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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Susan David
Read between
January 4 - February 4, 2023
Emotional agility is a process that allows you to be in the moment, changing or maintaining your behaviors to live in ways that align with your intentions and values. The process isn’t about ignoring difficult emotions and thoughts. It’s about holding those emotions and thoughts loosely, facing them courageously and compassionately, and then moving past them to make big things happen in your life.
into your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors willingly, with curiosity and kindness.
open, nonjudgmental space between our feelings and how we respond to them.
Recognizing, accepting, and then distancing ourselves from the scary, or painful, or disruptive emotional stuff gives us the ability to engage more of the “take the long view” part of us, which integrates thinking and feeling with long-term values and aspirations, and can help us find new and better ways of getting there.
The ultimate goal of emotional
agility is to keep a sense of challenge and growth alive and well throughout your life.
in our own life stories, getting hooked doesn’t imply the excitement of being on the edge of your seat. It means being caught by a self-defeating emotion, thought, or behavior.
Being emotionally agile involves being sensitive to context and responding to the world as it is right now.
That same need to have the rightness of your cause validated, or your unjust treatment confirmed, can steal years from your life when you let it persist.
“A joke is an epitaph for an emotion.”)
Brooding is a cousin of worry. Both are intensely self-focused, and both involve trying to inhabit a moment that’s not now.
brooders are ahead of bottlers in one respect: In their attempt to solve their problems, brooders are at least “feeling their feelings”—meaning, aware of their emotions.
Brooders are similarly hard to deal with because they tend to dump their real, heavy emotions on others. They want to talk it out with those close to them, but at some point, even their nearest and dearest get empathy fatigue—tiring
Moreover, the brooder’s self-focus leaves no room for anyone else’s needs, so listeners often ultimately walk away, leaving the brooder feeling both frustrated and alone.
In short, chasing after happiness can be just as self-defeating as the bottling and brooding we talked about earlier. All these coping mechanisms arise from discomfort with “negative” emotions and our unwillingness to endure anything even remotely associated with the dark side.
It’s usually when we get knocked down a few pegs that more of the subtle, sometimes painful but potentially important underlying details in life come to the fore.
Sadness is a signal to ourselves that something is wrong—often that we are looking for a better way to be here and participate. And outward expressions of sadness signal to others that we could use some help.
Long before there were books or movies—or philosophers, literature professors, or psychologists—these universal stories were the way people passed along key life lessons. And one of the lessons conveyed in myth after myth is that trying to dodge the things we’re most afraid of is a very bad idea.
This is not even the stuff of a good, tear-soaked Oprah episode. But it can be enough to hook you into behaving in ways that don’t serve you.
she disempowers this big, scary bundle of unwelcome emotions not just by confronting it, but also by letting the Babadook live in the basement, where she feeds and cares for it. In other words, she learns to tame and accommodate it without letting it dictate her life.
Showing up is not a heroic exercise of will but simply looking our personal tormentors in the eye and saying, “Okay. You’re here, and I’m here. Let’s talk. Because I am big enough to contain all my feelings and past experiences, I can accept all these parts of my existence without being crushed or terrified.”
Showing up involves acknowledging our thoughts without ever having to believe they are literally true. (Brooders especially should take note of this, because the more often we hear some dubious statement repeated, even just inside our own heads, the more likely we are to accept it as truth.) Showing up starts the process of getting us off that hook.
one of the great paradoxes of human experience is that we can’t change ourselves or our circumstances until we accept what exists right now. Acceptance is a prerequisite for change.
When we stop fighting what is, we can move on to efforts that will be more constructive and more rewarding.
Recognizing you had to play the hand you were dealt is often the first step toward showing yourself more warmth, kindness, and forgiveness. You did the best you could under the circumstances. And you survived.
Self-compassion is the antidote to shame.
So, in the interest of your emotional agility, here’s my advice: Keep your eyes on your own work.
Your story is your story. You need to own it, rather than it owning you, and to honor it with compassion.
Developing meaningful compassion for yourself does not mean deluding yourself. You need to be deeply aware of who you are, for better and for worse, and fully attuned to the world around you.
One of the greatest human triumphs is to choose to make room in our hearts for both the joy and the pain, and to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. This means seeing feelings not as being “good” or “bad” but as just “being.”
Sometimes, in our struggle with difficult circumstances, we make things much worse for ourselves. We take raw pain and convert it into real suffering.
Without the subtle differentiation in meaning provided by language, they’re unable to make sense of their personal issues in a way that might allow them to “get a handle” on them.
Merely finding a label for emotions can be transformative, reducing hugely painful, murky, and oceanic feelings of distress to a finite experience with boundaries and a name.
when people can’t clearly express their feelings in words, the only emotion that comes through loud and clear is anger, and the unfortunate way they express it is by putting a fist through the wall—or worse.
Along with the importance of precisely labeling our emotions comes the promise that once we do give them a name, our feelings can provide useful information. They signal rewards and dangers. They point us in the direction of our hurt. They can also tell us which situations to engage with and which to avoid. They can be beacons, not barriers, helping us identify what we most care about and motivating us to make positive changes.
“What is the purpose of this emotion?” What is it telling you? What does it get you? What’s buried underneath that sadness, frustration, or joy?
Once we stop struggling to eliminate distressing feelings or to smother them with positive affirmations or rationalizations, they can teach us valuable lessons.
If you can confront both your internal feelings and your external options—while maintaining the distinction between the two—you’ll have a much better chance at having a good day, not to mention a meaningful life.
people who wrote about emotionally charged episodes experienced a marked increase in their physical and mental well-being. They were happier, less depressed, and less anxious. In the months after the writing sessions, they had lower blood pressure, better immune function, and fewer doctor visits. They also reported higher quality relationships, better memory, and more success at work.
This, in turn, gave me insight about myself, the most important revelation being “I am resilient.” I realized that I can live with my full self, even the parts I’m not so thrilled about.
writers in these experiments who thrived the most began to develop insight, using phrases such as “I have learned,” “It struck me that,” “the reason that,” “I now realize,” and “I understand.”
In the process of writing, they were able to create the distance between the thinker and the thought, the feeler and the feeling, that allowed them to gain a new perspective, unhook, and move forward.
More often than you might expect, they found ways of turning these obstacles into opportunities to connect more directly with their deepest values.
without action, a value is just an aspiration,
A simple bid for a partner’s attention: “There’s a pretty boat.” A bid for a partner’s interest: “Didn’t your dad sail a boat like that?” A bid for enthusiastic engagement: “Hey, with a boat like that, we could sail around the world.” A bid for extended conversation: “Have you called your brother lately? Did he ever get his boat fixed?” A bid for play: Rolling up a newspaper and bopping a partner lightly on the head, saying, “There. I’ve been meaning to do that all day.” A bid for humor: “A rabbi, a priest, and a psychiatrist go out sailing . . .” A bid for affection: “I need a hug,” or
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It’s important to believe that you can achieve your goal, but you also need to pay attention to the obstacles most likely to get in the way.
mental contrasting.
making habits out of behaviors we’ve consciously chosen, and that are connected with our values, is a key aspect of emotional agility.
When we get too good at something, we can quickly find ourselves lulled back into autopilot mode, reinforcing not just rigid behavior but also disengagement, lack of growth, and boredom—in short, we fail to thrive.
