“To thrive in this uncertain world,” notes Jen Fisher, “we could all use a little more emotional agility.” As Deloitte’s Chief Well-Being Officer, Fisher hosts the WorkWell podcast series featuring interviews with leading experts from across the spectrum of work, health, and self-development. In this episode, Susan David explores why our emotional life can’t (and shouldn’t) be put on pause when we clock in. David is an award-winning Harvard Medical School psychologist and author of the bestselling Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life.
Jen: There is a myth that positive emotions are obviously good emotions and difficult emotions are bad and we should avoid them. Is this true and is it even possible to avoid difficult emotions?
Susan: I think there could be nothing further than the truth. [The idea that] Good emotions are about joy and happiness, and bad emotions are somehow about anger or anxiety, frustration, and they should be pushed aside. This is one of the largest misunderstandings of emotions and really, this has real cost. It has cost to the individual because when people see their emotions as good or bad, what they start doing is engaging and hustling with their emotions. I shouldn’t feel that, that’s a bad emotion, I should be grateful for my experience. And this, in the longer term, is actually associated with lower levels of well-being, high levels of mental distress, and also feeling stuck and being stuck, because if you are in a situation where for instance you are feeling bored in the workplace, and you said to yourself I shouldn’t feel that, at least I have got a job, I should be grateful, then what is that doing? It’s not allowing you to actually recognize that you need greater levels of growth and learning at work, and so then you are not going toward that thing that’s important, that value. So, you are actually not able to be agile and to be fruitful and to bring the best of yourself forward.
[The idea that] good emotions are about joy and happiness, and bad emotions are somehow about anger or anxiety, frustration, and they should be pushed aside. This is one of the largest misunderstandings of emotions.
When we look at the workplace, this similar principle is operating. If we think about organizations that say things like “We want people to be innovative” or “We want people to be collaborative”, there is no innovation that is possible without potential failure and without the difficult emotions that come with potential failure. There is no true collaboration that takes place without conflict or dissenting views, and the emotions that come with that. So, for all of those organizations and leaders and teams that say “We want these outcomes,” whether it’s collaboration or agility or creativity, what those organizations need to be doing is then opening themselves up to the reality that those often tough emotions are part and parcel of being effective in an organizational setting.
When we think about the powerful change that happens in the world, in society, that doesn’t come about because everyone is positive. That comes about because people say “Hey that’s unjust, I feel angry at how I am being treated.” And so these emotions, like anger, that are often seen, again, as being negative are actually the catalyst for some of the most powerful changes that we can have in society. The capacity to be capacious and courageous enough to go toward those difficult emotions is often what brings us to better ways of being in the world.
Jen: How did we get here? I mean, especially in the workplace.
Susan: I am going to give you two answers to these questions, and they are like me connecting with a nerd part of myself. One, actually is a gendered response: If you look historically, and I am talking over educational systems of many hundreds of years, what you often had is situations where formal education was open to males and what was able to be taught formally were math and the sciences. What then happened is these emotions, the things that feel softer, were actually relegated out of formal institutional learning and therefore very often [out of] formal workplaces. So, what you will end up having is this really interesting dichotomy where organizations become associated with goals and outcomes and science and logic, and emotions get sidelined.
Another aspect to this comes about in psychology. If you think about the process and learning of psychology, often we have had this idea that, well there is Freud, and Freud [talks about] the subconscious—it’s very difficult to understand, very difficult to measure. So you find a move toward behaviorism, and behaviorism is, if we tap this thing twice and the dog wags its tail, then we have measured that. There is this whole systematization of psychology that becomes focused around what’s easily measurable.
Now, why does this matter in organizations? What we have in organization is actually fairly toxic organizational structures that then become focused on what can we measure, what output, what goals—it’s really the industrial mechanization of human endeavors that is literally bound up to the Industrial Revolution. What that does is it segments out of the workplace the beautiful messy humanity, the gorgeousness of a difficult conversation, where we both come to the table and it’s tough, but we get something out of it and we move forward. So, I really believe that for organizations and for us as people to be in systems that are resilient and capacious, we need to actually make way for these difficult emotions, and to understand the real importance of these difficult emotions in the workplace and beyond. Because truly, when you look at the future world of work, these aspects of humanity that actually differentiate us from what can be automated are the currency of now and in the future, and are critical to our own well-being.
Understanding Our Emotions
Jen: What is emotional agility, and how does it better help us understand our emotions?
Susan: Emotional agility is, I think, one of the most critical skills that we can have as human beings. Every aspect of how we love, live, how we parent, how we lead is ultimately driven by how we deal with ourselves, our inner world.
The short answer is that emotional agility is basically the capacity to be healthy with ourselves, to be healthy with our thoughts, our emotions, and the stories that we have. The longer answer is that there are core components to emotional agility that are really critical to this capacity to be healthy. The first is the ability to show up to our emotions with a level of gentle acceptance and compassion, and this really circles back to the beginning of our conversation, this idea that there aren’t good and bad emotions. If you start hustling with yourself and start [thinking you should] only have “positive” emotions or see your emotions as positive, or only think good thoughts? Number one, it doesn’t work. When we try to push aside these difficult emotions, there is actually an amplification effect. You said [to] yourself,