2018-11-01 - Emotional Agility by Susan David ============================================= Chapter 1, Rigidity To Agility ============================== > Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space > is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our > growth and freedom. --Viktor Frankl, Man's Search For Meaning If there was ever a time to become more emotionally agile, it is now. When the ground is constantly shifting under us, we need to be nimble to keep from falling on our faces. Emotional agility is a process that allows you to be in the moment, changing or maintaining your behaviours so that you can 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 the, to make big things happen in your life. The process of gaining emotional agility unfolds in four essential movements: * Showing up. Facing into your thoughts, emotions, and behaviours willingly, with curiosity and kindness. They are part of who we are and we can learn to work with them and move on. * Stepping out. Detach and observe thoughts and emotions for what they are, creating an open, non-judgmental space between our feelings and how we respond to them. We can also identify difficult feelings as we're experiencing them and find more appropriate ways of reacting. * Walking your why. Focus more on core values, most important goals... Take the long view. * Moving on. Research supports an incremental improvement view of self-help. Tiny tweaks principle: Small, deliberate tweaks infused with your values can make a huge difference in your life. Especially when we tweak routine and habitual parts of life. See saw principle: Find a balance between challenge and competence to stay excited but not overwhelmed. Chapter 2, Hooked ================= People without a realistically consistent story, or a story completely divorced from reality... may be labeled as 'psychotic'. But while most of us may never hear voices or have delusions of grandeur, in scripting our own stories we all take liberties with the truth. Sometimes we don't even realize we're doing it. When you automatically respond in whatever unhelpful way you do, you're hooked. Getting yourself hooked begins when you accept thoughts as facts. [Bouba and Kiki effect Kiki effect @Wikipedia Angular gyrus @Wikipedia ] The angular gyrus provides the capacity for sensory blending, weaving together emotions and reasoning. It is an evolutionary adaptation of our nervous system to quickly and automatically produce the fight or flight reflex. Humans love to create mental categories and then fit objects, experiences, and even people into them. If something doesn't fit in [any] category, it goes into the category of 'things that don't fit'. Heuristics = rules of thumb, snap judgements, quick and easy categories, premature cognitive commitments As with the tendency of our thoughts to blend with our emotions, the tendency to fit what we see into boxes for easy sorting--and then to make quick gut decisions about them--evolved for a reason. Life is just a hell of a lot easier when you don't have to analyze every choice. The book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, describes the human mind as operating in two basic modes of thought. System 1: fast, automatic, effortless, associative, and implicit, which means they are not immediately available for introspection. They often carry a lot of emotional weight and are ruled by habit, and as a result, are very good at getting us hooked. System 2: slower, more deliberate. Requires much more effort and a deeper level of attention. They are also more flexible and amenable to rules that we consciously establish. It is these system 2 operations that allow us to create the space between stimulus and response, which provides for the full expression of our humanity, and allows us to thrive. Once our minds slip into default mode, it takes a great deal of flexibility to override this state. This is why specialists are often the last ones to notice common sense solutions to simple problems... trained incapacity of experts. People who are hooked into a particular way of thinking or behaving are not really paying attention to the world as it is. Being emotionally agile involves being sensitive to context and responding to the world as it is right now. Four most common hooks: * Thought-blaming. Blaming your thoughts for your actions or inactions. * Monkey-mindedness. * Old, outgrown ideas. Childhood trauma, emotional baggage, etc. * Wrongheaded righteousness. Cutting off your nose to spite your face. Beginner's mind is a cornerstone of emotional agility. Chapter 3, Trying To Unhook =========================== Short-term coping mechanisms that escalate in the long-term: * Bottling up * Brooding ... suppressed emotions inevitably surface in unintended ways, a process that psychologists call emotional leakage. In both cases we lose our ability to be fully engaged with the world around us... openness and enthusiasm are replaced by rules, confining stories from the past, and invidious judgments, and our ability to solve problems and make decisions actually declines. It's when these strategies are used as default coping methods, as they often are, that they become counterproductive. The unwritten rulebook about emotions contains what psychologists call display rules. Our so-called negative emotions encourage slower, more systematic cognitive process. We rely less on quick conclusions and pay more attention to subtle details that matter. Chapter 4, Showing Up ===================== ...we must face up to, make peace with, and find an honest and open way to live with [our demons]. When we show up fully, with awareness and acceptance, even the worst demons usually back down. Showing up involves acknowledging our thoughts without ever having to believe they are literally true. Acceptance [of ourselves or our circumstances] is a prerequisite for change. Treating yourself with compassion is, in fact, at odds with deceiving yourself. You can't have real self-compassion without first facing the truth about who you are and what you feel. Compassion gives us the freedom to redefine ourselves, as well as the all-important freedom to fail, which contains within it the freedom to take the risks that allow us to be truly creative. ... even when you're dealing with the world as it really is, you have enormous leeway in how you respond to it. But to maintain this kind of equanimity, we do need some basic emotional equipment, including a nuanced emotional vocabulary. An infant screams because she can't express her unhappiness in any other way... Unfortunately, many adults still don't use their words to define and understand their experiences and the emotions surrounding them. 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. Alexythemia isn't a clinical diagnosis... it carries very real costs. Learning to label emotions with a more nuanced vocabulary can be absolutely transformative. People who can identify the full spectrum of emotion... do much, much better at managing the ups and downs of ordinary existence than those who see everything in black and white. If you confront your internal feelings and your external options, while maintaining the distinction between the two, you'll have a much better chance of having a good day, not to mention a meaningful life. You'll make important decisions in light of the broadest possible context. Chapter 5, Stepping Out ======================= I read about an intervention [James] Pennebaker had conducted at a Dallas computer company that laid off one hundred senior engineers. Most of these were men over fifty who had worked at the company since university. This was the only work life they knew, and getting pushed out had left them panicked and confused. They faced the real likelihood of never working in their field again. After four months, not one of them had found a new job. Pennebaker and his team wondered if writing about their experiences could help the 'downsized' engineers. Eager to try anything that might improve their employment prospects, the engineers agreed to participate. Pennebaker had one group of engineers write about being laid off. They delved into their feelings of humiliation, rejection, and outrage; the related strains on their health, marriages, and finances; and their deep worries about the future. The two control groups either wrote about time management or didn't write at all. Before the writing began, there were no differences between the groups in terms of motivation or the effort they were making to land a new job. But afterward, the degree of change between them was astonishing. Just months after the emotionally charged writing sessions, the men who had delved into how they truly felt were three times more likely to have been re-employed than those in the control groups. The writing not only helped the men process their experiences; it also helped them step out from their despondent inertia and into meaningful action. After many more studies, with many thousands of participants--children and the elderly, students and professionals, people who were healthy and people who were ill--we can say with confidence that showing up and applying words to emotions is a tremendously helpful way to deal with stress, anxiety, and loss. ... Talking into a voice recorder can deliver the same results as writing. In fact, to live an intentional, meaningful life and to really thrive, one of the most critical skills to develop is this ability to take a meta-view--the view from above that broadens your perspective and makes you sensitive to context. Emotional agility means having any number of troubling thoughts or emotions and still managing to act in a way that serves how you most want to live. Research shows that using the third person... is an effective technique for distancing yourself from stress (or anxiety or frustration or sadness) that can help you regulate your reactions. [This resembles narration.] Techniques for stepping out: * Think process. Long-term path of continuous growth. * Get contradictory. Zen paradoxes. * Have a laugh. Humor forces you to see new possibilities. * Change your point of view. Perspective taking. * Call it out. I am having a thought that... I am having an emotion that... * Talk to yourself in the third person. Transcend egocentric viewpoint. Chapter 6, Walking You Why ========================== ... the art of living by your own personal set of values--the beliefs and behaviours you hold dear and give you a sense of meaning and satisfaction. It's just a lot faster and easier to follow what we see than it is to work it out for ourselves. social contagion Making choices and negotiating relationships without a clear set of governing values at the front of your mind is exhausting. Continuity of self--consider distant future self as a person with core beliefs that will remain stable, not an abstract stranger. Characteristics of values: * freely chosen * not goals, ongoing not fixed * guide rather than constrain * active not static * allow you to get closer to the way you want to live * bring freedom from social compulsion * foster self-acceptance Above all, a value is something you can use. Questions to start identifying values: * Deep down what matters to me? * What relationship do i want to build? * What do i want my life to be about? * What do i feel most of the time? What kind of situations make me feel most vital? * If a miracle occurred and all the anxiety and stress in my life were suddenly gone, what would my life look like and what new things would i pursue? When you connect with your real self and what you believe to be important, the gulf between how you feel and how you behave closes up. You begin to live your life without as many regrets and without as much second-guessing. Values relate to quality not quantity of action... social snacking You give up the path not taken, and with any loss comes a certain amount of pain, sorrow, and even regret. ... Even if your choice turns out to be 'wrong', you can at least take comfort in knowing you made the decision for the right reasons. Chapter 7, Moving On: The Tiny Tweaks Principle =============================================== Research observed 'bids for emotional connection' or efforts to reach out between couples. Although they may have seemed inconsequential on the surface, these teeny, tiny behaviours were the best predictors of how well each couple would fare in the long term. In one follow-up six years later, the couples in which either partner had responded with intimacy to 3 out of 10 bids were already divorced, while those who had responded with intimacy to 9 out of 10 bids were still married. In looking for the right places to make these tiny changes, there are three broad areas of opportunity: * beliefs / mindset * motivations * habits Tweaking your mindset starts with questioning notions about yourself and the world that may seem set in stone--and that might be working against what matters to you--and then making the active choice to turn yourself toward learning, experimentation, growth, and change--one step at a time. Engaging our autonomy--the power of 'want to' rather than 'have to'--is the second prerequisite for tweaking your way to significant change. The only way we can really be sure the changes we make are lasting is by taking the intentional behaviour we've consciously chosen and turning it into a habit. Tweaks to alter "choice architecture": * Change your environment so that when you're hungry, tired, stressed, or rushed, the choice most aligned with your values is also the easiest. * Add a new behaviour to an existing habit. * Pre-commit: Anticipate obstacles and prepare for them with if-then strategies. [create rulesets] * The obstacle course: Offset a positive vision with thoughts of potential challenges. mental contrasting: the combination of optimism and realism produces better results than optimism alone. [positive thinking is counter-productive] Chapter 8, Moving On: The See-Saw Principle =========================================== ... living at the edge of our ability incrementally advancing ourselves beyond the level of our competence and comfort. In our relationships, creative lives, personal development, and work, we can provide this advancement in two ways: expand our breadth as well as our depth. Perhaps the best term to describe living at the edge of our ability, thriving and flourishing, being challenged but not overwhelmed, is simply 'whelmed'. And a key part of being whelmed lies in being selective in our commitments, which means taking on the challenges that really speak to you and that emerge from an awareness of your deepest values. To keep growing, you need to be open to the unfamiliar, even the uncomfortable, and leaning into your uncomfortable emotions allows you to learn from them. The ultimate litmus test for any action should be this: Is this going to get me closer to being the person I want to be? The workable choice is the one that's appropriate for whatever short-term constraints you face, but also brings you closer to the life you want to live over time. Chapter 9, Emotional Agility At Work ==================================== In one study, participants were asked to consider a male candidate and a female candidate for the position of police chief. After they heard about the background of the two potential hires, the study subjects were asked whether they thought it was more important that the successful candidate be streetwise or formally educated. Over and over, the participants chose as more important whichever quality had been ascribed to the male candidate. If the man up for the job was said to be streetwise, the participants said that it was more important for the police chief to be streetwise. If the male candidate was said to be well educated, the participants went with that. Not only did they consistently show this gender bias, but they were also completely unaware that they had a gender bias. Every job involves physical or intellectual work, or both. But every job also involves emotional work--what psychologists call emotional labour--the energy that goes into maintaining the public face required in any job, and in fact in any human interaction. To some degree, emotional labour is about what we call 'being polite,' or 'getting by'. We all do it, it's generally harmless, and it's more socially savvy... At work, though, the more you fake your emotions, or surface act, the worse off you're likely to be. Too great an incongruity between how you really feel and how you pretend to be becomes such a chore that it leads to lower mental health and burnout. Tweaking your job, also known as job crafting, involves looking creatively at your work circumstances and finding way to reconfigure your situation to make it more engaging and fulfilling. The first step is to pay attention to what activities--either at work or outside your job--engage you the most. You can also change the nature or extent of your interactions with other people. You can also change how you see what you do. Chapter 10, Raising Emotionally Agile Children ============================================== To be truly happy, though, one must know simply how to 'be', and by that I mean to be effectively with oneself--centred, kind, curious, and not fragile--in a changing world. A child's sense of secure attachment--this idea that "I, in all my glory, as well as all my stinkiness and imperfection, am loved and accepted"--allows them not only to take risks in the world, but also to take risks with their own emotions. Knowing that they will not be invalidated, rejected, punished, or shamed for feeling whatever they feel, they can test out sadness, happiness, or anger and figure out how to manage or respond to each of the emotions in turn. Chapter 11, Becoming Real ========================= Emotional agility is the absence of pretence and perfection; it gives your actions greater power because they emanate from your core values and core strengths, something solid, genuine, and real. author: David, Susan A. detail: LOC: BF335 .D38 tags: book,non-fiction,self-help title: Emotional Agility Tags ==== book non-fiction self-help