences, the essence of what makes us human. Is it either good or bad, positive or negative? And what that foundational idea does is it leads us into situations of discomfort with difficulty motions where we either push them aside, we suppress them, we get stuck in them, we haven't developed the skills that are actually needed to be in the world as it is, which is a world in which beauty and fragility hold hands and in which joy and grief hold hands. We're going to talk in detail about how one develops emotional agility, but you brought up your own personal biography a few moments ago and talked about growing up in apartheid South Africa.

There's another piece of the story, though, that relates to the subject of emotional agility and may, in fact, represent the roots of your interest in the subject, which is, if I'm recalling correctly here, the death of your father at a reasonably young age for you, and some of the emotional fallout in your own life. Can you just tell that story a little bit if you're okay with it? Yes, absolutely.

So when I was 15 years old, my father, who was 42 at the time, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And my father was brought home to die in our house. And I recall then one Friday morning, my mother coming to me and saying to me to go and say goodbye to my father. And so I had this backpack and I put the backpack down and I walk through the passage to where my father is

in his room. And I opened the door and I walk into the room and my father's lying in his bed and his eyes are closed, but then I knew that he knew that I was there because in his presence, in my father's presence, I had always felt seen. I'd always felt a civil boner from this person in my life, from my father. And I kissed him goodbye, I told him I loved him and I then went off to school.

And from there, I had an experience that I think so many of us have had, especially in the last couple of years, which is that the world feels like it's falling apart around us. We in the shadow of illness and death, and there's all of the stuff going on, and you can't but go onto social media and see people saying things like,

well, look for the silver lining. If you don't use your time in quarantine to perfect sourdough bread baking or to dust off your screenplay, then there look for the silver lining. If you don't use your time in quarantine to perfect sourdough bread baking or to dust of your screenplay, then there's something wrong with you. And don't get me wrong if you use time during COVID or when you were behind closed doors to perfect your knowledge of 20th century Scandinavian cinema,

like all power to you, nothing wrong with it. But we seem to live in a world that really conspires against us seeing ourselves that has these notions of silver linings and again positive emotions and negative emotions and just be positive and positive vibes only. And I had this extraordinary experience of going to school.

And that day I'm drifting from science to history, to math, to biology, and my father slips from the world. And I come home from school that day, my father has died. And on the Monday, my mum, she's got three children, and she wants to keep things normal. She sends us back to school and I go to school on the Monday and there is a studious refusal to use the word father by my peers because everyone feels that it's going to make me uncomfortable. So I now have this experience of feeling like I have had my world ripped away from me and no one wants to talk about it. No one wants to use the word

father, no one wants to say how is your weekend because it feels too much. So I go from like the May to July September November and I'm going about with my usual smile and people say to me, how you doing? And I shrug and I say I'm okay black, all of us, we become the masters of being okay. But then in truth, maybe this connects a little bit with your experience in your own life when you were in the midst of anxiety and panic and these questions of what do we turn towards and what do we turn away from.

And I was saying I was okay, but my heart was breaking. And as this young girl, I'm 15 years old, I start to deal with that pain by binging and purging, like so many young girls do, refusing to accept the full weight of my grief. And no one knows. And in a world that seems to value relentless positivity, it seems like no one wants to know, but one day I got a class and I have this extraordinary teacher. And she hands out these blank notebooks and Dan, she says to the class, but it feels like she's saying it to me.

She says, right, tell the truth, right like no one is reading. And so I start this extraordinary correspondence with this teacher where every day I write about my pain and my fear, my sadness, my grief, my regret, my joy, my all of these experiences and this teacher writes back to me in the silent correspondence that goes on for many months. She writes back in pencil.

And I actually, a couple of years later said to her, why did you write back to me in pencil? Barely legible pencil. And she said to me, Susie, I wrote back in pencil because it was your story. I was witness to your story, but ultimately it was your story. So how does this relate to my career?

How does this relate to the question that you're asking, which is how did I start becoming interested in these ideas? I became fascinated with, on the one hand, a world that tells us to just be positive and to unsee ourselves and the impact that that was having on me psychologically and in terms of my mental health and well-being

over time. And then on the other hand, this invitation broke it through this teacher to see myself, to show up to myself with acceptance, to not see these emotions as good or bad, but to rather try and be compassionate with them, to be with them with acceptance, to sense make out of them. And what I started to recognize is that this narrative that was being fed about positivity and being a cancel the linings was a fake narrative. And it was contributing to lower levels of resilience and lower levels of well-being. And on the other hand, the difficult work of showing up actually seemed to support

resilience and support well-being and so this was the revolution for me. It was like so many people who are listening to this podcast today. The power is often not in the big movements. The power is often in the small movements, the small revolutions within side of ourselves, the small conversations that we have with ourselves, the small conversations with others. And for me, it was this recognition that there is this narrative that undermines resilience. And there is a counter narrative that is less popular that supports resilience. And so I became an emotions researcher. I started to look into emotions, emotion regulation, emotional health, well-being, what is authentic happiness and emotional agility.

Appreciate that background. It's really helpful and illustrative, especially as we're going to dive into the how of all of this. Just a point of interest and maybe clarification. I don't know. I certainly don't think you're wrong that there is a narrative in the culture of positivity. We've seen the law of attraction and the power of thought and thinking, which is complete nonsense and whatever. I've been on my high horse on that for a long time, so I'll keep it short. But there is simultaneously I've been on my high horse on that for a long time, so I'll keep it short. But there is simultaneously plenty of negativity, or you know, there's emo music where people are talking about how hard life is, and which, by the way, I'm cool with that.

But then there's also straight up negativity on one need look no further than Twitter. So how dominant is the positivity narrative really? Well, I think that both of these narratives are dominant in different ways. So if we look for instance at a lot of social media, there is a dominant narrative around positivity around, don't be so angry. And then there is a counter-narrative, which is a narrative of everything is terrible, everything is traumatic, everything is difficult. And I think this exactly is where what you speak to is so important in the context of emotional agility, which is on the one hand what we do is we have these difficult

emotions and we might push them aside in the service of forced positivity, what I call bottling, bottling our difficult emotions. On the other hand, what we might do is we might get stuck in our difficult emotions. We brewed on them, we get victimized by our newsfeed, we get hooked on being right, we get stuck in our difficult emotions. We start treating these emotions as fact and they start to own us rather than us owning them. And so these are the skills of emotional agility, the skills of emotional agility and we'll go into them in practice. But the skills of emotional agility are recognizing that emotions

aren't good or bad, emotions are data, emotions signpost the things that we care about. If you feel rage when you watch the news, that rage might be signposting that you value equity, but if you feel grief, grief holds hands with love and grief might be signposting the need to connect with the memories that you had of that person, our emotions are data, but our emotions are directives, just because I feel sad doesn't mean that my sadness defines me. And so we have this truly remarkable situation for decades, for hundreds of years, mathematics and strategy and logic have been taught in our schools. They have been lauded in our organizations as the most important skills. And the tragedy is that we are not taught the capacity to experience our emotions in healthy ways, which is that they are data, but they are not directives.

So an example, Dan, is I can show up to my son's frustration with his baby sister. He's more introverted and she's on the extreme of extroversion. I can show up to his frustration. I can soaborn him. I can love him and I can see his experience. So I'm showing up to that experience with acceptance and with openness. But it doesn't mean that I'm endorsing his idea that he gets to give her way to the first stranger he sees in a shopping mall. You know, we own our emotions, they don't own us. And there are these essential skills that help us to develop these capacities. Coming up the four skills of emotional agility and some extremely practical advice about how to practice emotional granularity after this. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai.

And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wondery's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feuds say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices

taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other, and it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music or the Wonder App. So let's talk about the four key concepts within emotional agility. You just mentioned the first one, which is showing up. Yeah, so the first is the showing up to difficulty motions in self and others with a level of acceptance. And what's really important here is acceptance isn't passive resignation to the point that you made

earlier. It's not a despondency, it's not a sense of like, oh my goodness, this is terrible, there's nothing I can do about it. It's rather this idea that we end the struggle within ourselves by dropping the rope. We move away from thinking, I should or shouldn't feel this thing. I'm allowed to or I'm not allowed to, or my team is allowed to or not allowed to feel this thing. Instead, what we do is we drop the rope. We recognise that this is what is in front of me. So, acceptance is showing up to what is by stopping the hustle. Dan, you spoke about earlier, you know, how pervasive is this positivity idea and sometimes positivity sounds innocuous on the surface, but it is actually an avoidant coping strategy in the framing

of my English teacher. If I said to people, think about the last couple of years and take out an imaginary piece of paper and write on that piece of paper, write what you're feeling. Tell the truth, write like no one is reading. So you're listening to this podcast right now and you've got this imaginary piece of paper in front of you. What would your emotion would be on it? Would you write loneliness or grief, sadness, joy, hope, anxiety, loss, disappointment, unsupported, like, what would it be that you would write?

Now, in so many listeners' minds, in the narrative of force positivity, but dressed up in rainbows and sparkles, you would imagine that what I'm going to now do is say, turn your piece of paper over and write what you're grateful for. Because that is, that is so often what people are asked to do. Turn the piece of paper over and write what you're grateful for. But no, what emotional agility ask you to do is turn the piece of paper over and ask yourself, what is that emotion signal about your values and your needs? Because loneliness might signpost

that you can be busy in meeting after meeting Zoom call after Zoom call, but that you are craving greater levels of intimacy and connection. And border, you can be bored and busy. And border might be signposting that you need more learning and growth in your life. That might signal a greater level of depth

and learning about your children, your partner, or in the workplace, but that's something that's important to you. And so the first aspect of emotional agility is this acceptance of told the truth right like no one is reading. And it's an acceptance that is born of dropping the rope of trying to force gratitude or positivity.

But it's also Dan, I think it's an acceptance that comes with it, something that I think is really important, which is, you know, you speak about it a lot on this podcast, which is self-compassion, that it's hard to human. It's hard to be in a world that is changing and I often think of this beautiful, heraclitus, philosopher, the Greek philosopher who said, you can never step into the same river twice. Because as a human being, the world is changing and we are changing and that makes it hard.

And so we need to be compassionate with those difficult experiences. So that's showing up. I can share more about other strategies as well if that's helpful. I want to go through each of them in detail, but just a question on the foregoing, because in my mind, there's a difference between relentless, forced positivity and gratitude. I suspect we agree here, but I just want to allow you to clarify for listeners. I think there's a lot of benefit to gratitude, and there seems to be a lot of data behind it. Or assuming what you're saying is forcing it in the face of a difficult emotion can be

a way to not look at the difficult emotion. Correct. So, yes, I'm not anti-happiness. So, I'm not anti-positive. It's, yeah, I literally wrote a 90-capital handbook called the Oxford Handbook of Happiness. I'm not like anti-happiness. I love being happy. I'm not anti-gratitude. There's a huge amount of data showing that these emotions like joy and awe

and transcendence and gratitude are hugely powerful in our lives. So what is the distinction. The distinction is forced false, forced false positivity, forced false gratitude. When we're starting to do this, we are starting to engage in one of the most profound forms of unseeing, of unseeing of ourselves, of unseeing of others. When we look at our difficult emotions or we feeling stuck at work or we struggling in a relationship and we show up to them and we start trying to see them and understand them and work through them using these tools of emotional agility. We very often get to a place of authentic happiness and of authentic gratitude, but it's born, not of denial, it's born of seeing. Well said.

So the second of the four key concepts is stepping out. So the first part of emotional agility is the ability to be accepting and with compassion. A second part of emotional agility is connecting with that idea that I spoke about earlier, which is that we own our emotions, they don't own us. We know that it's very difficult to read the instructions when we stuck inside the bottle, when we stuck inside feeling frustrated or angry or sad or whatever the experience is, it's very difficult to read the instructions. And of course, you speak so much about mindfulness and mindfulness is one way

that we can step out. We're starting to notice our thoughts, our emotions, and our stories for what they are. They are thoughts, emotions, and stories. So if we just think about the language that we use think about the language that we use when we are in struggle. We'll say something like, I am sad. It's such a commonplace term. I'm sad. I'm angry. I'm frustrated. We use this with our emotions, but we might also use it with our stories. We might say, I'm being undermined. I'm undermined. Now, when we use this language, what are we saying? We are literally saying, I am, I am all of me. 100% of me is defined by sad. There's no space for wisdom. There's no space for intentional values or any other aspect of ourselves. And so it becomes very difficult to create the space that allows us to move forward in our lives because we are literally in psychological terms, we call this fusion,

we've become fused with the difficult emotion. And so when we start noticing our thoughts, our emotions, and our stories for what they are, which is their thoughts, emotions, and stories, we can start saying, I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. I'm noticing that that is my story that I'm being undermined. I'm noticing that's my, I'm not good enough story. And when we start just literally noticing our thoughts, our emotions and our stories, what they are, we start creating this space so that we're now stepping outside the bottle. and then the way that I think of this is, you know, when you say I am sad, it's almost like there's a cloud in the sky and you have become the cloud. You are the sad cloud. When you say I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad, I'm noticing that I'm feeling angry. What you are doing is you are recognising that you are not the cloud, that you are the sky. We are

capacious and beautiful and wise and able enough to experience all of it, all of our difficult emotions and to still choose how we want to move forward. So noticing is another strategy that's very powerful. There's one other that I can share with you, Dan, which is that words matter. And so in my work, very often people will say things like, I'm stressed. You know, I'm stressed. It's so commonplace. We hear it every day in every organization, in every household. People say, I'm stressed or it might be, I'm busy. But if we think about it, there is a world of difference between stress and disappointment, stress and feeling

unsupported, stress and exhaustion, stress and that knowing, knowing, feeling that you're in the wrong job or the wrong career or that the project isn't working out. So when we label our emotions using very big umbrella terms, I'm stressed. Your body and your psychology literally don't know how to make sense of that experience. So a very powerful way of starting to create space between asinar difficulty motions or to diffuse from our difficulty motions is to ask yourself what are two other options. You know, I'm saying that I'm experiencing stress, but what else might I be feeling? And again, I invite every person who's listening to us themselves, okay, well, what is the emotion word that you default to?

And then what are two other options and you can start seeing that if you move from something like I am stressed to I'm feeling unsupported. Already what that starts to do is it starts to help you to understand the cause of the emotion and also what you need to do in relation to the emotion. So you're starting to find your way through the tunnel, through effect of processing. And this is really powerful. I don't want to overstate the power, but I'm going to say that I believe that this is an emotional superpower. We call this emotion granularity. We know that children as young as two and three years old,

who start being able to discern the difference between mad versus sad versus need mummy, that those children who have a better capacity to label their emotions more effectively have in longer-tudinal studies higher levels of well-being, higher levels of self-regulation, higher capacity to delay gratification, higher ability to move towards their goals, it's profoundly, profoundly important. And then just one quick example of that

I was working with a client once. It was actually in a consulting context in this client. His default emotion, he kept on saying that everyone was angry. I'm angry, I'm angry, my team's angry, my wife's angry, everyone was angry, that was the default umbrella term. And I started to think, what are two other options? Like, what else could you be feeling? And he started to say, well, actually, I'm scared. I'm fearful of the fact that I'm in a new role and the things might not work out in the way that I want. And maybe the team is actually not angry, maybe the team's mistrusting. Now you can see if you go into a conversation with, I'm angry and the team's angry, it's a very different conversation than if you go in and you are, I am scared and the team is looking for opportunities to trust.

And then a couple of months later, I happened to go out with this client, and his wife was at the dinner, and she said to me, it's such a subtle skill, but it completely changed the relationship because he would come home from work and he would say, you angry. And she would be, I'm not angry, I'm tired or I need support. Or I just need love, I just need a hug. And as soon as they started to engage in a conversation that was about specificity in their emotional experience of each other. What they also started to do was to broker

level of curiosity and depth and acceptance. I'm going to read you back to you. You say that when we label emotions accurately, we are more able to discern the precise cause and our brain's readiness potential is activated, allowing us to read the data of our emotions and take the proper next steps. Yes. So step three here, or concept three of emotional agility is walking your why.

What does that mean? Well, so much, Dan, of what I've spoken to is this idea that we often get fused with our difficult thoughts, emotions and stories and that we need to create space. It's not his words, but it's that sentiment that's often attributed to Victor Frankl, that idea of between stimulus and response, there is a space and in that space is our power to choose. And it's in that choice that lies our growth and our freedom. I think that sentiment becomes really powerful because of course, when we try to process an experience or process something that feels difficult,

or when we're trying to move from fusion to diffusion, the obvious question becomes, well, what are we putting in the space? Are we simply so much in our heads that we aren't living our lives? Are we so focused on the self that we unseen what's in front of us? And so the third component of emotional agility is really this recognition that in that space is our values is who we wanna be, this capacity that we all of us have to be wise. And I don't mean that in an abstract way, I mean that even in the most tangible way,

you know, do we bring our cell phones to the table and for go precious time with our children? Do we bypass our spouse in the kitchen, you know, them doing their thing and we doing our thing and like not actually connect with those people in our lives. And so the third component of emotional agility is this aspect of walking your why. This really important recognition that in the same way as we can pick up viruses, human beings are subject to what is called emotion contagion. And I know this is again something that you've touched on previously. An emotion contagion is literally the idea that we pick up emotions and in fact, behaviors from other people.

And there's really fascinating research, for instance, that shows that if someone in our social network we do not even need to know the person. If they start engaging in behaviors that are poor health behaviors or if that person in our social network gets divorced, we are significantly more likely to engage in those behaviors or get divorced. What is happening here is we start in very subtle ways picking up behaviors that become normalized through what we see other people doing. And the most obvious is this we might see everyone in our neighborhood driving a particular car and suddenly we're like, hmm, that's an ask car, I want that car. We start doing this and we know even if you're sitting on an airplane

and your seat partner buys candy and you're trying to be more healthy in your choices, you do not even need to know that seat partner. If they buy candy, your likelihood of buying candy increases 70%. So we pick up on the emotions and behaviors of other people without even knowing that we are doing this. And it becomes really important for us to ask ourselves, who is the core of me that wants to move forward in a particular way. And of course, the answer to that lies in thinking about our values and how we want to be in the world and how we want to come to the world. And then I'll give you just one example, which is, imagine you are someone who's grown up in a community where no one in your community has ever gone to

college. But you fight and you strive and you make your way to college. And then as it happens, you fail a test or you hand in an assignment and you do poorly in that assignment. What likely happens in that environment is all of that narrative, all of those stories that have existed in your community, in that moment of stress are likely to surface. Oh, maybe I'm not cut out for this. Maybe I'm not good enough. Maybe they were right all along. Our anxiety starts to take center stage. So we know that in that moment, many, many of those students will actually drop out of college.

Now, if you take these students and you ask them in the shortest of exercises to do what is called a values affirmation, and values affirmation is basically literally, you know, people listening and invite you to do this. It's so powerful. Take out a piece of paper and for 10 minutes, just write about who you want to be. Like, what are your values?

What is your purpose? Whether that applies to how you want a parent or how you want to lead or how you want to shape your community. And literally those 10 minutes spend writing about what is important to your values, when these kids do it as they're going into college, that 10 minute exercise protects them three years down the track from dropping out. Because what starts to happen is when we start to affirm our core, our intentions, our values, who we want to be, and we bring it more front and center, we are less likely to become victim to this social contagion that we see around us. We are more likely to have a

healthy distance between the emotions that are swirling around us and then that centeredness of who we want to be in this world. So that's walk your way, this ability to That's walk your way, this ability to connect with your own heartbeat. And it's a heartbeat that is often something that we don't connect with in the busyness and the noise that invites us to turn away. After the break, the fourth and final skill of emotional agility, and Susan explains the power of so-called tiny tweaks. Keep it here. How do we figure out what our core is, what our values are, what we care most about. What's the process? Well, there are a couple of really important questions that we can ask ourselves, and they're very simple questions. The first is, when we look back on our day and we said ourselves, what did I do today that was worthwhile? What did I do that was worthwhile? And note, I'm not asking,

what did I do that made me happy? What did I do that was fun? What did I do that was worthwhile. And note, I'm not asking, what did I do that made me happy? Or what did I do that was fun? What did I do that was worthwhile? Some of us people say things to me like, I want the stress, I want the disappointment, I want those things to go away and I'm like, I get it, but you know, those are dead people's goals. Dead people never get disappointed. Dead people never have their hearts broken. Discomfort, not discomfort just for the sake of it, discomfort because it feels worthy. Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life. We don't get to raise a family or leave the world a better place or have a career that feels like it's true to the career that we want without stress and discomfort.

And so this is why this worthwhile isn't just about fun, it's often about moments when we've engaged in discomfort. So, asking ourselves like, what did I do today that was worthwhile? That's one moment. Another way that we can start discerning what our values are, is by asking ourselves, if this was my last day, if this was my last day, what would I want my last day to be? And often in those moments, you'll recognize that there's values there.

Another is, and this is why this process of emotional agility is so important in its focus around not pushing aside difficulty motions, because another way we start discerning our values is by turning over the piece of paper, turning over the piece of paper where we've got a difficult emotion on the one side and on the other side, what is that difficult emotion signposting? If I think about guilt as a parent, if I think about guilt and I can get so wrapped up in guilt, but if I turn the piece of paper over, what is the guilt signposting? The guilt is signposting that I value presence and connectedness with my children and that I want more of that. So one of the ways we can discern our values is by turning the piece of paper over and saying,

if my emotions are data and if my emotions signpost, my needs and my values, what is this emotion signposting? And for those of you listening who work with teams, a team member who puts their hand up and who says, I'm worried. I'm worried about the change. You know, what do we do? We often default to saying, oh, that person's just negative. We often default to saying, oh, you either on the bus or you off the bus. We put people in these positive negative boxes and we push out psychological safety. But if we instead recognize the team member who says, I'm worried about the change, what is the value that the team member is holding? The value might be that the team member cares

about the client or that the team member actually cares about the outcome here. So this is really profoundly important and liberating. Let's go on to the fourth of your concepts. It's called moving on. What does that mean? Well again, I think this idea of emotions can often feel like it's very internally focused and yet emotional health is actually moving out of your head and into your life. It's moving towards those values. And so moving on is the notion that values are not these things that you just write in a book or that are on walls and businesses. Values are qualities of action. Values are not these things. They often feel very abstract and people roll their eyes and they're like, oh my goodness, we've got values in our organization and we told that we need to believe in these values and it's like they feel very abstract and there's a level of kind of cynicism that's often associated with

values, but values are qualities of action. Values are the idea in front of us, which is I value my health and there is an apple and there is a piece of chocolate and that there is a choice point that I have in front of me here. And the choice point is, do I move towards my values or do I move away from my values? And if we think about our values, there are so many experiences that we have literally hundreds every day, which represent choice points. I gave some examples already. Do I bring my cell phone to the table or do I leave it in a draw? Do I reach out for a hug to my loved one or do I keep that wall up where it's been for the past couple of months? Do I move towards the conversation that I know that I need to have,

or do I move away from it? And so moving on as the idea that we can take our values and use those values as a lens, and let me give an example of a difficult conversation. If we succumb to our difficulty motions, we might avoid a difficult conversation. And yet, when we think about avoidance and we think about the value that is being signposted, it might be, I'm avoiding the difficulty motion because I'm worried about fairness.

Having a conversation that's fair or it feels unfair to have this conversation, fairness feels important. So you can start asking yourself, okay, so fairness is important. How fair is it if I don't have this conversation? How fair is it to myself? How fair is it to this individual? How fair is it if I'm in an organization? How fair is it to the organization? What does a fair conversation look like? How do I have a fair conversation? So we can start using our values as a lens in the way we interact, in the way we connect with our children and the people who are important in our lives. And what becomes also really important here is often when we think about values and we think about moving towards our values, it feels like, oh well, we've got to make huge changes.

But in truth, Dan, we know that the most important changes that we can thread in our lives as people are actually not about doing dramatic things. It's not about leaving. It's not about selling up and going and living on a wine farm in France in order to reconnect with ourselves. It's not about doing things that are dramatic. There's a huge, huge amount of research in psychology that shows that what I call an emotional agility, I call these tiny tweaks.

Tiny tweaks are the small moments that matter and that bring us towards the things that matter in our lives. The idea being here that if you've ever sailed, you know, we know that we can move, we can move two degrees as we sailing and another two degrees and another two degrees and we land up in a completely, completely different part of the bay. And the same is true when we think about our values, which is the moment where instead of shutting down, I connect with my spouse when they come home from work and I put my arms around them

and I genuinely ask them how their day was. And I do that today and I do it tomorrow and I do it the next day and it's a tiny 2% there is a different relationship that is crafted than if I didn't do that 2% and so moving on is about small moments that take us towards our values as opposed to away from our values. Torre de'Anne to the book there's a lengthy discussion of realness or being real. What do you mean by realness? For so many people listening, you will recall the beautiful Velveteen rabbit, that beautiful book, the Velveteen rabbit, and we have this little rabbit who fears that they're not like the other toys because they aren't as shiny, they aren't as new.

And the horse describes how when you are loved, when you are seen, and an arm paraphrasing using emotional agility language, when you are loved, when you are seen, and an arm paraphrasing using emotional agility language, when you are loved, when you are seen, when you show up to yourself, when you show up to others, you become real. And the Velveteen Rabbit says, does it hurt? Does it hurt being real? And the answer is yes.

A lot of what my work focuses on is the idea that life's beauty is inseparable from its fragility. That we are all young until we are not children are little and we we nag them or we feel exhausted and then one day there's like silence where their child once was now making his or her way in the world. And there's this extraordinary fragility and beauty in the world and that fragility and that beauty are what is real.

It's the both. It's the bothness. Around the age of five, kids become aware of their own mortality. And I remember at that age, becoming absolutely fearful that my parents were gonna die. And this was 10 years before my dad was diagnosed

the terminal cancer and, you know, he was completely well and I would find my way night, often night, often night, often night, I would find my way in between my parents in their bed. And I would cry and I would say to my dad, Daddy, promise me you'll never die., Daddy promised me you'll never die. Daddy promised me you'll never die. And my dad was extraordinary because he could have buffered me with forced false positivity.

He could have said you've got nothing to worry about, I'm going to be around forever. You know, let's read some bedtime stories. He could have done what we do in our social media. He could have said things like, look for the silver lining. Could have done all of those things. But he didn't. He didn't. And I saw him remember to this day,

he comforted me with soft pets and kisses, but he never lied. He said to me, Susie, we all die. It's normal to be scared. And what I understood by his realness, by his refusal to turn away from truth and his refusal to turn away from me, is he was saying to me that courage is not about pretending that everything's fine, it's also not about getting stuck in the negative. Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is fear-walking.

Courage is fear-walking. And so to answer the question about realness, it's about holding to bothness. It's about holding to the idea that we can be fearful on the one hand and hold courage on the other. Before I let you go, can you just plug any resources you've put out into the world that people who want to learn more from you could access? Yes, so if anyone wants to connect with me, you know, all of the Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, I try to really post these ideas in a way that feels thoughtful and connected. My TED talk, my TED talk on the gift and power of emotional courage, my book, emotional agility,

and then there's also just on my website that around 200,000 people have taken now, and that a lot of people find really helpful, which is a free quiz that I've got. And it's a quiz that takes a couple of minutes. You get a free 10 page report and one thing that people love about that is it starts to explore the idea of what your values are. Dr. Susan David, thank you very much for coming on the show.

Thank you for inviting me. Thanks again to Susan David. Thank you very inviting me. We'll see you all on Wednesday for an episode with my man, Danny Goldman, author of Emotional Intelligence. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad-free with with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.

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