Susan David

We just have to look for it.

It reminds me of, um, the work of Susan David, "Emotional Agility," and I found that personally very helpful, and also think of it often in conversations with others, uh, in, in work about being able to navigate exactly that.

And one of the things that she talks about is that emotions are like weather patterns.

They come and they go.

But I really think the thing that hit me on this walk that I wanted to share on this podcast is for all of us to be really careful of pushing our, our true desires down because we don't wanna deal with the uncomfortable feelings they come with.

I've been doing so much feelings work over the past couple of years, getting my emotional agility certification, uh, last year with Susan David, and it is just so shocking to me how much of what I perceive happening comes down to feelings and being able to manage our emotional life.

And so much of the, you know, not trying or the fear or like the conflict comes from avoiding feeling our feelings or being scared of feeling them, and so avoiding taking action that could possibly lead to feeling these feelings.

So to sum it all up, [laughs] and thank you for hanging in here with me.

She's an esteemed psychologist.

Susan David splits her time between.

I

love her.

What we think about is not always true or helpful.

Susan David talks about this in Emotional Agility.

Our brains are constantly creating stories about what's happening to us.

We're trying to make sense of things, and sometimes we get so caught up in a story that we don't even realize that there's a difference between what actually happened and everything we've added to it.

Yeah.

And that's actually, I mean, to back to your very first question, one of the other very memorable interviewees, and I had the opportunity to interview a few times as Susan David who wrote, um, emotional agility and has a wonderful platform.

She is really, and really making such a difference, um, in the world.

But she, I interviewed her when I was, um, writing articles quite frequently for HBR and she talks a lot about, uh, that sort of distancing, like distancing, not just from, you know, this is this person's personality, but even from your own negative emotions, like not I'm angry, right.

He talks a lot about emotional agility.

We have a philosopher's note on a book that he references by Susan David, I think, called Emotional Agility.

But we've got to accept, as I just said, that life is going to be challenging.

I'm going to read from the note a couple different times.

Today, I wanna talk about the intersection of conflict, stress, and emotional agility.

Now, I have covered all of these topics on podcasts before, but I wanna bring them all together in a way to say, what do we do in the moment when we're experiencing a conflict or a disconnect and we wanna manage our emotions on purpose? So the concept of emotional agility actually was coined by Susan David in her book, conveniently called emotional agility.

But it is about the the ability to experience your emotions without allowing them to automatically affect your behavior.

So if you are a student of Viktor Frankl at all, who is a Holocaust survivor who wrote Man's Search for Meaning, I think that's the name of it.

I remember that story so well.

And that brings me to our pocket sage today, Susan David.

She is a psychologist at Harvard Medical School, and she wrote this book called Emotional Agility.

And here's the line I always come back to in that book.