PDF Summary:Emotional Agility, by Susan David

When you experience a negative or stressful event, do you think through your responses carefully and act exactly as you want to? Or do you find yourself caught up in the emotions of the moment, acting in ways that you later feel embarrassed or ashamed of?

In Emotional Agility, clinical psychologist and management consultant Susan David explains that most people react instinctively to their perceptions of events—which are based on emotional, often-untrue narratives explaining why those events took place. David argues that you can break free of these controlling narratives by practicing emotional agility—seeing events and your emotions objectively so you can live with purpose and clarity.

In this guide, we’ll explore David's strategies and the importance of living according to your values so you can create the life you truly want instead of one ruled by your emotions and the desires of others. In commentary, we’ll explain the origins of David’s ideas, the scientific evidence behind them, and how to apply them to your life.

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Step 2: Accept Your Emotions

Once you’ve labeled your emotions, you can begin the second step of developing emotional agility: accepting your emotions. This means compassionately giving yourself permission to feel, struggle, and fail. You’ll acknowledge that neither the act of feeling unwanted emotions—particularly guilt and shame—nor the act of believing inaccurate narratives make you less of a person.

To achieve acceptance and self-compassion, David encourages you to look at your own faults and flaws as you would those of a loved one or a young child—with forgiveness. This strips away the accusatory power that self-narratives often hold.

In our example of feeling guilty about dropping out of college, you might be telling yourself that failing in the past makes you a failure. Self-compassion in this case might mean saying, “I regret my past decision, but I can still learn from it and make different choices in the future.” You acknowledge your past mistakes without believing the lie that you should feel guilt or shame forever.

David notes that accepting your emotions can help you use them for their evolutionary purpose: prompting behaviors that can improve your life. Regret from dropping out of college might prompt reflection and planning for a return to school or an attempt at moving up in your career—without the fear that you’re a failure who’ll never succeed in new ventures.

The Importance of Accepting Your Emotions

David emphasizes the power of self-compassion, but it may be even more important than she claims. Research suggests that mindfulness and facing your emotions—crucial components of emotional agility—might only be effective for positive mental and physical health outcomes when paired with acceptance. In one study, participants who paid attention to and accepted their emotions reduced their stress hormone and blood pressure levels. Participants who only paid attention to their emotions but didn’t accept them saw a much weaker improvement.

Research also shows that exposure to a source of stress (through exposure therapy) is effective for reducing physiological responses to the stressor. This helps your brain understand that the source of stress isn’t actually a physical danger. Similarly, accepting negative emotions and realizing they’re not a threat to you can help you feel less stress when you experience those emotions.

Step 3: View Your Emotions Objectively

Labeling and accepting your emotions goes a long way to reducing their intensity and power over you—which makes it easier to take the third step of developing emotional agility: viewing your emotions from an objective perspective. David says when you’re able to look at your emotions—and the narratives they come from—from a rational, objective standpoint, you’ll be able to see the flaws in your narrative and in your emotional reactions to it.

For example, if someone cuts you off in traffic, you might feel anger as your brain forms the narrative, "He deliberately cut in front of me!" For the rest of your commute, you wallow in your anger. However, if you think about the situation objectively, you’ll realize that the other driver likely wasn’t trying to mistreat you—he simply didn’t see you—and there’s no reason to be so angry.

(Shortform note: Some people may find it more difficult than others to see their emotions objectively. Research shows that people with Major Depressive Disorder have lower activity in the part of the brain responsible for voluntary emotional regulation, and injuries to the frontal lobe can hinder your ability to recognize your emotions.)

Additionally, understanding that your emotions are temporary experiences, not absolute truths about your life helps lessen the power of the narratives you hold about yourself. For example, the fact that you feel sad in reaction to an event doesn’t mean you can’t handle stress or that your situation is hopeless. It only means that, at that moment, you feel sad.

David offers two techniques for gaining an objective perspective: mindfulness for handling your present emotions and journaling for handling your past emotions.

How Emotions Relate to Personality

While David says that your emotions are only temporary and aren’t truths about you and your life, some psychological trait researchers emphasize a link between your personality traits and the emotions you frequently feel. One study describes a link between various emotions (and emotional regulation strategies) and the classic “big five” personality traits:

• Openness to experience: More curious people tend to be more accepting of their emotions.

• Conscientiousness: More organized people tend to be more mindful of their emotions.

• Extraversion: More outgoing people are more likely to experience positive emotions.

• Agreeableness: More compassionate people are more likely to feel positive emotions toward others.

• Neuroticism: More nervous people are more likely to experience negative emotions.

However, while these traits are useful descriptors, they don’t define you. In Personality Isn’t Permanent, psychologist Benjamin Hardy says your personality changes throughout your life—in response to both major life events and your daily habits and choices. Indeed, studies show that as people grow older, they tend to become more outgoing, organized, and agreeable.

Handle Present Emotions With Mindfulness

Mindfulness is the act of paying attention to your senses, emotions, and surroundings without judgment. David suggests that by paying attention to the stimuli in your surroundings—and the emotions that arise from your thoughts about these stimuli—you can weaken your instinct to believe your narratives. Your brain avoids mindfulness to save you mental energy in everyday life: If you can pour a glass of water without paying close attention, you’ll likely do so on autopilot every time you’re thirsty. While on autopilot in this way, you’re more susceptible to your narratives and emotions controlling you.

However, David says you don’t need to be mindful at every moment in order to ward against narrative and emotional control. Instead, pay deliberate attention to your surrounding stimuli from time to time throughout the day. You’ll gradually become more mindful with practice.

A Buddhist Perspective From Mindfulness in Plain English

David briefly mentions that you shouldn’t judge your emotions and perceptions while practicing mindfulness. Looking into the original Buddhist principle of mindfulness clarifies the importance of a nonjudgmental perspective. In Mindfulness in Plain English, Buddhist monk Gunaratana describes a few characteristics of mindfulness as they relate to being aware of—but not assigning value to—your emotions and surroundings:

• Mindfulness is nonconceptual awareness. There is no conscious thought, where judgment happens.

• Mindfulness is nonjudgmental awareness. You can’t be aware if you’re judging all of the stimuli around you.

• Mindfulness is awareness of change. However, while it watches this change, it doesn’t comment on it.

While David’s principles of mindfulness align with Buddhist principles, her practical suggestions differ slightly. She says you can practice mindfulness by intensely focusing on objects or actions for a period of time. On the other hand, Gunaratana argues that mindfulness isn’t the same as concentration: Unlike mindfulness, which should have an element of ease, concentration requires effort and force.

Handle Past Emotions With Journaling

Journaling means writing down your experiences, feelings, and thoughts—or narrating them into a voice recorder. Unlike mindfulness, which deals with present emotions, journaling is a technique for processing past emotions and narratives. David says journaling naturally leads you to label and accept your emotions, offering you a more objective understanding of those emotions. Journaling can reduce the power of lifelong emotions and narratives, preparing you to actively choose your responses to emotions in the future.

Consider The Bullet Journal Method

While journaling can be a helpful practice, research suggests that it can easily turn into a form of wallowing if you journal about stressful events themselves instead of your emotions related to those events. One journaling method that may be particularly well-suited to enable emotional agility instead of wallowing is bullet journaling.

In The Bullet Journal Method, Ryder Carroll suggests the following techniques:

• Write by hand. Writing by hand is usually slower than typing or speaking, so you’re more likely to mindfully pay attention to your emotions and surroundings while writing.

• Reflect on the past. Carroll encourages you to reflect on past experiences by writing about them daily, considering your feelings and different ways you could have chosen to respond to events.

• Plan for the future. Regularly revisiting your goals for the future helps you think ahead to what you want to do, and planning your goals far enough in advance allows you to tweak them as you discover what values you want to live by (which we’ll explore next).

Step 4: Choose Your Values

Now that you’ve learned how to take back control from your narratives and emotions, you can move on to the final step of developing emotional agility: choosing your values. Values are the guiding principles that shape your behaviors and decisions, the things in life that you believe are most important. David explains that everyone has values, whether they realize it or not—though for most people, many of these values are intrinsically tied to unconscious narratives.

For example, your extended family might consider “family” a core value—and look down on you for cutting an abusive parent out of your life. You might then feel tempted to believe the narrative that you must always remain in contact with your family, no matter what.

David recommends contemplating the values others impose on you. Examine your behavior across different settings in your life. Do you act or speak differently around friends, family, and others? If so, why? Does this arise from a desire to appease or impress others who value certain behaviors more than you do?

(Shortform note: In 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think, author Brianna Wiest suggests that the compulsion to adopt others’ values as your own comes from the need for external validation. Early in life, you likely created a narrative that conforming to the expectations of others was the only way you could experience comfort and happiness: If you acted according to their desires and expectations, you were rewarded—for example, with extra attention and affection. On the other hand, if you acted against their desires and expectations, you were punished—for example, with rejection or social humiliation.)

Choose and Pursue Your Personal Values

David says that besides the values you receive from others, you also carry a set of personal, unique values that, when pursued, will give you a sense of fulfillment and purpose. When you objectively understand your emotions, you don’t instinctively believe what your narratives and emotions say you should value. You’re free to purposely determine—and live by—your personal values.

David gives advice on how to determine your values: Ask yourself what life you’d pursue if you had no obstacles or stress standing in your way. When you go to bed each night, think over your day and decide what parts of it were valuable and which didn’t feel fulfilling. Imagine what your future self might think of your current values—and where those values will lead you in the future.

(Shortform note: It can be intimidating to consider every aspect of your life to determine what you value within it. In Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans suggest an exercise to guide your thoughts. Think of your values in terms of four categories: health (mental, physical, and spiritual), work (both paid and unpaid), joy (what makes you happy and relaxed), and interpersonal relationships. Contemplate how satisfied you feel in each category. If you don’t feel satisfied in a category, think about what would improve your satisfaction—this will highlight where your current value set may be falling short.)

Choose Value-Based Goals

Once you have your values in mind, how do you set goals that honor your values and make them a more central part of your life? Simon Sinek's Start With Why offers a way to set value-based goals. He explains that truly great companies start with a “why”—values that inspire you and give you a feeling of purpose—instead of starting with a “what,” or their products and services. Though Sinek wrote this book to help companies make values-based goals, you can adapt his principles to choosing personal goals as well. Let’s explore how:

Once you’ve determined your personal values, decide the actions you're willing to take to pursue your values—and note actions you’re not willing to take, or actions that contradict your values. For example, if you value “family,” consider what you’re willing to do to honor this value. Would you be willing to adjust your work schedule to attend a child's extracurricular activities? Are there some actions you won't take because they'll harm one value, even if they serve another?

Then, choose your goals based on these reflections. Sinek suggests turning a value into a concrete action: The value "family" might become, "Eat dinner with my family every weeknight."

Part 3: Pursuing the Life You Want

Even after you develop the skill of emotional agility, your past still affects you—a past shaped by narratively and emotionally driven decisions. Changing the life you spent years building according to your narratives won’t be easy, but living by a couple of David’s principles will put you on the right path:

1. Grow through gradual change.
2. Live for the future, not the past.

We’ll explain how these principles can help you start living by your values while avoiding falling back into the trap of narrative and emotional control.

Principle #1: Grow Through Gradual Change

Though emotional agility gives you techniques to choose how you act and respond to events in your life, shifting from living by your narratives to living by your values involves making many small, deliberate choices every day that serve your values.

Studies show that setting small goals for change is more likely to result in success than committing to huge, life-changing goals all at once. When your goals are smaller, the stakes for failure are lower. David says that because you won’t be held back by emotions that often accompany failure, like fear of shame or embarrassment, you’ll be more likely to succeed.

(Shortform note: You don’t have to abandon long-term goals in lieu of setting smaller ones. Instead, consider breaking down large goals into smaller goals—giving you the benefits of smaller goals while still letting you work toward a larger one. In The 12 Week Year, Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington offer advice for how to do this efficiently, suggesting that you set specific metrics and deadlines for your smaller goals. This helps you track your progress and see where you need to make adjustments if you want to ultimately succeed at your larger goal.)

David emphasizes three avenues for successful, gradual change: your belief in your abilities, your attitude toward change, and your routines. Let’s explore each in detail.

Avenue 1: Your Belief in Your Abilities

To escape controlling narratives of fear and helplessness, David urges you to choose to believe that you’re capable of change and growth. Studies show that you’re more likely to succeed in your goals for change when you believe that capacity is within your power.

However, David doesn’t advise simply believing you will succeed at every goal regardless of its scope or the obstacles that stand in your way. Instead, she suggests approaching low-stakes goals with the belief that you will succeed. Over time, you’ll build a new narrative that you’re truly capable of success.

(Shortform note: While researchers agree that believing in your ability to succeed is an important foundation for achieving goals, it’s important to avoid overconfidence, especially when you lack the skills to approach a certain problem. This can lead you to make dangerous mistakes, like trying to wire your own home despite knowing little about electrical safety. Psychologists note the common mental bias of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the tendency for people to overestimate their knowledge or expertise in an area. To avoid the Dunning-Kruger effect, ask yourself how your assumptions might be flawed, and ask people with expertise in the area of your intended goal for feedback and critique.)

Avenue 2: Your Attitude Toward Change

The work of pursuing your goals—spending hours job hunting, for example—can feel like an unpleasant chore. This can make you less likely to follow through with your goals in the long term. To combat this frustration, reframe your responsibilities and tasks as things you genuinely want to do—and as stepping stones toward goals that you also want to achieve.

David says you’re more likely to feel motivated and committed in the long term when you approach tasks in this way.

(Shortform note: Researchers agree that reframing responsibilities to emphasize that you want to take them on is a powerful way to keep motivated. However, you should be careful when reframing—you don’t want to fall into a new controlling narrative by ignoring the negative elements of your situation or telling yourself that you have to stay positive. After all, your responsibilities won’t always be free of negative emotions, and an objective view of your situation will include the bad along with the good.)

Avenue 3: Your Routines

In addition to prompting your emotional reactions to narratives, your body and brain also drive you toward instinctive actions requiring little to no conscious thought: routines. When you repeatedly make the same desired choice—perhaps choosing fruit over candy if your value is “healthy eating”—that choice gradually becomes an instinctive routine.

David offers two ways to sculpt your routines to promote a gradual change that will serve your values:

1) Adjust your environment. Change how easily you can access things that help or hurt your values. If you want to journal instead of looking at your phone first thing in the morning, keep your journal by your bedside and leave your phone on a charger at the other end of the house.

2) Adjust an existing routine. It’s easier to change an existing routine than to create a new one, so a fairly simple way to add your values into your life is resolving to do a values-supporting behavior at the same time as a step in your routine. For example, if you want to show your partner you love her, you can add “write a caring note” to your current routine of preparing coffee.

David adds that if you habitually struggle with certain negative emotions, you can add the extra step of coming up with a positive response to your emotion. For example, if you frequently feel exasperated at your child’s behavior, you can tell yourself, “When I feel frustrated, I’ll stop, decide how I want to respond, and then answer.”

David warns you to stay aware and critical of your routines—even the new ones that serve your values. Falling too deeply into any routine puts you at risk of falling back into mindless behavior and automatic reactions.

(Shortform note: It can be difficult to remain mindful of your routines and whether they continue to serve your values over time. One way to do so is by conducting a regular audit of your routines—asking yourself questions that reveal whether they continue to support your values: Does this routine still serve a purpose, or is it just a habit? Do you care more about following the steps of the routine than about its original purpose? Does a change of plans that interrupts your routine put you in a bad mood? Does your routine feel boring? If you answer “yes” to any of these questions, take a closer look at that routine’s place in your life.)

How Habits Work

Understanding how routines and habits work can help you adjust them when necessary. In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg describes three essential elements for how a habit works:

• Cue: This is a trigger that signals the starting point of your habit and tells your brain to move into automatic mode to execute a specific routine. For example, you see a cookie and feel the urge to eat it.

• Routine: You act out the physical, mental, or emotional sequence of behavior that your brain has stored. For example, you pick up the cookie and eat it.

• Reward: This is the result of your routine and signals the end of your habit. For example, you feel a sugar rush from eating the cookie.

You can deliberately add rewards to habits (like taking a short walk outdoors or eating a small piece of candy) to engineer the reward phase of a habit you’re trying to build. This principle also applies when adjusting an existing routine. If you’re trying to cut down on a habit of eating cookies, you might try drinking a cup of tea instead—and perhaps drinking it with less sugar over time.

Principle #2: Live for the Future, Not the Past

David warns against believing the sunk-cost fallacy when pursuing your goals. The sunk-cost fallacy is a narrative that insists you should continue pursuing a goal no matter what to avoid wasting the time, money, and other resources you’ve already spent pursuing it.

Perhaps you find your career unfulfilling. You might still feel reluctant to leave a position it took years to reach. Even if another career seems more satisfying, your narrative might provoke feelings of loyalty to your company, fear of the unknown, and perhaps even guilt at the idea of “wasting” years of your life.

The sunk-cost fallacy can be a difficult narrative and set of emotions to view objectively. Nevertheless, David urges you to consider an alternative perspective: Instead of considering what you’ve invested in a goal, consider what you stand to lose by continuing to pursue that goal. If you don’t change your situation, what opportunities might you miss? By acknowledging that keeping your current goals could mean wasting opportunities, you strip the sunk-cost fallacy of its controlling power.

(Shortform note: At its foundation, the sunk-cost fallacy is about your emotional investment in a decision. So, while you might be able to “outsmart” your logic by considering potential loss, you can also try applying the principles of emotional agility to the emotions surrounding your investment: Label precisely why you’re having a hard time shifting your goals, objectively consider the pros and cons of staying the course, and mindfully consider how your current goals are or are not aligned with your personal values.)