Emotional agility and why it matters

 

Do you ever get the feeling that we live in a “fix it” world? I do.  If someone is sad, we try to make them happy, if someone is angry, we try and calm them down.  In a world that values relentless positivity we want to fix everything, especially when it comes to emotions that make us feel uncomfortable.  But sometimes it’s important to recognise that worried and uncomfortable is precisely where we need to be.

A psychologist called Susan David talks about a concept called emotional agility.  When we are emotionally agile, we are able to experience our thoughts and emotions in a way that doesn’t allow them to hijack our plans.  What this means is that we can experience big feelings like sadness, anger or frustration and we are still able to do the things that are important to us. 

There are four key parts to developing emotional agility

1.       Showing up

This is about being curious when emotions show up.  It’s pausing and asking ourselves the question “why do I feel so frustrated (sad/anger/anxious) right now?”. This is important because our emotions signpost us to what we value.  For example, when a young child comes home from school feeling really frustrated because their friends left them out of the game, one reason they may feel so frustrated is because being connected to their friends is important to them.  Our default response is often to move our children away from the tricky emotions.  This often looks something like “don’t worry you have lots of other friends”.  By doing this we are failing to support them to see their emotions as valuable, normal and natural.   It is so much more helpful to allow them to sit with the emotion and support them to understand why they are feeling so frustrated.

 

2.        Stepping Out

This is about how we unhook from the thoughts or emotions.  Have you ever had the experience of your young person saying “I just want this feeling to go away”?  I have.  Susan David calls this a dead person’s goal. Only dead people never feel sad or stressed, these emotions are part of life and unhooking from these emotions is NOT about getting rid of them.  It is about taking a step back and recognising our emotions are just one small part of us, and what’s more we actually have some choice about what we do with them.  One super simple way to do this is to move away from I am statements and instead preface the thought or emotion with I am having the thought that …. or I am having the feeling that …  What this simple exercise does is take some of the power out of the thought or feeling

 

·       Take a moment to think about the most common unhelpful thought your mind shows up with (I am useless, I am stupid, nobody likes me….) and just sit with it for a moment

·       Now change this into I notice I am having the thought that…. I am stupid and just notice how different this feels

 

3.       Walking Your Way

This is about who is in the driving seat - your emotions or your values.  For most of us our emotions are pretty good at hogging the driving seat! This is exhausting because our emotions are constantly changing, sometimes without any notice at all.  One minute we can feel happy and relaxed and the next minute we just want to get away from everyone.  This makes for a very erratic driver!  If we can allow the things that are important to us (our values) to be in the driving seat (even some of the time) our journey will feel much less bumpy. The reason for this is when we are living our life in a way that is aligned to our values – being fair, connecting with our friends, working hard – we all feel so much more comfortable with who we are and how we are living our lives.

 

4.       Tweaking

Once we know what our (or our young people’s) core values are, we can start to make small changes that allow us to do more of the things that grow these values.  For example, if we value connection with others, we can start to spend more time with our friends even when our emotions are telling us not to bother.   Over time these changes will become more automatic and we will find ourselves less driven by emotions and more driven by our values.  This doesn’t mean that we are now free of difficult emotions, remember we need these emotions to bring our attention to the important things, but it does mean that we can start replacing BUT with AND.  So instead of saying I really want to go to the party BUT I am too anxious we can say I really want to go to the party AND I am anxious about going. 

Finally...

Emotional agility is the ability to be with our emotions, to learn from them and to move forward to do the things that are important to us anyway. This is the cornerstone of resilience and it is hard.  Sometimes we will manage it and sometimes we wouldn’t and that’s OK.  The direction we are traveling in is so much more important than the speed we are going.