UN-HOOK from Difficult Emotions with Dr. Susan David | Being Well Podcast

hey everyone welcome to being well I'm Forrest Hansen if you're new to the podcast thanks for joining us today and if you've listened before welcome back I'm joined today as usual by Dr Rick Hansen so Dad how are you doing I'm great and I'm thoroughly psyched about our topic which is tied for first place on the extremely short list of the most important mental health broadly things to know and do it's fantastic praise and I think that it's absolutely true and we're joined today by Dr Susan David Susan is an award-winning psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of the best-selling book emotional agility her Ted Talk on the topic of emotional agility has been seen by more than 10 million people and she's a frequent contributor to the New York Times Washington Post and Wall Street Journal she's also the host of Ted's podcast checking in with Susan David So Susan thanks for joining us today how are you doing absolutely great and Rick you said tied for first place I'm curious a tie oh mindfulness broadly coming from the heart and learning the deliberate cultivation along the way I won't make those my list of four and there might be a fifth or a sixth but those definitely would be the top four for me how about you I mean I've fundamentally believe that these skills that we cultivate internally uh just drive everything and there there are a number of those uh but they impact on you know we often talk about them impacting on our mental health and well-being but I think at a broader level they impact truthfully on our community our organizations and the way we parent and love and Lead so I think these skills are foundational um and it's one of the tragedies that they are not taught I love that you extended the personal into the political broadly the community institutional organizational societal I wonder if we could start even with you distinguishing um your frame of emotional agility from some other Notions that people might be familiar with like mindfulness or emotional intelligence yeah really important questions so my background are trained as a clinical psychologist and I did my PhD in emotions research and so a lot of my work has been driven in that context and I you know did did a lot of my PhD actually focused on emotional intelligence so maybe I'll start there um you know emotional intelligence is I think a profoundly important topic but I think it's become a somewhat dated and I'll give you a couple of reasons as to why I say that when emotional intelligence was first described by Jackman Peter salove it was described as the ability to problem solve with and about emotions and of course that's a very very important skill set um what was intentionally not included in emotional intelligence was values because the idea here was that it was a kind of intelligence and that you could use that intelligence to bring about world peace or to build an atom bomb a critical part of my work on emotional agility is that values actually are essential that when we use our emotions in a way that brings us towards our values takes us away from our values disconnects with the values of others that that has profound consequences in our lives uh another aspect of emotional intelligence in its popularization is that era is often seen as this ability to control difficult emotions the idea that we get these emotional hijacks we triggered we're struggling with our difficult emotions and emotional intelligence is often become this idea that it's synonymous with being able to control difficult emotions and I really in my work have pushed back on that because we know very well from the scientific research that the more we see emotions as bad and as needing to be controlled uh the more we have amplification of those difficult emotions and the the less we own our emotions in other words when we've got something that we are trying to control constantly that we are then actually owned by that experience rather than being capacious and beautiful beings so there there are a number of distinctions but I think those are core distinctions a lot of the focus of my work on emotional agility is about really profoundly practical skills that help us to have any number of difficult thoughts and emotions and stories and experiences to connect with our values and to move forward with those well there was half a dozen things in there Susan that I wanted you know which was fantastic but I also want to start just by kind of laying a foundation for people who might not be as familiar with emotional agility so you frame it as having these four different parts showing up stepping out walking your why and moving on these four kind of fundamental techniques that we can learn how to do which are themselves all made up of many different practices and techniques and things that people can use and I was hoping that you could Briefly summarize a chair for people sure and maybe before I do that you know it's it's an interesting thing when you write a book you often bring this perspective of you know academic and experience and story and you come up with the thing that is definitional um but I think there's something very profound and Powerful in the sentiment of emotional agility beyond the science and as we were coming into this conversation we were talking about my roots in South Africa and in many ways my experience growing up as a white child in apartheid South Africa it was you know a community and a country committed to denial um to not seeing because it's it's denial that makes 50 years of racist legislation possible while people convince themselves that they are doing nothing wrong and so a lot of my work was forged in growing up in that community and also in the experiences that I had as a child uh with the death of my father and other aspects of this but the reason I bring it back to this is in my TED Talk I use this phrase a soul Bonner and silverbone is a Zulu phrase you hear it every day on the streets of South Africa it basically means hello or if you Australian it means like g'day mate it's basically a kind of everyday greeting um but solomona literally translated means I see you and by seeing you I bring you into being and for me that is the essence of emotional agility work turned towards the self it is about the ability to see ourselves and that requires curiosity and compassion but also courage and it is not just in the seeing it is in the bringing into being it's the movement it's the we aren't living our lives in our heads we are living our lives in our action that becomes really important so how do we deal with our everyday experiences in ways that are healthy in how we come to ourselves and then the world but to get into the four you know core practices of emotional agility I do give some structure to this the first I I talk about showing up to difficult emotions and very often we have these views of difficult emotions that they are good or bad or positive or negative the academic Sciences repeat with this idea that emotions are good or bad and often what that can lead to is people experiencing difficult emotions but having a meta view of those emotions as being bad and so they might hustle with them they might judge themselves for having them they might think that they're not allowed to have them because they aren't struggling as much as other people and so a really important part of the first movement of emotional agility is this this recognition that you don't get to rebuild a city when it's still under bombardment and it's very difficult to forge forward in our lives when we are fighting ourselves so showing up is about gentle acceptance of difficult emotions and there's of course a lot to that the second part which is stepping out is about creating space between us and our emotions so you know in the Beautiful language that I'm sure you've used on this podcast is you know between stimulus and response there is a space and in that space is our power to choose and in that choice lies our growth and freedom but when we stuck in our difficult emotions when we hooked it's difficult to move forward it's difficult to know what we value and so as stepping out incorporates mindfulness and then other um tools and practices that help us to create space then the third part is walking your why and the essence of this is really about hearing the heartbeat of your own why hearing the halt of your values and who you want to be in the world and why that is so important because values are often seen as being this abstract idea and and I believe that values are qualities of action and then the last is moving on and moving on is really the science of how we cultivate habits and changes to bring our values and our wisdom forward I noticed a shift in my own body when you use that Zulu phrase about seeing into ourselves and it made me reflective for a moment on what it feels like to be seen whether it's by the another person or by ourselves and a kind of melting that occurs when that accepting non-judgmental presence is brought including to our own emotional material and then to feel a kind of receiving of that even inside ourselves yes so we're giving it to ourselves and we're receiving it from ourselves both I love the word that he was melting because it can often feel when we talk about struggling with suffering or burnout or well-being or any of these things can often feel very either white knuckled or it can feel very impractical the more that we soften into ourselves which is why I use this term gentle acceptance the more we're actually able to breathe into the essence of of Who We Are you know maybe it's helpful for me to share a little bit of how I came to this work when you use this language and when you talk about seeing self and seeing others so I already described it a little bit about my experience in South Africa but um when I was around 15 years old my father was diagnosed with thermal cancer and I remember firstly I speak about this in my TED Talk I remember going into his bedroom on the day that he died uh my mother called me as I was about to go to school and she told me to put my backpack down and go and say goodbye to my father and I remember going into my father's room and his eyes were closed and he was in clear pain and yet I knew that he knew that I was there and I had always felt seen by my father in in that summer born away but then what happened was I started to experience after his death what so many of us experience in the world which seems to be that the the the world seems to always conspire to um ask us to unsee ourselves we become busy in our work we're feeling burnt out we're busy without there's all of the stuff that's going on and we start to unsee ourselves and for me what I experienced was in the days and months after my father died I went to school on a Monday because my mom wanted to keep things normal and um they became this like forced positivity that I started to experience where people firstly wouldn't use the word father in my presence because they were worried that they would upset me and I also started to be praised for you doing so well you're being so strong you know there were all of these things I didn't drop a single grade and so there was all of the stuff that was going on on the surface which was oh aren't you great aren't you happy aren't you wonderful aren't you doing well and inside I was dying I was dying I became bulimic I was unable to experience the weight of my grief and um I was in English class one day and there was this remarkable teacher who handed out these blank notebooks to the class and she knew what I'd been going through and she said to the class there was this invitation but it felt like it was to me and she said you write I told the truth right like no one is reading and Rick and Forest I began as correspondence with this teacher where every day I would write in my journal I would write about the loss and the regret and my anger and all these experiences and the teacher she her name was Meg she would write back to me and she would write back to me in pencil in this very light almost imperceptible pencil and we had this silent correspondence that went on for months and months and months and she saved me and she saved me by enabling me to save myself two decades later I went to a psychology conference and someone said at this conference is is there anyone in your life who's made an impact on you who doesn't know about the impact and if that is the case reach out to them and so I reached out to Meg and I said to her you know you don't know but I want to let you know the difference you made and then I asked her a question and I said to her tell me why you always wrote to me in pencil mm-hmm and she said something remarkable she said to me Susie I wrote in pencil because it was your story you were writing your story you were writing your chapter it was your story and I was bearing witness to it and there was so powerful firstly the experience with her literally forged my entire career because I became interested in what it what helps versus doesn't when it comes to these emotional and psychological capacities but I think there's something so profound in the sawabano it's like the it's the it's the pencil because you're witnessing another person's story and it's the pencil even in the thinking of it's the holding lightly isn't it I feel a lot of respect and compassion for that younger you and that speaks to something that you've also written about the notion of continuity of self obviously using that term self very Loosely I mean to me that younger you with and her qualities is present here and you also talk about projecting yourself into the future yes the the continuity that way too and uh I'm deliberately jumping around here but I just kind of Wonder uh how it's meaningful for you these days to take into account the future you you know tomorrow a year from now a decade from now in the last year of your life you know how how you weave that in to your own emotional agility I think that's a powerful question and there's such powerful ideas the idea of continuity of self I always feel the five-year-old or the 15 year old inside of me and for anyone listening right now there is something so powerful in just breathing into the moment and asking what your five-year-old needs is it fun joy learning people like what is your five-year-old need and so the idea of continuity of the self is that often when we get stuck in difficult emotions or stuck in difficult experiences we get very stuck in the present and yet you've you've got these other people in your life that will be with you always and those people are the five-year-old you and then the you today plus 15 years plus 20 years plus whatever and I think there's such power when we move away from saying how do I feel what's wrong what's not going well why am I stuck why am I stressed are we stuck in this moment is to just remind ourselves that there is a five-year-old you tapping you on the shoulder saying see me and love me and I need something of you and then there is the older version of you that is saying see me love me or the choices that you're making gonna make me proud you know are you looking after yourself are you looking after your health are you looking after your relationships are you doing these things and so to get to the essence of what you were asking was how do I use that I try to use this idea of continuity of self very often because what is it doing it's like getting us into that zone of stepping out which is the perspective taking and broadening our view and the way that looks for me very practically is just even like you know I mean I'm sharing something here but all of us all of us well many of us speak to ourselves in the third person okay and speaking to yourself in the third person is found to be very psychologically helpful so what Susie what should you do today not what am I going to do today Susie what should you do today because what you're doing is you're moving yourself from your own perspective into a curious stance and I'm often often daily I was laughing at myself the other day saying Susie it's okay you know you've got this um what do you need today I'm having these conversations with myself constantly but they're not actually what the meme of today they are I think with the Mimi of the past and the future the Future Part I'm very struck by including relating to your third element of walking your why the values part uh in the sense that if we take our future self into account uh very often then motivation becomes much more straightforward what would be the best wisest most compassionate thing for the one who has Joys and Sorrows we know most keenly ourselves and who's the one to whom we have the highest Duty in a sense the one over whom we have the greatest power our future self and so there's for me there's something a little bit like uh like a relay race you know in this moment I've received a baton from my past selves at least in this life right and I don't want to suck I don't want to drop the Baton you know I want to appreciate how they've set me up to the extent they have and then I want to pass the Baton forward tomorrow and then next year and then on to the next last year of my life in a way that helps those future versions of me as well which for me is kind of the way I talk about at least walking my own why in this particular regard and I wondered if you wanted to add to that or touch on that absolutely the idea of future self you know where is this going from the research that shows that when we consider our future selves we very often will make very different choices when when it comes to our finances what we spend our money on you know the day-to-day decisions because it is actually there's almost this like shortcut that's happening to the parts of our lives that we most value and um it's it's just very powerful one of the things that I really appreciate in your work Susan that we're already talking about right now is how to relate to these different kinds of emotional or thought pattern-based hooks that we have that can drag us into uh some spooky places in the mind but also into some problematic behaviors that maybe aren't aligned with what we feel like we would really want in the future or maybe what some younger version of ourself wanted for us in the past and I think this way of thinking about it like the the future self idea is a great way to unhook from some kind of a thought but a lot of the time with people when we're actually really hooked by an idea or an emotional pattern in particular in the moment it can be very difficult to identify that there's a hook that's present and part of the process is often figuring out that we're hooked by something in the first place because it can kind of become the water that we're just swimming in and I'm wondering what do you think helps people identify that their and uh I mean call it what you will CBT they're stuck in their stinking thinking or however you want to kind of talk about it the way that I thoughts emotions and stories that are now driving us and are taking us away from our most valued lives part of what we see around us particularly in a lot of the more you know generic social media worlds that we see is this idea that you know we should think positive and we should be positive and it's a lot of this like positive thinking that has been you know very much part of a cultural narrative you know the Sadir of forced positivity or positive thinking there's so many issues with it um but you know ultimately it's an avoidance coping strategy it's like wrapped up in rainbows and sparkles but it's an avoidant coping strategy because as soon as you're starting to say I just want to be positive I only want to be positive I only want to think positive I only want to then what you're not doing is you're not recognizing that the reality of life um Demands a fragility that is interwoven uh with who we are as people and that we develop our capacity not by turning our backs on the fragility but rather facing forward towards the fragility and being able to see it and absorb it and connect with it and I think that's really important and so very a very crucial part I think firstly of starting to recognize our hooks this is probably foundational to my work is that I already mentioned that I you know don't see emotions as being positive or negative good or bad and the same with thoughts our thoughts have evolved to help us to make sense of the world to um understand what we need to pay attention to they have a very strong evolutionary perspective and so a a very important part of this is to recognize that any thought any emotion any story is actually kind of normal it doesn't need to be shamed it doesn't need to be judged but when the thought emotion story starts to become a prison when it starts to drive your action then you know you hooked so an example might be I'm sad so I'm going to stand back there's no space there for your values of connection or collaboration or other parts of yourself you know there's literally a fusion between your thought and your action uh I feel undermined in this meeting so I'm just going to shut down again there's no space that allows values to come into play or um you know having a conversation with the child in which you have this precious moment with the child each night but you're so stressed that when they come to you and they show you this beautiful picture that they drew and they look at you you know the eyes behind the eyes and the Soul behind the soul of the child You Don't See because you're on your phone and that's hooked again because it's the stress that's driving a particular response so I talk about different uh categories of hooks uh but but most commonly we know we hooked when it is the emotion the thought or the story that's driving our action rather than a groundedness in our values the internal experience becomes a prison that directs or demands how we Act this is where you know this as a clinician it gets tricky because people have different they have layers of values and I think about wisdom proverb from the Buddhist tradition that wisdom is choosing a greater happiness over a lesser one and personally I might add is choosing a lesser harm over a greater harm so it's in other words in the face of multiple values and multiple um tugs at us it's it's making some kind of choice in that space that you talked about that Victor Frankel talked about uh to walk higher Road in some ways and yet that lower Road and I will use that distinction higher lower just for Simplicity um is really compelling It's Got The Power of Habit it reflects a lot of values like you know avoiding dreaded experiences the force and I talk about or Conformity or the value of not seeing think about the moral difficulty for you know white people in South Africa you live through it's on not claiming any Authority at all about that but just imagine you know the what what was come up so people would have a value on not seeing so I just kind of wonder what you have found in your framework yeah that helps people walk that higher Road and overcome the fact that a lot of other values are pulling them in another Direction so I think there are a couple of aspects to this that are really really important um the first is that often what I've experienced with values is that people talk about values being in conflict so they'll often say things like well I value this but I also value that and those values on conflict so I think you know to what you're talking about one of the most important aspects is you know your values just are they're values that are more helpful to you now versus less helpful but getting all judgy about whether you know a value work but because I'm at work and you know this is going on at home it means I don't value home people often get a lot of Shame around their values because of the slap feeling that it's conflict and the way that I think of values more is that there's a bothness like there's this idea that if you've got a diamond and the diamond has many facets they're going to be times in your life where one of the facets is front and center you focusing on a particular project at work you are um managing an aspect of your mental health you so there's one aspect that is front and center but it doesn't mean that the rest of the diamond doesn't exist I think things can be a helpful piece of like we spoke earlier about melting in where we move or if someone's in the space of like conflict to be more in the space if there is this diamond um but there can also be two things that I think can be really important and difficult to be aware of when it comes to values firstly we can be so front and center with some of our values a value of Conformity Conformity Conformity Conformity that we then go against some of the others consistently we keep on having that diamond faced away from us and we actually aren't engaging in our lives in a holistic way and what is workable so for example someone who values um money who values finances and at the bottom of it it's because I value money because it provides me with safety it provides me with a whole lot of things but if that person is so valuing of what's front and center that they are consistently turning away from their relationships or um connecting with others or their health or their well-being then that moves now into the space of not workable in other words they are my values they're not in conflict with each other but if I keep doing this thing in this way is it going to bring me closer ultimately in the longer term in the continuity of self is it going to bring me closer to being the person the loved one the parent that I most want to be and very often the answer is going to be no I believe that just as we can become hooked in a very rigid way on thoughts emotions and stories we can also become hooked in a very rigid way on a value you know we can value something so much we can value fairness so much that in our rigidity with fairness we don't actually see other people at the table um we can become hooked in a value in a way that stops us from connecting with others so the value again just is but when we hold into it so tightly it can sometimes be indicating to us that this is not workable I'm really interested in this and so I kind of want to throw out a first question comment is will an emotion so I'll come back to that in a second and the way I'm thinking about values here is that it's basically an umbrella term for Notions that are held very consciously certainly but more broadly I'm thinking about motivational tugs of various kinds or wants broadly and often there's a there is a conflict there is a difference there's a Divergence between uh the immediate rewards of doing what's familiar and staying safe and and the short-term gains uh netted against what for some for is often the case of an immediate cost netted against vague long-term future gains for walking that higher Road right and so there's um we're being pulled we're being pulled in different directions there and I just kind of wonder how we can apply your framework to strengthening [Music] um I'm going to call it the will but strengthening the will which I think of is surrendering to the best within us essentially that would then over time inclined us increasingly and more rapidly and efficiently to disengage from that familiar short-term rewarding Lower Road if you will and help us become increasingly more comfortable and and pulled down that higher Road how can we strengthen that core of choice and motivation well this it's such a such an important question us as being fundamentally what matters to me including you would say emotionally matters and or in terms of reward matters not just conceptually and you know uh aren't as much of Will and emotion in the foundation of values that's not to say it doesn't matter in forging a life um but the way that I think of values is that values are the things that matter to me they what I want in the in the dark of night when I'm by myself lying about what they're what I want my life to be about but why does it matter does it matter because it's intellectually appealing or because it's emotionally somatically you know viscerally um mattering to important Salient desirable right yes yes it's mattering to me because this is this is the core of what encapsulates a sense of richness yeah also lined with your deepest being the one into the one to whom we are seeing into whom we are seeing right yes it's it's the it's the it's the who am I and who do I want to be in the whole then when we think about emotions and we think about um comfort versus discomfort most human beings are drawn towards comfort you know in in every aspect of Our Lives most human beings are drawn towards comfort they value it in effect in a broad sense they like it they want it and I could we want it we defer we default to comfort when we really connect with our values often what we're doing is we're being asked to engage with discomfort okay it is the discomfortable getting out it's the discomfort of engaging this is why I often talk about this idea that discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life because what you're doing is you you aren't actually often engaging with the easy emotions you often aren't engaging with what's easy in your life you are often showing up to what's tough to what isn't working in your relationship to what isn't working in your job to what what you know I'm bored at work and that feels really comfortable but my value is the value of learning and so the more we become open to our difficult emotions the more we start saying to ourselves okay so this boredom that feels really comfortable but there also feels like there's a sense of dissonance what is that difficulty emotion signposting about my needs and my values and that boredom even though it feels really comfortable might be signposting that learning is extraordinarily important for me and it's asking me to move with courage and discomfort to the thing that matters and this is where in a lot of my work I talk about even this idea of thinking about what our values are becomes so important because when we look at when we look for example at a step like stereotypes okay we often think of stereotypes as being stereotypes and biases are things that other people have about us and it's true but when we are under stress we can often start to self stereotype so we can often start to say things like oh maybe they're right maybe I'm not cut out for this you know maybe maybe this isn't the right job for me and we found this for example in studies of kids who are going off to college where you've got children who've grown up in an environment where all of their messaging has been we're not College material we not Cloud for college this isn't this this isn't us now you've got a child who struggles who works who does everything they can and they make it to College then what happens in the first six months they fail their first test things are harder they're struggling with their peers and at that moment of stress it is much more likely that there won't continue in that path it is much more likely around 70 percent likely that they will actually drop out of college now if you take those kids and you just ask them to engage in a 10-minute exercise where they write down what are their values like affirming their values like why are they at College why is this thing important to them why are they studying medicine what is the importance of that and what they want to bring to their Community what are they doing that 10 minutes of values affirmation protects those children two and three years down the track from dropping out so to Circle back there is this idea of these values that is foundational the core of what matters to me and then there is an environment that constantly asks us to be comfortable and that is constantly telling us what we can't do and who we can't be and there is huge anxiety and as soon as we have that we drop down into black and white thinking into self-biasing and into rigidity and stereotyping this is where these emotional agility skills are important just in the example that I've given who am I like what is the heartbeat of my why when you know that when you're going into have a difficult conversation with your boss or when you go into the workplace that's changing but you know who you want to be in your career and as a person it protects you and it helps you to act in the longer term in ways that are more values concordant so one of the ways that we've talked about this in the past on the podcast uh Susan is through the language of wants and needs what do I want what do I need another way to say it what do I value and it's really interesting whenever we post content related to this one of the most common comments that we get is well but I don't know what I want well I don't know what I need I don't know what I value I can't feel into myself I don't know my way why don't I know my why why don't I know my why you know that whole going down that rabbit hole yes and it's actually really heartfelt and and I really feel for that person who doesn't have a feeling for their interior in that way or maybe there's been a lot of conflict between what they experienced at one time in their life as an authentic value that came into conflict with this broader societal forces that you're speaking to that could very understandably cause somebody to divorce themselves from that or maybe bury it down in some kind of way and I'm just wondering what you think supports people and being able to go through that process of identifying those those core whys inside of themselves it's it's such a a common experience if anyone's listening now and then I kind of know what my values are it's so common and I think you know there's so many reasons for it there is there is of course family of origin reasons like are you as a child are you allowed to have autonomy of the self in terms of what you wanted what you liked what you didn't or did you have to defer to others constantly when it came to that were you told what you needed to study you know like there's all of this all of this thing that can happen and but even just like a day-to-day business I've met so many parents who talk about you know in these first years of raising young children they completely lose themselves and they they you know just trying to survive and they don't necessarily have a sense of what their values are so some of the things that I think can be really helpful is asking asking just a couple of questions so firstly you know if if if this was my last and I'll just give you a couple and some might be helpful um but if this was my last day on Earth what would I want to be doing on that day okay just that simple question can be helpful in sign posting what's what's helpful um another question that's really helpful to ask is um at the end of each day what did I do today that was worthwhile what did I do today that was worthwhile and Rick this gets to your question earlier which is I specifically use the language worthwhile not what was easy not what you enjoyed not what was fun not what was comfortable but what was worthwhile sometimes what is worthwhile is actually really difficult it's it's that having of the tough conversation it's the courage to stay with someone who is ill and see them there is there is so much that that question asks so what did I do today that was worthwhile I mean if anyone's interested in exploring this further I've actually got a quiz on my website that's been taken by around 200 000 people that has a whole list of values and starts to ask questions that help you to unpack that and that's it um Susan david.com forward slash learn is the quiz so I think that those are some really helpful questions and to connect of course in terms of what you're mentioning with the the ones versus the have to's this becomes so important in in willpower when when someone is approaching a situation and they say something like I have to get a job I have to be on their Duty I have to be healthy have to's in our lives evoke resistance automatic resistance no one wants to have to anything and so as we frame our lives in heftus we automatically decrease the likelihood that we will get there because we actually work against our own motivation whereas one to two goals or goals that are derived from a clear sense of I I want to be healthy because I want to see my kids grow up um you know this is this is important to me because it's our model to my children um not I have to be on Dad Duty I get to spend time with my kids like the more that we can think of are the way we language in our lives in in often wears that are very rote and automatic we stop recognizing that often we use language that is actually disconnected with our values and creates resistance and that if we try to make changes creating a stronger line of sight between what I want to do and the value that is supporting that actually increases our likelihood of being motivated and walking the path I can say honestly Susan that foursome I don't know how many are we now for us 300 plus um this is one of our deeper more Off Script um conversations which is really saying something good about you I want to name that and um I'm burrowing in here because uh I think actually a lot of people know what they really care about and uh some don't but they do what they and I'll use the language of caring what do you care about what matters to you what what are your most fundamental AIMS in this life uh okay values broadly the problem is it's really hard to to sustain action based on what you most care about in the face of all the other things the external pressures in society and then the ways that are past is acting like a puppet master sometimes pulling us in various ways down old not so good roads so a lot the question is what what is that factor which if people strengthen it in themselves globally it's like a meta motivational factor that enables them to become increasingly able to sustain surrender to being lived by being given over to those most fundamental values those most fundamental things that matter that they care about that really come from the core of their being and I think that's a really deep question actually I don't wanna I don't want to cut you off before you even go here Susan but the first thing that's coming to me that is I wonder if this is kind of a distress tolerance question in some kind of way but I want you to take this wherever you want to go with it Susan yeah that would be that would be a great that would be one of the factors right another one is how identified are you with in a healthy way the the you that you see into with that Zulu phrase when you do your first action here of showing up for yourself that you become really identified with that but I want to turn it over to you now Susan uh I think it's a beautiful question I as you were talking how can we possibly do a podcast without talking Greek philosophy um oh boy I've never done that before either of course we need to so I'm reminded of you know when you were talking about all the things in the environment that keep going and going and going um I'm reminded of heraclitis the Greek philosopher he said we can never as human beings we can never step into the same river twice because the world is always changing those around us are changing the environment is changing and we even within ourselves are changing so if I extend this little when you're talking about like what is this you know foundational skill this is why in my work I only talk about walking your wire as like the third movement and then moving on is the fourth because the foundational pieces are actually the pieces that are about um the river is changing around you is you are changing and you're trying to kind of walk through this River in the people that are able to walk through the river there is a groundedness and so for me this is why these emotional skills actually are crucial because what is it that pulls me away from my values or tells me I'm not good enough or or you know makes me lash out what's very often happening is I'm unseeing myself in some of like the most basic ways so compassion is crucial and when I'm working with large organizations and I'm talking about some of the skills where these leaders are going through transformations of 300 000 people and the environment is changing in the economy and there's all of the stuff that's going on and then they've got another Zoom call to do another 10 calls there is a compassion of the hands on the heart that ground you in place so I think that's one I think another is a gentle acceptance you know gentle gentle acceptance I mentioned earlier like we can't build the city while there's an internal bombardment we need to as we move into the fragility of compassion of illness of things ongoing well in my relationship to have a gentle acceptance of that because it becomes very difficult to move towards your values or to make changes if you aren't seeing what is so I think those are two key skills in showing up there are also just really important stepping out skills one in particular that connects with mindfulness is if you're saying something like I am angry or I am sad or I am frustrated or I'm being undermined when we use this language and we very often use this language I am now if we think about I am language what it's saying is I am All of Me one hundred percent of me is sad I am defined by my sadness or I am unworthy that language I am all of me is defined by being unworthy there's no space for values there's no space for discomfort because we literally are being defined in this moment and so I really you know encourage people that I work with to get a little bit looser with their language where they're starting to notice their thoughts their emotions and their stories for what they are their thoughts their their emotions their stories they are yours they are important they are all of those things but they are not fact just because you had the thought you're unworthy doesn't mean you're unworthy and they don't need to drive you action so instead of saying I am sad I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad I'm noticing this is my I am unworthy thought I'm noticing this is my there's no point in even trying here so I'm just going to be quiet in this meeting when instead you say I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad what you're doing is you're creating linguistic space between you and the emotion because no human being is the cloud you know we we are not the cloud you are not the cloud you you are the whole damn sky so that's a piece of language and then the last thing that I'll add is it helpful for me to maybe give one other strategy that might be very practical yeah I think that would be great so so just you know one of the things that comes up in emotions research is how very often people use very broad brush stroke again to this like you know amorphous being amorphous around their emotions language so people will often say something like I'm stressed and no matter what they went through today you know no matter how their day was I'm stressed and we find again this in organizations and in families where people will very often use very broad brushstroke language to describe their emotion now when you keep saying I'm stressed I'm stressed I'm stressed I'm stressed your body and your psychology doesn't know what to deal to do with that stress it's very diffuse If instead of saying I'm stressed you label that emotion more accurately what psychologists call emotion granularity so now you're moving beyond stress and you're saying the thing I'm calling stress what is it oh it's disappointment it's loneliness it's feeling unsupported it's it's actually it's boredom it's exhaustion when we move Beyond these broad breast scope of labels and we become more nuanced around our emotions we are more able to understand the cause of the emotion and also what you need to be doing in response to it when we look at young kids children who at the age of two and three years old have greater levels of emotion granularity they're able to discern between mad and sad and and different types of emotions are children who grow up with higher levels of well-being greater levels of ability to delay gratification we're talking about the continuity of self they had the ability to move with distress tolerance towards their goals and you can see how this plays out if if you're a 16 year old and you really want to be liked and you really want to be part of a group and accept it and your peers have this wonderful idea to spray paint graffiti on the principles office wall there is going to be something that happens in a child that has greater levels of emotion granularity where the child will say gee on the surface there is this thing that looks comfortable and exciting and a part of the group but a child that's got emotional granularity is also going to be able to say that there's something that feels wrong about it I've got a sense of anxiety there's something going on in my body actually this isn't a great thing to do so it's no surprise then that that child is going to be able to stay the course of their goals when other Temptations arise and when the world moves in yeah and I also think this just comes back to what we were talking about a little bit earlier about identifying what some of those wants needs values are that lie inside of you is it that there's truly nothing there or is it that there's a whole bunch of material there that is extremely rich and very complex and has these different layers that Rick was talking about earlier in the conversation and the issue and the issue isn't so much that you know there's a black hole inside of myself it's that there's so much there that I don't know where to begin in terms of untangling at all and I think you've given a lot of good material here for how to start untangling that knot and and one other quick untangle is see your emotions your emotions your difficult emotions are often signposting what your values are so someone who says it just feels empty inside I'm lonely okay I'm lonely I don't know what my values are I feel empty inside you might look at that and go this person feels empty they feel like they don't have their values but what is loneliness loneliness is often signposting the greater need for intimacy and connection and boredom I've spoken about before anger often signposted we want greater levels of equity and fairness Joy often signposts that being in the space of creativity is what's important so our emotions often signposts our needs and our values so if you're struggling to think about what your values are stay with their difficulty motion and it's often going to start tapping you on the shoulder and telling you and then coming back to this comfort that we were talking about earlier someone who's lonely is is we know when people are feeling lonely they very often will shut down when they get invited out they'll often say no they often don't speak as much socially not because of social anxiety but because there's a sense of being in on themselves so the the emotion of or the experience of loneliness signposting intimacy and connection also asks us to bring with it actions you know values or qualities of action how can I move myself towards that and very often it's going to be asking us to move with discomfort towards the thing that matters I think that's a really beautiful summary of a lot of material that we explored today Susan and this was just a wonderful conversation thank you so much for taking the time to do this we both really enjoyed it thank you so much for having me I loved I love the conversation yeah I got a lot out of it and I think about psychosynthesis which is a system you may know something about and um it talks about these two great Dimensions love and will and these are terms that are used really broadly and will there is not mentas the kind of classic willpower standards yeah it's not that at all it res is really the way I described it giving surrendering to being lived by the best within us uh from the core of our being Rippling outward and then the question becomes uh much as people can become more competent and skillful effective with love let's say and how can they become our competence skillful and effective with Will understood in this way which then becomes a a major global factor in helping people really enact the second and third steps uh probably the third and four steps rather in your structure and to me that's a very deep consideration what helps us become better at willfulness understood in this very wise way over time how can people learn to be better at willfulness in the deep meaning that we're exploring here it's such a beautiful question and such an important exploration well we could let her have you back to uh talk about motivational agility I love it let's do it thank you really it was great we had a great time today talking with Dr Susan David about her construct of emotional agility and book by the same name emotional agility emphasizes the importance of being flexible and adaptive with our emotions it's not about avoiding difficult feelings but rather about approaching them with curiosity compassion and the willingness to learn from them by developing it individuals can cultivate the skills that they need to navigate life's challenges make authentic choices that are aligned with their values and ultimately lead more satisfying lives and it's those values that we spent a lot of time talking about throughout the conversation Susan really foregrounded the values piece as an essential component of emotional agility and one of the things that really separates it from similar constructs like emotional intelligence emotional agility has four parts showing up stepping out walking near why and moving on showing up includes facing your feelings and acknowledging and accepting your emotions without judgment and it could also include moving away from avoidance or suppression and toward curiosity and compassion toward your own experience second stepping out means creating some distance between yourself and your emotions and this included a lot of very good mindfulness based CBT kind of stuff labeling our experiences labeling our emotions with more granularity was something that Susan talked about toward the end of the conversation feeling our emotions rather than being the emotion and not having our emotions directly dictate our actions where Susan gave the example of I feel stressed so I will fill in the blank there's no space there there's no Freedom there's no agency there's no ability to intervene in that moment with our emotion we're just a prisoner to it we're experiencing it and our action is flowing naturally from that experience and Susan really talked about how we can find a moment there find some space where we recognize the pattern that we're in and cultivate the ability to step out of it where we see the emotion that we're experiencing we get more granularity around it maybe we're able to burrow down underneath that to find the values that it rests upon then third walking your why and this means aligning our actions with those core values and long-term goals and this can include reflecting on what truly matters to you and using that understanding to guide your decisions and behaviors and I really enjoy interesting topic that we got into during the conversation was what allows somebody to identify those underlying emotions and values that are truly important to them because so often when we talk about this we receive feedback from people along the lines of people tell me to align my actions with my values but I don't even know what my values are so how can I possibly do that and Susan unpacked all of these different things that really understandably can get in the way of our ability to determine what our values are maybe you had some developmental experiences that separated you from those values maybe you've just received a lot of social messaging a lot of so-called social contagion around what you should care about and Susan and Rick had a really interesting dialogue about what supports somebody and aligning increasingly over time with the things that really matter to them then finally the fourth step of emotional agility is moving on and this includes breaking out of old patterns and cycles and letting go of the emotions and thoughts that no longer serve us another topic that came up throughout the conversation was this movement from our past to our present to our future self how we can often find the things that we truly value by going back in time internally and looking at that younger version of who we are and asking what does that younger version need what did that younger version really want before the world got in the way and how can I bring that younger version's values more into my life these days and then along the same lines a really powerful motivational tool is turning toward the future and asking ourselves hey if I were me a year from now or 10 years from now or 30 years from now what would I wish I had done today if I close my eyes and imagine myself as that person 30 years from now really try to inhabit that person in this embodied felt way you're 30 years older than how old you are today and then you open your eyes and you return back into your body as it is right now what would you really want to do with that body in the Here and Now how would you want to turn your life In This Moment now that you're back in time just as you are today in a way that would benefit that future version of yourself and I really love that exercise because it does a couple of things first it gets me in direct contact with what my values really are what I actually care about in this moment now that I have it to do all over again and then second it really makes a lot of questions of behavior very obvious it becomes kind of obvious what would benefit me obvious uh what would detract from the future self that I'm going to be in a couple of years and it can give you a real motivational push behind the higher road that Rick mentioned because we all have many different things that we want and many different things that we value and sometimes those wants or values are in direct conflict with each other uh we maybe even know that we should take one road but another road feels really appealing right now and practices like this are a wonderful way to nudge ourselves toward that higher Road over and over again so I hope you enjoyed today's conversation with Dr Susan David again her book is emotional agility It's a Wonderful book I would strongly recommend it I would also recommend her Ted Talk which she gave on emotional agility I think that it's been seen by over 10 million people or something like that it's been incredibly popular if you're interested in this territory you should definitely check it out if you'd like to support the podcast you can subscribe to us wherever you're listening to the podcast right now on you can also check out the videos of the episodes on YouTube you can find my channel Forrest Hansen over there and you can join us on patreon it's patreon.com beingwellpodcast and for the cost of just a couple of dollars a month you can support the show and you'll receive a bunch of bonuses in return so until next time thanks for listening and I'll talk to you soon foreign [Music]

Channel: Forrest Hanson

Views: 10,445

Keywords: Mental Health, Personal Growth, Self-Help, Psychology, Forrest, Forrest Hanson, Being Well, Being Well Podcast, Rick Hanson, Resilient, Self-Care, Anxiety, Psychology Facts, Self-Development, Emotional Agility, Emotional Agility with Dr. Susan David, emotional intellgence, seeing and being seen, feeling seen, continuity of self, compassion, labeling your stressors

Id: 5epTwwVJ31A

Length: 68min 22sec (4102 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 04 2023