How to nurture your “emotional agility” (with Susan David)
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You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy. I like to think that I am a pretty emotional person, right? I'm certainly not one of those guys that's always all stoic, all stiff upper lip, right? The only acceptable place to display emotions is when I'm watching football. That is certainly not me. That is not me at all.

But that does mean that sometimes I can get stuck in my feelings or I can overemphasize positive thinking, always looking for a silver lining when maybe there is not a silver lining there. I sometimes wonder if I would be the person on the deck of the Titanic looking around and going, well, on the bright side, we are getting to experience history firsthand. And that's not ideal. I think that's probably not ideal. That's why I am so excited about today's guest, psychologist Susan David.

For years, she has been teaching people that the way that we navigate our internal worlds, our everyday thoughts, our emotions, our self-stories, that the way that we navigate those, it determines our success in life. I loved her book, Emotional Agility, Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive and Work in Life. And I am so excited for you to hear our conversation that we have on the show today. Here's Susan David. Hi, I'm Susan David. I'm a psychologist and I'm the author of the book, Emotional Agility.

I guess my first question, which obviously I think I have a little bit more of a sneak peek behind the curtain than other people, but what is emotional agility? So the short answer really is that emotional agility concerns the psychological skills that are necessary for us to be healthy human beings, especially healthy human beings in a very fast paced, changing and complex world.

And the truth is that every day we have thoughts, you know, thoughts might be, I'm not good enough or my boss is an idiot. We have emotions, sadness and grief and so on. And we also have stories. Some of our stories were written on our mental chalkboards when we were five years old about whether we're worthy, whether we're creative, leaders, not leaders. And as it turns out, how we deal with

This inner world that we have is crucially important to every aspect of our lives, to how we love, how we live, how we come to our relationships, what careers we put our hands up for and how we lead ourselves in the world. There's a longer definition, which is the ability to be with our thoughts, our emotions and our stories and

in ways that use these as important pieces of data about the things that we care about and the values that we hold to, but also not getting stuck in those, not getting dictated to by our sadness or by our story, and rather making choices that are concordant with how we want to live our lives and what those values actually are.

It feels like so many of us are in situations, whether it's on a societal level, when we look at our countries that we live in, or just on a personal level where we're

It's hard to be healthy, right? Maybe there's not a model of what healthy looks like when it comes to emotions. And like you were saying, sometimes that comes from the pressure all around, right? We have to be upbeat. We have to be positive. We have to never have grief or sadness or fear. And sometimes it comes from more dramatic situations with your immediate family. What do you do or how do you advise people to find models for what healthy looks like?

Well, I think that the issue that you raise, which is really that society conspires against our ability to be healthy with ourselves. So if we think about the most essential part of ourselves, our emotions, we often at a social level and also within our families, we

will either explicitly or implicitly convey that there are good and bad emotions. So there's this idea that the good emotions are the emotions when you are happy, when you're joyful, when you're conveying gratitude.

The bad emotions are the sadness, the grief, and so on. And built into our language, even built into the study of psychology, is the idea that there are these positive and negative emotions. And so really that's been my life's work. My life's work has really been focused on this idea that there's this narrative that exists that is so profoundly about unseeing ourselves.

It's so profoundly about emotional ill health that so much then of what we are doing is scrambling around putting band-aids on atom bombs. So a really important part of emotional agility at its core is actually about learning to drop the struggle and

with whether you should or shouldn't feel something, with whether something is allowed or not allowed by dropping the rope. In other words, moving beyond the tug of war that before we even get to the experience itself, just the judgment that we have about whether we can or can't feel what we feel. What I often say to people is there is no hierarchy when it comes to emotions. There's no hierarchy.

emotional pain that's not allowed because someone else might be feeling something more. If you are feeling what you are feeling, you are feeling what you are feeling. It doesn't help to layer judgment on top of that. So the first part of emotional agility that's really important is showing up to our difficult emotions with a level of compassion and

where we recognize that this emotion, this experience that we're having is hard for us and that it's hard to human.

And that it's not for us to lay on now additional judgment as to whether we should or shouldn't feel what we feel. So that's a core foundational aspect of emotional agility. And of course, there's a lot beyond that, but that is really foundational. You know, I think a lot of people like for me, right? Not only did I think like there's only good emotions and bad emotions, but I'm such an extreme version of...

You know, I'm literally a professional comedian where it's like something bad happens. My immediate professional response is like, OK, how can I make people laugh with that? How can that be? What's the bright side? And it's been very helpful to have a therapist say it's OK if there's not. Sometimes things are just hard and bad. You know, you don't have to be like,

The earth is on fire and 600,000 people have passed away and I lost my job. And the bright side is maybe there's not a bright side to that. It's okay. Yes. It's so profoundly built into the way we think about emotions. And what I found in my work and that I talk about in my TED Talk is that often when people experience difficult emotions, they aren't bad emotions, but they certainly can feel bad.

uncomfortable, alien or profoundly untethering. But often what happens when we experience these emotions is we engage in one of two responses. We might, on the one hand, bottle these emotions. We push them aside. We try to create a level of humor around them. We say, "I can't deal with this now because I've got my to-do list, but my to-do list is never ending." And so we bottle our emotions.

On the other hand, often what we do is we brood on our difficulty emotions. So we get so stuck in them that we get owned by them.

You know, I feel cynical about my job or I hate my colleague or I get stuck inside my Twitter feed and I almost get victimized by those difficult emotions. So a really important aspect of emotional agility is recognizing exactly as you described that we don't need a bottle, we don't need to brood on them, we can end the struggle and then we can start bringing really profoundly important emotions

emotional capacities that help us to then make sense of these emotions in ways that are healthy. We're going to talk more about how to make sense of those emotions in just a moment. But first, a short break.

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I'm so excited to share the stage with all the amazing speakers of the TED Next conference, and I hope you'll come and experience it with me. Visit go.ted.com slash TED Next to get your pass today. And we're back. We are talking with psychologist Susan David about emotional agility.

Well, you've already I feel like you've already moved towards technique. So let's push even further in that, which is a lot of these, you know, you've identified things that we can do of the bottling or the deflecting or the avoiding with tasks. What are some what are maybe three things that people who are listening should do to improve their emotional agility?

Three out of 30, three out of 300. I'm sure there's infinite amounts of things that could train your agility. So here are three tools that I think are really profoundly important. The first is that for every single person listening, if we think about the last 18 months,

And if I had to ask you to imagine taking out a blank piece of paper and on that blank piece of paper, writing an emotion word of something that you either experience right now or have been experiencing, what would that word be? So the word might be, it might be grief or loneliness. It might be boredom.

So there's so many different emotions that we might be experiencing. Now, in a world that seems to value relentless, toxic positivity, where there literally is a kind of tyranny of positivity, where if you experience one of these difficult emotions, what someone might say is, now turn around the piece of paper and write what you should be grateful for. What I would instead invite people to do is to turn around that imaginary piece of paper and ask yourself,

What need or value is being signposted by that difficulty motion? And so if you think about that piece of paper, when you turn it over and you say to yourself, what is this emotion pointing to in terms of my needs or values? Boredom, for instance, might be signposting that you value growth.

And that you don't have enough of it in your life. And you can be in a relationship for 15 years and know that you loved and yet still be bored or be in a workplace where you're busy and still be bored. Loneliness. Loneliness might be signposting that you need more intimacy and connection. Grief. Grief is... I always think grief is love looking for its home. Grief is love. So if we...

think about one tool, it's really about experiencing these difficult emotions. And instead of judging them, trying to say, what is the need that this emotion is signposting that is really important? So that's one skill that's really crucial. Okay. So that's one. Okay. That's one. Number two, I want to give four.

Okay, I love it. I'll take a bonus one. They have to be too many, but you can shut me down. No, no. Four for the price of three. That's great. Okay. So a second really important tool is self-compassion.

Self-compassion, when we describe it, especially in a world that makes us feel like we are in a never-ending Iron Woman or Iron Man competition, self-compassion can feel like you being weak or lazy or lying to yourself, that you're letting yourself off the hook. But when we think about self-compassion, the components of self-compassion are the recognition that it's hard to human and that for every single one of us,

we are being asked to human and we're being asked to human in a way that doesn't come with a playbook. And so a core component of our capacity to be healthy is to see yourself as a being in that struggle. And so how might you do this? I invite you for a moment to just ask yourself, what is the five-year-old in me need right now?

is that five-year-old asking to be seen, to be loved, to feel worthy, to have spontaneity and joy. What is the five-year-old needing? And it's a really profoundly important exercise because we know from a psychological perspective that our ability again to be healthy as humans is

is yes, to be in the present, but also to have what is called continuity of the self. Continuity of the self is that we recognize that there was a being within us that is a younger version of ourselves that had hopes and dreams and aspirations. And that indeed, there's an older version of ourselves that is

Saying, don't forget to save, you know, don't forget to do these things for me. And so when we start bringing this level of compassion to a younger or an older version of ourselves, what it actually starts doing is strengthening the thread between these different versions of ourselves that are really important. I absolutely, I mean, this show is called How to Be a Better Human, but I absolutely think that a possibly more accurate title for the podcast would be Hard to Human, as you've said a few times.

It's so hard to human. It's so hard to human and it's hard to recognize. So one of the things that I've found in my work is, and this is skill number three, is often people use very big, broad brushstroke labels around their emotions. So these very big umbrella terms. So one of the ones that is very commonly used is people will say I'm stressed.

You know, how was your day? I'm stressed. How was the meeting? It was stressful. Now, if we think about it, there's a world of difference between stress and disappointment, stress and feeling depleted, stress and that knowing, knowing feeling of I'm in the wrong job or the wrong career. So a really important skill when it comes to emotional agility is what is called emotion granularity.

Emotion granularity is the very simple skill of saying, what else am I feeling? So this thing that I'm calling stress, what are two other options? Oh, it's disappointment.

Oh, it's feeling unsupported. When we label our emotions more accurately, we actually start readying ourselves for strategy and action. And as it turns out, this is a foundational thing

psychological skill that it is one of the biggest tragedies that we are not taught it in schools that we aren't taught these skills because they're so caught our well-being. The third skill then about these like what are two other options, what else might you be experiencing is really about saying, I'm calling this thing stress as an example, but what else might it be?

So what starts to happen is there's a whole other way of now seeing a person beyond the story that we are ascribing to them that is far more, again, sensitive to context, sensitive to actually what's in front of us and therefore allows us to be agile. Okay, I'm going to try and use some agility of my own to segue from our interview into a quick ad break, and then we will be right back. Don't go anywhere.

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I want to tell you about a new podcast from NPR called Wild Card. You know, I am generally not the biggest fan of celebrity interview shows because they kind of feel packaged, like they've already told these stories a bunch of times before. But Wild Card is totally different because the conversation is decided by the celebrity picking a random card from a deck of conversation starters. And since even the host, Rachel Martin, doesn't know what they're going to

pick, the conversations feel alive and exciting and dangerous in a way because they're vulnerable and unpredictable. And it is so much more interesting than these stock answers that the celebrities tend to give on other shows. You get to hear things like Jack Antonov describe why boredom works or Jenny Slate on salad dressing or Issa Rae on the secret to creativity.

It is a beautiful, interesting show, and I love it. Wildcard comes out every Thursday from NPR. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back. It's interesting. I think that as I'm sure happens to you all the time when you are having these talks, that it's impossible to not think about my own life and the way that these affect me. And one thing that immediately came to mind there is

For many years now, I haven't drunk. I haven't stopped drinking alcohol. And sometimes people ask, like, what was it? Was it some big dramatic moment? And for me, it really wasn't. And I know some people have that. For me, it was more that when I started to have this emotional granularity, which I never would have used that term for before, but I realized...

I am drinking alcohol because it's easier than feeling slightly socially uncomfortable, right? That everyone else has a beer, so I'll also have a beer. And even though I don't want that, I'll just do that. And once I realized that, once that came into my head, then I thought, well, I don't want to do that anymore. I'll just learn how to be, I'll practice being a little more comfortable with people without having the alcohol, which I don't want. And then it improved my life in all these other ways. And

I think that with the idea of granularity around emotions is like if someone came to paint your house or your apartment and they said, I'm going to paint the walls blue.

You would say, what kind of blue? You wouldn't just be like, great, love blue. And yet we do that with emotions all the time. Sad, angry. And it's when you do it that way, you get solutions that aren't really for the problem. They're just in the general ballpark of the problem. They're in the ballpark. And this is why when I use this term superpower, I really mean it. Because what you just described is

such an important insight. If we think about so often the changes that we're trying to make in our lives and in our world, you can see that in order to make a change, we actually need this granularity. So for instance, if you say,

stress and it feels amorphous stress. And then you just attach a solution that again is an amorphous solution to the stress, drinking, overeating, lying on the couch, watching Netflix, whatever it might be for the individual. It doesn't move us anywhere towards actually solving what is actually going on or

bringing us to a place in which we feel like we flourishing or thriving. It's literally just again, a bandaid on my leg, whereas actually my legs broken. Yeah. Yeah. So when we are trying to make changes and we can start saying, okay, this thing that I'm feeling, I'm not unhappy in my job. I'm bored in my job. And then we go back to that thing of like, well, what is the boredom signaling about my values or about my needs? And

Now we actually start having an extraordinary pathway forward that is hyper individualized. What can you do if you're a person who is kind of repeatedly experiencing the same emotions and thoughts? So maybe you have this granularity and you know what it is, but it keeps coming up. Do you just manage them and deal with that every day? Or how do you keep doing that work on yourself? Yeah.

Well, if there's an emotion that comes up time and time again, that emotion, again, is often signposting a need or a value that we have. And often when we talk about values, values often sound very...

abstract or the kind of things that they put on walls in businesses that make you want to roll your eyes. But the way that I think of values is that values are qualities of action. So every single day we have the capacity to either move ourselves towards our values or away from our values. And there are many, many micro moments of that ability to do that.

So drawing on one of the examples that I gave earlier, if you experiencing this sense of loneliness, so you've gone from stress and you're saying, okay, it's not stress, it's lonely. And then you start saying, okay, the loneliness is signposting that I need more intimacy and connection. And often what we know is when people feel lonely and you can be lonely in a crowd, lonely on Zoom calls every day, lonely in a house full of people,

We often know that when people experience loneliness, what they actually do is they paradoxically put up even more barriers. They become more distant because they're worried about being rejected. They become more closed into themselves. And so we can start saying, what are small moments where I can move myself in the direction of my values? So a choice point might be that every single day I'm

find myself getting coffee in the kitchen and my husband's there as well. And we usually grunted each other and walk away from each other as an example. But in that moment, my choice point that's going to be bringing me towards my value, which is more intimacy and connection is to put down my phone and

genuinely connect with a person for a minute or genuinely reach out and give them a hug. And so what you're starting to do is you're starting to take these repetitive experiences and starting to just

understand what they're signposting for you about your needs and thinking about how you can bring yourself in a way that's closer towards your needs. So if we know that a value that we've had is around health, as an example, we're trying to eat a healthier diet. We can make that choice point being that there is healthy food on the table, that the choice point is that every morning I know that I am

go into my kitchen and I'm reaching for a snack, but there's something that's easy there. And so a really important aspect of emotional agility is recognizing that these emotions are signposting things that we need and that we actually have the capacity to shape our environments, not by

rewriting the narrative, not by moving to a wine farm in France so that we no longer feel lonely, but actually thinking about what are moments that we have in our everyday experience that can bring us closer towards the things that we value. Well, we obviously are coming close to the end here. I'd love to just get a really quick definition from you since we talked about it earlier. And I think it's something that many people are going to relate to as a concept. You talked about

toxic positivity or false positivity. Can you just define what you mean by that? Yes. We, again, live in a culture that has come over time to somehow value positivity and happiness. And don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-happiness. But what happens when we push aside normal human emotions in the service of forced false positivity?

is we are actually then individually as well as in our communities failing to develop the skills that help us to deal with the world as it is. The world as it is, is a world that is fragile, that is complex, where grief and love are interwoven, where the beauty and fragility of life are a given. And so when we only develop skills around, I've got to pretend to be happy all the time,

We are turning our back on actually the most important skills, which are the skills that help us to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. A world in which we do have these difficult emotions. And so what is toxic positivity? I often use the word forced false positivity or this tyranny of positivity. It is basically about turning your back on

on the reality of what you or other people are experiencing and instead pretending to be happy or mandating that other people should just be positive. And we often do this with good intentions, just be positive, good vibes only, et cetera. But really what it is, is it's an avoidant coping strategy. It is a form of denial.

It may be wrapped up in unicorns and sparkles and lovely sounds, but it is denial. And when we live in a world that is based on denial, we don't develop the skills to deal with life as it is. Amazing. Well...

Dr. Susan David, thank you so much for being on the show. It's been a pleasure talking to you. And I could really talk to you for three more full days without stopping and running out of stuff. So I know we just touched the tip of the iceberg. Thank you so much for having me. Okay, that is it for today's episode. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and this has been How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to our guest, Dr. Susan David. Her book is called Emotional Agility.

On the TED side, this show is brought to you by Abhimanyu Das, who is emotionally flexible. Daniela Balarezo, who is emotionally dexterous. Frederica Elizabeth Yosvav, who is emotionally nimble. Ann Powers, who is emotionally acrobatic. And Cara Newman, who is emotionally adroit.

From PRX Productions, How to Be a Better Human is brought to you by Jocelyn Gonzalez, who shows up, Pedro Rafael Rosado, who steps out, and Sandra Lopez-Monsalve, who walks her Y. Thanks to you for listening. If you enjoyed it, please share this episode with an emotionally agile friend and leave us a positive review. Thanks again for listening. Have a great week.

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