The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant - Brené with Dr. Susan David on the Dangers of Toxic Positivity, Part 1 of 2

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

I’m talking to Dr. Susan David, author of the bestselling book Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life. This is a full-on emotion-researcher geek-out on how emotional granularity and agility benefit us as individuals and as leaders. It’s such a good conversation that we made it into two episodes, and this is Part 1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi everyone. I'm Bray Brown and this is the Dara to Lead podcast. In this episode, I am talking with Dr. Susan David, who is the author of the bestselling book, Emotional Agility, Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life. This is a full-on emotion researcher, geek out, learn so much, ask each other a million questions, laugh, and call bullshit together on the, whole notion of toxic positivity, that everything is great and that we can just take all of our hard emotions, stuff them away and put up a really pretty quote card on Instagram, and it's all going to be good. We're collectively calling bullshit on that, and we're talking through what we've both learned about emotional granularity, the ability to really get specific

on how we're feeling and what we're feeling. What is agile? What does agility mean? What's fragile? What's fragile, what's rigid, and it's basically the direct opposite of what most of us were taught growing up. So it's such a good episode that we made it into two. This is part one. I cannot wait for y'all to hear this. It's something else here now. Something new. From exclusively on Paramount Plus, it's the series Stephen King calls Scarious Hell. Everything here is impossible, but it's also real. Sci-Fi Vision calls it the best show streaming right now. We're running a time and we still don't know the rules. Don't miss what the movie blog calls something you need to watch. Saving those children is how we all go home. From binge all episodes exclusively on Paramount Plus.

Before we jump into part one of this two-part podcast, let me tell you a little bit about Susan David. Dr. David is one of the world's leading management thinkers, and she is an award-winning Harvard Medical School psychologist. Her book is entitled emotional agility, get unstuck, embrace change, and thrive in work and life. And we're going to talk about that a lot. She has a great TED talk on the topic. I think it is a great primer for her work and you can watch it. She is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal. And she, you can see her often actually on TV talking about her work and weighing in on what we need to understand about the

emotional landscape that we live in. She is also the CEO of evidence-based psychology. She's on the faculty at Harvard Medical School. And she is a co-founder of the Institute of Coaching, a Harvard Medical School McLean affiliate. She's also on the scientific advisory boards of Thrive Global and Virgin Pulse. She lives outside Boston with her family. Let's jump in with Dr. Susan David. So I am really excited to talk to you. It feels like this has been a long time coming. I feel like it has. Yeah. For years, actually. For me, for me, it has. Well, I'm excited to be here with you now. Thank you for being on the podcast. I'm delighted. All right. I want to start with this question. I have a million questions for you. I have more questions than I could probably ever ask you. But we're going to start with this question. Tell us your story. Start us from the beginning.

I want to start by saying that my life's work has really been in the focus of emotions and what it is that helps us. when we think about emotions as being this core part of us as human beings. And so, of course, I think like so many stories, that gets born of the way our childhood gets shaped. And for me, that is true. I grew up as a white child in the white suburbs of apartheid South Africa. So very much a country, a community committed to not seeing, committed to denial at a really fundamental level. And so at a very early age, I became very interested in a theme that really runs through my work, which is the theme of seeing versus not seeing.

Who is seen, who is not seen, and how do we see ourselves? How do we see ourselves as fully formed whole human beings? So this is where some of this thinking first starts. And then I had a really seminal experience when I was around 15 years old. my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And I recall, I mentioned this actually in my TED Talk, my mother coming to me on a Friday and saying to me to go and say goodbye to him. Because we knew that that was likely going to be his day.

And so I have this very clear memory of putting my backpack down and walking through the passage to where the heart of my home, my father lies in cancer. And he's 42, as I say, I'm 15. And his eyes are closed, but I know that he sees me because I had always experienced this feeling with him of being seen. So I kiss him goodbye. I tell him I love him and then I go off to school because my mother is trying to keep things as normal as she can. And I have this really remarkable experience of going through the day and running from math to history, science to biology.

and I know that my father's going. And then on the Monday, I go back to school, and the months go from the May to July to September. And all this time, I walk around with a smile on my face. And everyone's saying to me, how are you doing? You're so strong. You're so strong. You know what this is like, Renee.

You become the master of being okay, because you prays for being strong. You're trying to get on with it. You're trying to move through things. You've been told that being positive. is good, that gritting is good, but my heart is breaking. You know, my heart is breaking. And my family is struggling. My mother hasn't been able to keep her business going. My father hasn't been able to keep his business going. They're both small business owners. She's grieving

the love of her life. She's raising three children. The creditors are knocking. And I start to spiral. And for me, that is expressed. in binging and purging, truly not being able to experience the full weight of my brief. And yet still, people saying to me, how are you doing? And I'm like, I'm okay, I'm okay. So this is really the answer to your question, or part of the answer to your question. I am in English class one day and the teacher hands out these blank notebooks. And she says, as she hands it to me, she says, write, tell the truth and write like no one is reading.

And it was the most incredible experience because I started with this teacher, this secret silent correspondence, where I would write in this journal and I would write, I would be showing up to myself my grief, my pain, my loss, my regret. and I would write in this blank notebook for this teacher, and she every day would hand this notebook back to me. And she always made sure to write in pencil, not in pen. You know, mine was the pen, mine was the narrative, hers was the pencil.

And what I started to experience through that journaling was something that was so profound. It was a revolutionary act for me that really shaped my life and my career, this idea that we have so much around us that tells us to just get on with it and just be positive. But what I was experiencing with this woman, what I experienced with my father and what was the counterfoil to my experience in South Africa, was this idea of how seeing is so healthy and is so powerful. And so that actually shaped my life. It shaped my career.

It led me to want to become an emotions. researcher because I was really just interested in what are the narratives that we have in our society that are supposedly narratives of resilience and success and health and well-being, but that actually undermine us. They make us less resilient. They make us more fragile and they insult our community and our society. And so these are the questions of my work. of course, I'm more than that one experience, but that for me shaped me. God, it's such a beautiful, traumatic and real story. Boy, if you're listening right now, I know a lot of teachers listen to the Dare to Lead podcast because teachers are such

important leaders in our culture and our community. Wow, one teacher, one blank notebook, one mandate to do nothing but tell the truth of your experience, right? Yeah, one teacher and a teacher who many years later I reconnected with and sent her a bunch of flowers out of the blue and said to her like little did you know, little did you know that in many ways this, not you saved me, but this experience that you created for me, this context that you created actually saved me. Tell me more about how living in apartheid South Africa shaped your thinking around invisibility and being seen. Because I have to tell you that as someone who studies

emotions and I know the work and I know the literature, you have a very beautiful, powerful, and important lens. Not everyone comes to this work around the lens of being seen and invisibility. Tell me how the experience in South Africa shaped your understanding of seeing and not seeing. Well, maybe I'll start by telling you a story that is not my story, but I think is an important one. And this is a story of a mother who, because of apartheid laws, has a baby and is not able to bring her baby into the place that she works because of segregation. And so the mother leaves her baby with her grandmother, with a child's grandmother, and comes to her work, and the child is a child that she does not see for maybe six months or eight months. And she every day expresses her milk and flushes it down the toilet.

it. And that family that that woman works in, they have their own baby. And every day she feeds that baby formula. And so this is an example of an individual story, a trauma that is then playing out in multiple ways, in lenses across communities. And it's a heartbreaking. story. And so as I'm a child growing up with this and you see this kind of thing going on, and you become so the dissonance, the dissonance, the sense of disconnect, the sense of horror that this is what is being perpetrated in the community and the place that you're living is just so profound. And there's this beautiful word in South Africa, which you hear every day on the streets,

Sababana. It's a Zulu phrase. It means, hello, it's a greeting. You hear it every single day, hundreds of times a day. But Samaubona, when you literally translate it, has the most beautiful meaning, which is, I see you, and by seeing you, I bring you into being. And that's what Sabaaborna means literally. And so I think that I, from a very important, I think that I, from a very thing, I see you, I see you, I see you, I bring you into being.

I, from a very young age, was just through this thread of my father, through the thread of this teacher, through what I sing around me, made me become so focused on these ideas, this narrative, this lens of seeing and what seeing actually means. And then again, this is the counterfoil to what we see even in the US today, even beyond this counterfoil, which is often a counterfoil of, let's just be positive. If you say things that are negative, you're just being a negative person. There's this whole narrative that basically constantly leads us away from seeing. And it's not only seeing other people, it's also seeing ourselves. It's seeing the reality of the fragility of life. How do we recognize this reality that life's beauty and its fragility are interwoven?

They are absolutely interwoven. We know that we are young and then one day we walk down the streets and no one thinks we're sexy anymore. You know, we've become unseen. We are well until heartbreak brings us to our knees. We think that life is in control and then there's a pandemic that comes that reminds us all, you never were, ha, ha, you know, the joke's on you. And so we have this fragility that is interwoven in our lives and yet the narrative that we have so often in society is a narrative of just be positive, just get on with it. This narrative that basically

locates all success in the individual that denies the systemic impact that not being seen has on people. And this is what I feel passionate about. It's so interesting that you use that one day we're young and then one day we're invisible. I don't even remember when it was, Susan. I think it was maybe a year into my first interviewing two decades ago, interviewing one, interviewing women about shame. And I remember so well this story. I think it's in. I thought it was just me. I can't remember whether I told, oh yeah, I think it is. But a woman told me a story about driving and pulling up next to a car full of young men. And they were all smiling and kind of flirting. And she looked over and she smiled. And then all of a sudden from the back seat,

her 15-year-old daughter, who was there with her friend, said, oh, my God, you've got to be kidding. You think they're looking at you, mom? Yeah. And she used that as an example of what shame felt like for her. And she said, she just kept coming back to the word invisibility. Yeah. It's the sense of invisibility. The trapdoor to your heart opens. And you recognize that the assumption that you've had, the narrative that you had, is no longer. Yeah. So I want to walk through your work. I've got a flagged, dog-eared, posted, and I think these are advanced proofs. I think I've had this book before it actually came out. This is like my original original. I've got the original original. Yeah. For those of you who can't see, because you're listening,

obviously, I'm looking at Susan David's incredible book, Emotional Agility, Get Unstock, Embrace Change, and Thrive and Work and Life. And tell me what emotional agility is. Can you define it and the four-step approach that it is for us? So at its most basic level, emotional agility is about being healthy with ourselves. At its most basic level, it's this idea that all of us, we all, every single day, have thoughts, the thought might be, I'm not good enough or I'm being undermined. We have emotions, we have these emotions that so many of us experience and experiencing so much more lately of grief and loneliness and loss, anger, sadness, joy, happiness,

all of these emotions. And then we have these stories. And these are normal. The idea that we should just be positive or that you think thoughts and it manifests your reality, no, these difficult thoughts, emotions and stories are normal. They're part of the way that we as human beings are actually built so that we can construct coherent narratives of the world and make sense of the world. It's really important that I'm able to segment out that a noise that I'm hearing is the noise of my child prying as opposed to the dishwasher running. And so I'm needing to be able to take in all of the sensory information and to make sense, but to develop a sense of coherence. So emotional agility is this recognition that we have these thoughts, these emotions, and these

stories, and that the way we deal with them drives everything. It drives. It drives. how we come to our relationships, how we love, how we parent, what careers we put our hands are for, and how we lead. So emotional agility at its core is really the skills of being healthy with herself. And there are a couple of components to this. The first is what I call curiosity, which will be very familiar to you in your work, which is specifically when we think about it in terms of emotion, it's really the curiosity about not that these emotions are bad, and they should be pushed aside. But actually, what is this emotion signposting to me about what my need is, about what my values are? I just love this part of your work. I just want you to explain

the hell out of this to us. I love this part of your work. Okay. Okay. Do you want a short definition first and then we do curiosity or? I want you to tell us what signposting is because it's a remarkable piece of research. Well, it's this idea that, okay, let me go a step back, which is when I was studying psychology and I try to find an advisor who would advise me on a PhD in emotions, I could not, for the life of me, get anyone to agree to do this. Because even though I was in this psychology department, they would say to me, well, emotions are difficult to measure. There was this backlash against psychodynamic theory, which is, oh, it felt too ephemeral and too difficult. And then there was squishy.

Yeah, behaviorism felt very tractable. You could count how many times the dog barked. But emotions were either not seen as things that you could study, or if you did, they were always seen as these byproducts or end products. And what I mean by that is if you, for instance, manage your relationship effectively or if you manage your depression effectively, you will have fewer difficult emotions. So the idea was that it was always the emotions were the kind of end product of something that you might feel better about. at the end of the day. What I was really struck by, and this was really born of Charles Darwin's work, Charles Darwin described how our emotions are actually fundamental to our adaptation, that when you see other people, you are able through emotions to have their needs communicated to you,

and you can communicate your needs to them, but also that your emotions are helping you to communicate with yourself. So what we're starting to see here is this idea that emotions are not now the end product. Actually, they are these beautiful, yes, messy, yes, difficult, but beautiful signposts that we have that allow us to understand ourselves better. So let me give you some examples of what I mean by this, which is in a world that says be positive all the time, if I invite you to think about the last. couple of months, and I invite you on a blank piece of paper to write an emotion you've experienced,

or that's been tough for you. I'll do it. Let's do it. I'll do it. Yeah. I'm going to do it. Overwhelmed. I want to come back to that if we can.

Okay. Yeah, of course. Let's do more. Okay. Overwhelmed, scared, fearful, weary, confused. So these emotions. If you write these emotions on a piece of paper, in a world that tells you to just be positive, they would say, turn the piece of paper over now and write why you're grateful.

Okay, right why you're happy. Write why you've got so much more than other people. And what that is doing is false, force positivity and it undermines your resilience and it undermines your emotional agility. Stop. You got to stop. So many people listen when they're like running and walking. they tell me to the podcast, this is where you're going to have to stop and take a minute and hear

what she just said again because this is part of the little miracle of your work, I think. I write down, scared, overwhelmed, confused, fearful, weary. And then some people will say, turn it over and say what you're grateful for and what you've got better than other people. And they tell me to do that because they tell me this will make me stronger and more resilient. You're calling bullshit on that. I am calling complete bullshit. In fact, what I am suggesting is that when you do this, it makes you more fragile. Because then what you're doing is you are not living in the world as it is, which is overwhelmed, weary, confused.

You're living in the world as you wish it would be, which is where you're feeling grateful, but you're not feeling grateful. And so I have a real issue with this. I truly, and you probably can hear how passionate I sound about this, I truly believe that a lot of this idea that difficulty motions need to be pushed aside is accounting for so much of our fragility in our communities and in our psychological health and well-being right now. You know, when someone says to you, turn the piece of paper over and write what you are grateful for, what are they really saying? they're really saying my comfort is more important than your reality.

Oh my God. Can I get an amen from the people in the back? Yes. I mean, no, yes, this is it. Can I ask you this question because I was going to ask it later, but I think this is the right place to ask it. I think this is a really important conversation for the two of us to have. Have we moved into the realm of the toxic positivity? Have you heard that frame a lot? Yes, well, basically, what is toxic positivity? Toxic positivity is, and I talk about this in my TED Talk, this idea that it's a tyranny of positivity. It is a tyranny of positivity.

And let me give you a personal example of how this impacted my life. And then you'll see, again, why I just feel so passionate about these ideas. When my father was diagnosed with cancer, it was terminal. And he had been paying a life insurance since I was a baby. And he was dying and desperate and scared. And he had a number of members of his church who would come and visit him when he was in bed. And one day I went into the room after they left and he was sobbing. And he said to me,

they told me that I am going to die because I don't have enough faith. Oh my God. Okay. Because if I had enough faith, then I would be fine because I should have just left to God that everything's going to be fine. And it's because I've got a lack of faith that I'm dying. Now, he was confused and he was desperate. about six months later, I heard my mom and my dad having an awful argument. And I was able to put together that my father, in his desperation, with a diagnosis of terminal

cancer, had cancelled his life insurance. Oh, God. Because in his mind, in his mind, he had bound up this idea. that faith and positivity and cure come in together and that having life insurance is a sign that I don't have enough faith and that I've got to kind of prove something. Now, this might sound extreme, but how many times, how many times when people have cancer do we say to them, just be positive? Don't think bad thoughts.

It'll make it worse. How many times when people are marginalized, and discriminated against. Do we say to them, it's just about your attitude? Okay, it's your attitude. It's not about the fact that, like, there's no public transport in your area or that you be marginalized.

It's like attitude equal success. And so what we land up doing is we land up creating a context in which we with ourselves individually feel that if we feel difficulty motions, if we feel confusion, if we feel grief, if we feel these difficult emotions, there's something wrong with us. Because everywhere we look on social media, we're told to just be positive. This is toxic positivity.

Toxic positivity is forced, false positivity that sounds innocuous somewhat on the surface, but is basically saying to people, my comfort is more important than your reality. Or if you do it to yourself, if you hustle with your own, own emotions. If you said to yourself, I'm feeling lonely, but I shouldn't be lonely because, you know, people have it worse. People have it worse than me. You are gaslighting yourself. You are gaslighting yourself. And it might sound on the surface like this is going to make you stronger and you're going to be positive, but there is no research. There is no research supporting the idea that false positivity. In other words, a denial of,

of our experience is helpful to us as human beings. Again, what are you doing then? You are living in the world as you wish it would be, not in the world as it is. And how do we problem solve? How do we respond effectively to circumstances? It's when we're dealing with the world as it is. We need to deal with the world as it is.

Doesn't mean we need to get stuck in our difficult emotions, which is in agility. We need to be healthy with our emotions. but this narrative is bullshit. Okay, so you've had me write down my emotions. You didn't have me turn it over and talk about what I'm grateful for when I'm trying to be vulnerable and real with you and say, God, man, Susan, to be honest with you, and I gave you real words.

I'm overwhelmed, confused, weary, fearful. Yeah, I'm scared a little bit. I'm unsure. So tell me how signposting fits in with this. So this is this idea that our emotions. signpost the things that we care about, or that our emotions signpost our needs. So if you feel rage when you watch the news, your rage is not a negative emotion. You know, this idea that emotions are positive versus negative is, again, something that I push

against. Emotions are normal. Emotions are beautiful. There's no good or bad emotion. So if you feel rage when you watch the news, that rage, is signposting maybe that you value equity and fairness and that you need to make moves in your life towards that value. If you just push aside that rage, if you just bottle it, which is often what people do, they just push it as well and they say, I've just got to get on with it. I've

just got, I've got a job here. I've got my to do list. I've got all these things. Often what we do instead is we bottle the emotion we pushed aside. That is associated with high levels of depression. high levels of anxiety, low levels of problem solving, low levels of relationship effectiveness. Because if you bottle emotions, you're not actually able to be kind of vulnerable and effective with people. Often with difficulty motions, people instead of bottling, they might brood on their difficulty emotions. They get stuck in them. They say, why am I feeling, what I'm feeling? This is terrible. This is awful. I don't know if I want to be in this, raise children. I feel terrible. And it's almost like the metaphor that I have in my mind is that bottling is almost like you're carrying these emotions books.

You're carrying a heavy pile of emotions books and you carrying it so far away from you that your arms get tired. And your heart gets tired and you drop the box. When you brood on difficult emotions, you're holding the books so close to your chest that you can't see your husband. You can't hug your child. You can't be in the world. You can't give yourself the joy that you might need because it feels so close. And so emotionality is the space in between. And with your example, on a piece of paper, lonely, lonely might be signposting that

even though you live in a house with loved ones, that you can be lonely in a crowd because we go to the kitchen and we feel ourselves shut down as our partner reaches out to you. And there's that moment of defense. And so loneliness might be signposting to close off the signpost idea. Loneliness might be signposting that you need more intimacy and connection. Grief. Grief is love looking for a home. Grief might be signposting that this person or this experience that's gone from you still wants to be. with you in memories, in song, in photographs. I've never met someone who's sad, who isn't looking for a better way of being in the world.

Someone who's socially anxious, who's saying, how can I better connect? Even anger, you know, even especially anger, there's a body of research pointing to the idea that anger is foundational to moral courage. When you feel, not when you express, because there's a difference. Oh, yeah. Okay, there's a difference. When you're open to the feeling of anger, instead of saying, oh, I shouldn't go there, I'm being negative.

When you open to the experience of anger, what does it do? It makes you more likely to stand up against bodies or to use. your voice against injustice. So this is this idea of emotions as signposts, but I want to talk about one of your particular ones. Okay, go. I think. You love this. I know, I know this idea of what are different emotions, which is really what you're pointing to, which is you don't just have one emotion on the piece of paper, you've got a number. And yes, what we absolutely know is that Often what happens is when people experience difficulty emotions, what they do is they use very broad brushstrokes to describe what it is their feeling. So they'll say, I'm stressed is the most common one.

For sure. I'm overwhelmed. It's the most common one. But of course, we know there's a world of difference between stress and disappointment. You know, stress and that knowing, knowing feeling of, is this all it is? stress and depletion. If you use, or people who are listening, if we use big labels to describe our emotions, our body, our psychology doesn't actually know what to do with that.

What do we do with stress? It's this amorphous emotional experience. And so instead, if we are able to get more granular, if we're able to say, what are one of two other options? It is profoundly powerful. We know that children as young as two and three years old who are more able to accurately start labelling their emotions, have through their lifetimes better ability to self-regulate,

delay gratification, have a stronger sense of moral compass. And people might say, how does that really work out? Well, if you think about it, a child who has a more granular sense of his or her emotions, when someone says to the child, I've got this great idea, Let's let the air out of the principal's car tires. The child who says, the first emotion that I feel is excitement. But the second emotion that I feel is just quiet. That child who's able to be more granular is then more able to unpick what is it that's going on for me here.

Oh, this doesn't feel right. So this is really, really important, this idea that we often use these broad brushstrokes. But when we get more granular with labelling our emotions, it actually allows our body, our psychology, to say, what is the cause of the emotion? What is it that I need to put in place that's going to help me here? And this is just really important. It's very tough. So this is tough and this is such into the new research that we're doing right now and

we're doing a lot of work on emotional granularity, which is what we call this, right? How granular, how accurately I'm thinking of Mark Brackett's work, how accurately can we label what we're feeling, the more accurately we can label what we're feeling, the more capable we are of regulating it. So let me ask you these questions. What are the emotions, the big ones that are gummy and stick a bunch of things to it that we need to unclutter? What are the words that are often the big ones that we need to get more granular on? I think you said stress was one of them. Stress, definitely. Some people don't even do stress. Some people say busy. Busy, yeah. You know, everything's busy. Angry. I had a client that I was working with who

described everything as angry. He was angry. His wife was angry. His team was angry. And we had this process where I would say to him, what are two other options? They don't need to be right or wrong. What are two other options. And he started to say, well, maybe I'm scared. Okay. And maybe the team is mistrusting. And you can see if you go into a meeting and you are angry and the team's angry, that meeting is very different than if. Combatative, yeah. If you go into the meeting and it's like, I'm scared because I'm new to this role and the team's mistrusting, the meeting is very different. And he wasn't a psychology client of mine. He was a consulting client.

And months later, I went out with him and his wife, a group of people over dinner. And he was talking about this experience that he'd gone through about accurately labelling emotions. And his wife at the dinner table said, this changed our relationship. This simple skill changed our relationship because he would come home from work and he would say, you seem so angry and often. And she would say, I'm not. I'm just tired. You know, I just need help.

So I think busy, stress, angry, I think sad. Sad is, you know, sad, disappointed, vulnerable. There's so many different dimensions of sadness. So I think there are a couple of them. It's interesting because maybe 15 years ago, when we were running an early curriculum, a shame resilience curriculum, we asked, I think we got up to maybe 1,200 people. And since we've asked many, to write down all of the emotions that they've ever experienced. And do you know what the mean number was?

Tell me. Three. Really? Happy, sad, and pissed. Now, if that's all you've got, Yes. If that's all you've got, how do you have a conversation about injustice? How do you get ready for the loss of a loved one? This is one of the aspects of emotional agility. There are others as well, of course. But this is why I'm saying that when we shrink down into a sense of only one experience of emotions is legitimate and it's this positive experience, this is why.

it becomes erosive of our well-being because tough emotions are part of our contract with life. We don't get to have a meaningful career. We don't get to leave the world a better place. We don't get to raise a family without stress and discomfort. And with it comes the understanding of what it is that I actually need in this moment so that I can address that. And so really, again, this idea of emotions or signposts is this. idea that emotions, signposts, the things that you care about or the things that you need, when instead of just flipping that piece of paper over, you pay attention to it and you become

more granular with it, you generate a superpower that allows you not to be driven by the emotion. Our emotions are data. They're not directives. So I'll say that again, they data, not directives. We can learn from our emotions. They data, but they're not directives. we as human beings get to choose who we want to be. We get to step into our values. And it's the wisdom of emotions that allows us to understand what's going on for me with my anger, with whatever it is, and that then allows me to step into my values. But there's another thing that I think actually, if you don't mind, were you, I am.

Okay, so another thing that often happens is you'd ask me earlier on what is emotional agility. and I said it's about curiosity, it's about compassion, it's about courage around our difficult emotions. And it's basically this capacity to hold our emotions lightly and not become locked down into right versus wrong, rigidity with our emotions or letting our stories or our emotions own us. And a really important part of this is also linguistic skill. So really, I mean here is that we've all had the experience when you've worked with someone who's stuck where you said to the person, well, it sounds like you're really stuck. You know, what do you feel you need in this situation? And the person says to you, I don't know, that's what I'm

paying you for, you know. Yeah. Yeah. I'm stuck. You tell me. Okay, I'm stuck. Yeah. So then you said to them, let's just for a moment, imagine that you'd probably, you probably, you bring into the room the person who is the wisest, most loving person, the person who knows you best, who wants what's best for you and who you believe is wise. What that person advise you in this situation? And it's extraordinary because this individual who is stuck now says they would tell me to do A, B, C, D, E. Now, it's the same person. and we haven't actually got a physical otherwise individual into the room.

Right, right. So what's happening here? What's happening is that this person is engaging with perspective taking. They are moving themselves out of their emotional space, what I call it in emotional agility. I call this the ability to step out of emotions. So you're moving from your emotional space into an alternative space where you're able to see what it is that another person might want,

want or advise of you. So what you're doing is you're creating linguistic space in a sense between you and the emotion or perspective space. Now, we can do this even internally when we're struggling, when we're feeling undermined in a meeting, when we, you know, have the urge to leave the room because our husband's starting in on the finances or whatever it is. Often what we do is we use labels like we'll say things like, I am sad, I am overwhelmed, I am confused, I am lonely. Now, if we think about what we're doing there, it comes so naturally to us. But what are we doing? We are linguistically defining ourselves by the emotion. I am, all of me, 100% of me, is sad. There's no space for wisdom, for calm, for breathing, for connection, for values,

for other parts of ourselves. When we say, I am sad, it makes it sound as if you are the emotion. And it's almost like the emotion is a cloud in the sky. And it's like you have become the sad cloud. You know, the cloud in the sky is sad and you and the sad cloud are one. When instead you start labeling your thoughts, your emotions, your stories for what they are, this is anger. I'm noticing that I'm feeling angry. I'm noticing that this is my urge to. leave the room. I'm noticing that this is my I'm not good enough story. So what you're doing here is you're not bottling, you're not pushing it aside. You're not getting stuck in it. But what you're starting to do is you're starting to create linguistic space between you and the emotion so that you can

move beyond the emotion because, of course, when you say, I am sad, you are the cloud. When you say, are noticing that I'm feeling sad. It's so subtle, but you've created space and you are now zooming out. Because you on the cloud, you are the sky. You know, you are the sky. Human beings are capacious and beautiful and messy and extraordinary enough to feel all of their emotions and they have their values and have their wisdom. And so this linguistic distancing brings us into clarity with ourselves, brings us into alignment with ourselves.

We're no longer we owned by the emotion, but the emotion is a part of us. God, there's so much power in that. It is, it is extraordinary. And it's the kind of thing. Often with these skills, people say things like, oh, but it takes so much practice. It's like, I'm in a meeting and I get caught of God by my emotions. But no, most of the times where we say we get caught of God, it's because we aren't recognizing the patterns of when different emotions come up for us,

that I feel like I'm being caught of God, but it's actually when I constantly feel like I don't have a voice in this meeting. Okay, so these patterns that come up for us, and this example of I'm noticing is so small. but it's so powerful. There's a quote that you and I both love, probably because of the nature of the work we do and the way we try to live. And I'm not sure whether it's really attributed to, there's some question, Victor Frankel, Stephen Covey, Rolo May. But there's that quote between stimulus and response, there is a space.

And in that space is our power to choose our response. God, and you're talking about linguistic space here, right? So this quote is so beautiful and I love it. And I've started to just say in the sentiment of Victor Frankel, because I believe it's in his sentiment, but there's question as to the provenance of the exact wording of the quote. So at the very beginning of the conversation, you said to me, what is rigidity and what is agility? Yeah. Rigidity is when there's no space between stimulus and response. I'm angry, so I lash out. I'm frustrated, so I leave the room.

I feel undermined. And so I either shut down or I speak up, but neither of which are actually serving the intention of who I want to be in the moment. So when there's no space between stimulus and response, we are rigid. We get stuck on being right. We get so hooked on the idea of, I'm right and they are wrong and I'm being undermined and we become so hooked on this. What we're doing when we become curious with our difficulty motions, when we stop hustling with them, and instead we end the war with what we should feel.

by literally dropping the rope. When we open our hearts with willingness to the full range of our human experience and our beauty, even if those emotions are uncomfortable, but we stop hustling with whether we allowed them or not. Then we step out of them. What you're starting to do is you're starting to, between stimulus and response, there is a space.

How's the space created? The space is created by showing up to our difficult feeling, not bottling, not brooding, but rather creating space using these kinds of step-out strategies, labeling effectively. I've got others as well, you know, the I am that I just spoke about, there are many others. But then what are you inserting in that space? Again, our emotions are signposts. Our emotions are signposting our values.

So what we're inserting in that space, what's guiding us, data not directives, is how we want to show up in that moment with our values. And I love that quote. It's beautiful. It's just this kind of profound empowerment of the human spirit in a way that doesn't deny the real pain and the real suffering that is created by systems. But I've been thinking more that when we blame systems for everything, it can sound really empowering. It's like it's the system's fault. But actually in some ways,

it's the most disempowering thing you can do to a person to say it's entirely 100% a system that acts on you. Whether the system is the system of the family or whether it's the system of the workplace, there's so many systems that need to be changed urgently that are an insult to this idea of seeing the other. the person. But what I love about Victor Frankel's work is that there's something so profoundly recognizing of the person's capacity to breathe into a response to that system. Agency. Yeah,

there's agency. As opposed to victim. Victim. Yeah. Okay. I'll have a favor to ask. Can we do a two-parter? Yes. One of the things that this conversation about Victor Frankel about this space, this amazing sacred space between our stimulus and our response, our choice, is also compassion and self-compassion is a choice. Tell me what you've learned about compassion. It's a huge topic in my work, but it's also something I can struggle with as well. You asked me at the beginning about parts of work that have been influential on. One of the piece of work that's been really influential for me, there's been many, there's act, there's emotion regulation, but for me, the profound body of work in John Bolby. So John Balby describes in developmental theory, I think something so remarkably beautiful.

And I want to kind of play this out in terms of how I think about compassion. So what John Balby describes is something that all of us have seen. you go to a restaurant, for instance, in the days that we could go to restaurants, which hasn't been me for a year now. Yeah, same. Yeah, and you see a little child. The child might be 18 months old or two years old, and it's a very sweet thing that we note because the child's at the table with his parents or caregivers. And then the child runs away from the table. And what do they do?

They turn around. they look, they giggle at the parent or the caregiver, and then they run away even more. And so you see this go on and on and on and on, which is the child is looking, running, looking, running. So it bears the question then what is actually going on there? And what we know from John Bobby's work is the child has a secure base. The child is basically saying, if something goes wrong, while I'm exploring, when I'm learning, when I'm being curious, if something goes wrong, someone, something has my back.

They're going to step in and they're going to come and they are going to help me. So the way that I think about self-compassion is along these lines, which when we think about John Balby's work, John Balby is most known for this idea of Secure Base, but we can also think in developmental theory that children who are allowed to feel the emotional, that they feel where you don't have a parent saying, or don't be sad, let's go back cupcakes. Even when it's done with good intention, the parent really suburbiness shows up to the child's difficult emotion

and doesn't convent the child, under what we call display rules, that there's some emotions that are bad and some emotions that are good, instead just allows the child to feel what they feel. What happens is that child is then able to explore the emotional world the child is able to develop a sense of recognition that these emotions feel difficult, but they're not going to kill me. I become comfortable with discomfort. I learn that emotions pass.

You know, this is literally the bedrock of our capacity as children to start developing these emotional skills. So how does this relate to self-compassion? I think of it like this. Self-compassion is often thought of as being weak or lazy or letting yourself off the hope. but it is 100% not that at all. In fact, we know people who are self-compassionate are less likely to be dishonest with themselves, are more likely to be motivated.

So what is going on? What is going on is an analog, if you like, of that child in the restaurant. When you are kind to yourself, when you know that you have your own back, when you know that if things don't go well or if you have a fight with your spouse or you feel like you're failing, you will still love yourself, you'll still be kind to yourself.

What it does is it actually gives you the capacity and the power, just like that child, to explore, to take risks and to move forward in the world. And so this is why compassion is such an important part of emotional agility. Emotional agility, again, the ability to be with ourselves in ways that are curious, compassionate and courageous so we can take a good. values connected steps. And we do this in a number of ways. One of the most common ones that we hear is, you know, if you're struggling, imagine a child running up to you and telling you what's going on and how would you treat that child. And I think that's a really powerful one. But I think the other

ways we can think about compassion for every person listening right now, there's a five-year-old inside of you. You know, I think of it almost like those Russian bills, there's a five-year-old inside of you. The child is saying, see me, see me. And it's so powerful to just think, what is your five-year-old need right now? Do they need love? Do they need joy? Do they need the spontaneity of a picnic on the kitchen floor with your child? Do they need a hug? Do they need love? What is that child need? And it's really important to notice. when you're withholding from that child. Another way that we can access compassion

before we go into a difficult conversation is, and even in Zoom, is we're very tactile and we are currently suffering from a lack of touch. And so just putting your hands, and for those of you who can't see me, which is all of you, I'm literally right now, putting my hands on my chest. And Brenna is doing the same,

because we are tactile and it reminds us that we are here, that we are human and that we are more than our doing. We are more than our doing. And so these are some ways that we can start accessing our own compassion. It's just beautiful. I've been thinking so much about the work around safe exploration. I had someone tell me, this is just an anecdote, but I've thought about it a lot. when Ellen was born our first, who is now almost 22, someone said, you know those rickety wooden bridges,

the rope bridges that go over the deep ravine? And I said, yeah, and she said, parenting is about sending your child across that bridge. Boundaries are the handrails. Yes. And I thought, God, that made so much sense because I have raised kids that are fearless, in many ways around exploration, but I think it's because there's always been safety and boundaries at the harbor. And I think a lot about that bridge, and it makes me think about it when you're talking, Susan, because I think about there are two scenarios for crossing that bridge without handrails. And one is you just recklessly and with abandon, charge or cross it, and often to your own demise, or you're paralyzed and you never step foot on it or you kind of army crawl across

it slowly. But really to explore, there has to be, even to explore our own emotions, there has to be a sense of safety. Yes. You know, and that's compassion. I mean, that's compassion. I think compassion is. It's such a beautiful way of putting it.

You know, it's compassion is the guardrails. I think it's so gorgeous. And compassion, it's interesting because we can sometimes notice that we are being withholding in the competition. Oh, for sure. And even noticing that is just such a profound insight. Yeah, and I'm having this total research or aha moment because I have struggled so long for 15 years about this relationship that was so bewildering to me in the data. It took me two years to understand I had this group of deeply compassionate people. We had interviewed and I couldn't figure out what they shared in common because I was going after the wrong thing. I was looking at spirituality. But it turned out that what the most deeply compassionate people held in common was a sense of boundaries around how they allowed themselves to be treated by others and how they allowed themselves to talk to themselves. Are you tracking it all? So this is my tracking of what you're saying, which is something that I'm very passionate about in my work is that often when people talk about compassion, they talk about compassion fatigue.

And so it's this idea of we can't be too compassionate because if we're too compassionate, then we might move into compassion fatigue. And the way that I've explored this in my own work is that empathy and compassion, and they're different. We know that they're different. But empathy and compassion is very much about this ability to perspective take, to move into and out of different domains. If you think about empathy, empathy is about this capacity to say, this is how I'm feeling

and I'm moving into the emotional space of another person. That's this kind of empathy. Now, people can be very high on empathy, but if they have low capacity to manage their own emotion, that lands up being the recipe then for. empathy fatigue. So it's not that you want to decrease the empathy. Actually, the empathy, the compassion is what we need in the world. What we want to be doing is when people are experiencing compassion fatigue, we want to up their levels of emotion regulation capacity. And that looks like understanding what your boundaries on, what they're not. It looks like naming and labeling

your emotion. It looks like understanding your values. It looks like understanding your values. It looks like giving yourself moments for recovery. There's so many things that allow you to not be compassion fatigue. And I just find it really interesting because you can have someone if you do a kind of two by two, if you've got low empathy, you're going to struggle to connect. You're going to struggle to create the impact that you want. So you can have low empathy and low emotion regulation skills. And you can really struggle in your life. Or you can have high empathy and low emotion regulation skills and you feel so much, but you don't know what to do with those feelings that are arisen for you.

And so you struggle. And so they're different skills. And I think it's this high empathy and then these emotional skills that go hand in hand to create levels of health in our communities and in our psychologists. It's really interesting that we're talking about this because I often do this thing in the front of rooms when I'm facilitating the work where I'll have people come up and we'll be talking about empathy and compassion and I'll hold someone very tightly at the front of the room and I'll say, is this what empathy and compassion looks like? And people will say, absolutely. And I'll say,

but let's look at this and I'll separate the people and I'll just be barely touching fingertips with them. And I'll say, we can't truly be empathic and compassionate if we're not clear where we end and others begin. Do you know what I'm saying? Because I think it becomes emmeshment. Yes, yes. I think of this a little bit like, and I know you've done, we're doing a complete nerd thing here, which is great. We are geeky now, folks. This is it. I love it. I love it. So I think of a little bit like this, which is sympathy to me lately has become a kind of idea actually of this forced, false positivity. It's like thoughts and prayers, but get on with your mind.

Oh my God. Yes. So sympathy is like, I'm sorry you're in pain, but it's distant. Yes, for sure. Empathy says, I can imagine either cognitively or emotionally what this pain feels like. And there's a level of kind of shared cognitive or emotional language. Distant is sympathy. Empathy is the shared. Compassion says, I can see you are suffering. And I will do what I can to help. And so compassion is actually standing with the person, but you aren't the person. It's standing with them. standing beside them. It's a willingness to move things into action. But it's not an

emmeshment. It's not emmished. So I have a question for you. You know what? I'm going to leave y'all hanging, listeners. I'm going to leave y'all hanging to this question until part two. All right. We're going to do part two of this. I'm just going to end it here and just say, Dr. Susan, David, we're talking about emotional agility. I think I'm going to name the podcast episodes, Bernay and Susan, call Bullshit on Toxic Positivity Part 1 and 2. And then we'll come back and we're going to keep having this conversation. And I think it's incredible. So thank you, Susan.

Will you come back for Part 2? Yes, I will be here. Oh, I hope y'all like this conversation as much as I did. This is just deep learning. We are in school. We are in class together. There's going to be a part two. We're going to play them back to back.

You can find her book, Emotional Agility, wherever you like to buy books. We love our independent bookstores. You can link to it on our episode page. You can find Susan online at Susan David underscore Ph.D. on Twitter and Instagram. She's Susan David PhD on Facebook and LinkedIn. And her website is susendavid.com. Again, you can check out the episode page for all of these links.

It's on briney brown.com. And I will say last week on our Unlocking Us podcast, if you haven't listened yet, talking about a really great companion podcast to this, I talk with the amazing Dr. Edith Eager. She is an incredible therapist. She has dedicated her life to understanding trauma and healing and post-traumatic stress disorder. She was sent to Auschwitz when she was 16 with her family. Her parents were killed the day.

They arrived. liberated in 1945 and just has really spent her whole life helping us all feel and understand and make choices. And it's an incredible podcast, one that I will never in my whole life forget the conversation. Really appreciate our community. Appreciate listening and really love having partners in learning. I mean, that is what I feel like this community is. We are learning. We are taking two steps forward together sliding back one, sliding back three sometimes, but we just keep arm and arm trudging forward, staying awkward, brave, and kind. I'll see you all next time. Deer Deerlead is produced by Bray Brown, Education and Research Group. Music is by the sufferers.

Get new episodes as soon as they're published by following Deer to Lead on your favorite podcast app. We are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcast.com.