What We're Reading Now
Develop Emotional Agility
29 November 2016
Allison read Neda Semnani’s interview of Susan David, A Harvard psychologist explains why forcing positive thinking won’t make you happy, and got excited for David’s new book.
Tags: allison read, balance, grief, happiness, optimism
At Allison Partners, we believe people can learn how to choose to be happy. We’re fascinated by the power of optimism and especially appreciative of how our colleague, Lili Powell, explains the importance of generous interpretations.
However, we also know that force feeding positive thoughts to ourselves and others takes the happiness movement too far. Very often that overly positive approach keeps people from dealing with real, complicated, and difficult emotions in a constructive way.
Helping our clients figure out how to navigate their personal setbacks and grief so that they can take meaningful steps toward their goals and choose happiness is some of the most rewarding work we do. After reading Neda Semnani's interview of Susan David in The Washington Post, I’m hopeful that David’s new book, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life, will be helpful to my clients and me.
Semani’s interview as well as David’s free Emotional Agility Quiz and report have left me feeling that David’s book is going to provide powerful insights for people who are struggling with what David calls the “tyranny of positivity.” Additionally, David’s explanation of emotional agility sounds like what many of my clients have been searching for:
“Emotional agility builds our capacity to engage our inner world in a way that is courageous, curious and compassionate. Whereas positive thinking and avoidance have overemphasized the role of our thoughts, emotional agility is a skill set that builds on our ability to face our emotions, label them, understand them and then choose to move forward deliberately. It is the ability to recognize when you’re feeling stressed, be able to step out of your stress, and then decide how to act in a way that is congruent with your personal values and aligned with your goals.”
In the interview, David also provides an overview of the four steps she recommends for how to build emotional agility:
- Showing up
- Stepping out
- Walking your why
- Moving on
At the end of the interview, there’s a link to David’s Emotional Agility quiz. It took me 15 minutes instead of the promised five minutes, but that’s likely because I thought about the questions with this blog post in mind. The questions, the short values clarification activity, and the free report were helpful to me right away as I thought about a personal goal I’ve been struggling to achieve. So even before I’ve read the book, David’s already given me useful insights. I imagine it will be the topic of a future blog post. Stay tuned.
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