Years ago, in the Downton Abbey era, a well-regarded captain stood on the bridge of a British battleship, watching the sun set across the sea. As the story goes, the captain was about to head below for dinner when a lookout suddenly announced, "Light, sir. Dead ahead two miles."
The captain turned back toward the helm.
"Is it steady or moving?" he asked, these being the days before radar.
"Steady, Captain."
"Then signal that ship," the captain ordered gruffly. "Tell them, 'You are on a collision course. Alter course twenty degrees.'"
The answer, from the source of the light, came back moments later: "Advisable you change your course twenty degrees."
The captain was insulted. Not only was his authority being challenged, but also it was being done in front of a junior seaman!
"Send another message," he snarled. "We are HMS Defiant, a thirty-five-thousand-ton battleship of the dreadnaught class. Change course twenty degrees."
"Brilliant, sir," came the reply. "I'm Seaman O'Reilly of the second class. Change your course immediately."
Apoplectic and red in the face, the captain shouted, "We are the flagship of Admiral Sir William Atkinson-Willes! CHANGE YOUR COURSE TWENTY DEGREES!"
There was a moment of silence before Seaman O'Reilly replied, "We are a lighthouse, sir."
As we travel through our lives, we humans have few ways of knowing which course to take or what lies ahead. We don't have lighthouses to keep us away from rocky relationships. We don't have lookouts on the bow or radar on the tower, watching for submerged threats that could sink our career plans. Instead, we have our emotions - sensations like fear, anxiety, joy, and exhilaration - a neurochemical system that evolved to help us navigate life's complex currents.
Emotions, from blinding rage to wide-eyed love, are the body's immediate physical responses to important signals from the outside world. When our senses pick up information - signs of danger, hints of romantic interest, cues that we're being accepted or excluded by our peers - we physically adjust to these incoming messages. Our hearts beat faster or slower, our muscles tighten or relax, our mental focus locks onto the threat or eases into the warmth of trusted companionship.
These physical "embodied" responses keep our inner state and our outward behavior in sync with the situation at hand, and can help us not only survive but also flourish. As with Seaman O'Reilly's lighthouse, our natural guidance system, which developed through evolutionary trial and error over millions of years, is a great deal more useful when we don't try to fight it.
But that's not always easy to do, because our emotions are not always reliable. In some situations, they help us cut through pretenses and posturing, working as a kind of internal radar to give us the most accurate and insightful read into what's really going on in a situation. Who hasn't experienced those gut feelings that tell us "This guy's lying," or "Something's bugging my friend even though she says she's fine"?
But in other situations, emotions dredge up old business, confusing our perception of what's happening in the moment with painful past experiences. These powerful sensations can take over completely, clouding our judgment and steering us right onto the rocks. In these cases, you might "lose it" and, say, throw a drink in the lying guy's face.
Of course, most adults rarely surrender control to their emotions with inappropriate public displays that take years to live down. More likely, you're trip yourself up in a less theatrical but more insidious fashion. Many people, much of the time, operate on emotional autopilot, reacting to situations without true awareness or even real volition. Others are acutely aware that they expend too much energy trying to contain or suppress their emotions, treating them at best like unruly children and at worst as threats to their well-being. Still others feel their emotions are stopping them from achieving the kind of life they want, especially when it comes to those feeling that we find troublesome, such as anger, shame, and anxiety. In time, our responses to signals from the real world can become increasingly faint and unnatural, leading us off course instead of protecting our best interests.
I am a psychologist and an executive coach who has studied emotions and how we interact with them for more than two decades. When I ask some of my clients how long they're been trying to get in touch with, fix, or cope with their particularly challenging emotions or the situations that give rise to them, they'll often say five, or ten, or even twenty years. Sometimes the answer is, "Ever since I was a little kid."
To which the obvious response is, "So, would you say that what you're doing is working?"
With this book, my goal is to help you become more aware of your emotions, learn to accept and make peace with them, and then flourish by increasing your emotional agility. The tools and techniques I've brought together won't make your a perfect person who never says the wrong thing or never gets wracked by feelings of shame, guilt, anger, anxiety, or insecurity. Striving to be perfect - or always perfectly happy - will only set you up for frustration and failure. Instead, I hope to help you come to terms with even your most difficult emotions, enhance your ability to enjoy your relationships, achieve your goals, and live your life to the fullest.
But that's just the "emotional" part of emotional agility. The "agility" part addresses your thinking and behavior processes as well - those habits of mind and body that can also prevent you from flourishing, especially when, like the captain of the battleship Defiant, you react in the same old obstinate way to new or different situations.
Rigid reactions may come from buying into the old, self-defeating story you've told yourself a million times: "I am such a loser," or "I always say the wrong thing," or "I always fold when it's time to fight for what I deserve." Rigidity may come from the perfectly normal habit of taking mental shortcuts and accepting presumptions and rules of thumbs that may have served you once - in childhood, in a first marriage, at an earlier point in your career - but aren't serving your now: "People can't be trusted." "I'm going to get hurt."
A growing body of research shows that emotional rigidity - getting hooked by thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that don't serve us - is associated with a range of psychological ills, including depression and anxiety. Meanwhile, emotional agility - being flexible with your thoughts and feelings so that you can respond optimally to everyday situations - is key to well-being and success.
And yet emotional agility is not about controlling your thoughts or forcing yourself into thinking more positively. Because research also shows that trying to get people to change their thoughts from, say, negative ("I'm going to screw up this presentation") to the positive ("You'll see - I'll ace it"), usually doesn't work, and can actually be counterproductive.
Emotional agility is about loosening up, calming down, and living with more intention. It's about choosing how you'll respond to your emotional warning system. It supports the approach described by Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived a Nazi death camp and went on to write Man's Search for Meaning, on leading a more meaningful life, a life in which our human potential can be fulfilled: "Between stimulus and response there is a space," he wrote. "In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
By opening up that space between how you feel and what you do about those feelings, emotional agility has been shown to help people with any number of troubles: negative self-image, heartbreak, pain, anxiety, depression, procrastination, tough transitions, etc. But emotional agility isn't beneficial just for people struggling with personal difficulties. It also draws on diverse disciplines in psychology that explore the characteristics of successful, thriving people, including those like Frankl, who survived great hardship and went on to do great things.
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Not long ago I published some of my findings from this work in an article that appeared in Harvard Business Review. In it, I described how almost every one of my clients - not to mention I myself - tend to get hooked by rigid, negative pattern. I then laid out a model for developing greater emotional agility to unhook from these patterns and make successful, lasting changes. The article stayed on the magazine's Most Popular list for months and within a short time was downloaded by nearly a quarter of a million people - the same number as HBR's total print circulation. It was heralded by HBR as a "Management Idea of the Year" and was picked up by numerous publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Fast Company. Editors described emotional agility as the "next emotional intelligence," a big idea that changes the way our society thinks about emotions. I bring this up not to toot my own horn, but because the reaction to this article made me realize the idea had struck a nerve. Millions of people, it seems, are searching for a better path.
This book contains a greatly expanded and amplified version of the research and advice I offered in the HBR article. But before we get into the nitty-gritty, let me give you a survey of the big picture so that you can see where we're going.
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.
The process of gaining emotional agility unfolds in four essential movements:
SHOWING UP
Woody Allen once said that 80 percent of success is simply showing up. In the context of this book, "showing up" means facing into your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors willingly, with curiosity and kindness. Some of these thoughts and emotions are valid and appropriate to the moment. Others are old bits stuck in your psyche like that Beyoncé song you've been trying to get out of your head for weeks.
In either case, whether they are accurate reflections of reality or harmful distortions, these thoughts and emotions are a part of who we are, and we can learn to work with them and move on.
STEPPING OUT
The next element, after facing into your thoughts and emotions, is detaching from and observing them to see them for what they are - just thoughts, just emotions. By doing this we create Frankl's open, nonjudgmental 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. Detached observation keeps our transient mental experiences from controlling us.
The broader view we gain by stepping out means learning to see yourself as the chessboard, filled with possibilities, rather than as any one piece on the board, confined to certain preordained moves.
WALKING YOUR WHY
After you've uncluttered and calmed your mental processes and then created the space we need between the thoughts and the thinker, you can begin to focus more on what we're really all about: our core values, our most important goals. 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 find us new and better ways of getting there.
You make thousands of decisions every day. Should you go to the gym after work or skip it in favor of happy hour? Should you take the call from the friend who hurt your feelings or send him to voice mail? I call these small decision moments choice points. Your core values provide the compass that keeps you moving in the right direction.
MOVING ON
The Tiny Tweaks Principle
Traditional self-help tends to see change in terms of lofty goals and total transformation, but research actually supports the opposite view: that small, deliberate tweaks infused with your values can make a huge difference in your life. This is especially true when we tweak the routine and habital parts of life, which, though daily repetition, then afford tremendous leverage for change.
The Teeter-Totter Principle
A world-class gymnast makes difficult moves look effortless through her agility and the well-developed muscles of her torso - her core. When something throws her off-balance, her core helps her correct. But to compare at the highest level, she has to keep pushing beyond her comfort zone to attempt increasingly difficult moves. We, too, need to find the perfect balance between challenge and competence so we're neither complacent nor overwhelmed but are instead excited, entusiastic, and invigorated by challenges.
The businesswoman Sarah Blakely, the founder of Spanx shape-wear and at one time the world's youngest self-made female billionaire, describes how at the dinner table each evening her father would say, "So, tell me how you failed today." The question wasn't designed to demoralize her. Instead, her father meant to encourage his children to push the limits; it was okay - even admirable - to stumble when trying something new and difficult.
The ultimate goal of emotional agility is to keep a sense of challenge and growth alive and well throughout your life.
