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# 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
(HTM) Kiki effect @Wikipedia
(TXT) 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'.
(HTM) https://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/premature_cognitive_commitments_limiting_oneself.html
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.
(HTM) detail: http://www.susandavid.com/
LOC: BF335 .D38
tags: book,non-fiction,self-help
title: Emotional Agility
# Tags
(DIR) book
(DIR) non-fiction
(DIR) self-help