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Susan David, PhD, often references the South African greeting she grew up hearing Sawubona, while describing her pioneering work on emotions. It means: “I see you, and by seeing you, I bring you into being.” Then, she shares that we can’t see each other until we see ourselves.
“A core part of Sawubona is the idea that when we are disconnected from ourselves—when we push aside our pain—we start to unsee ourselves over time,” she says. “We start to live in our heads, rather than in our hearts. I call this segmentation: The idea that my emotions are good or bad. There are some things I’m allowed to think and other things I’m not,” she explains.
“It’s going to be very difficult for a leader who is running from meeting to meeting—not activating care for themselves, finding moments of joy or connection with self—to turn towards the hearts of others. For short periods, we can empathize, connect, and focus on team goals. But, if we do those things while turning away from our own hearts, there is a single, very strong predictor we can make, and that is burnout, because we’re engaging in more and more emotional labor.”
While a daunting question, I was curious how we might stop engaging in that labor and utilize that energy to elevate our relationships with ourselves and each other. As an award-winning psychologist, leading management thinker, and bestselling author of Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life, I’ve found David’s work to be a transformative resource to not only answer, but live it. Here, she shares some emotional agility tactics to collaborate with intention and compassion.
Fast Company: You share that the beginner’s mind is a cornerstone of emotional agility. It takes discipline to practice this mindset alone. So, it’s compelling to consider embracing it as a team. What habits and practices do you harness to achieve it?
Susan David: The idea of staying curious for longer is a core aspect of coaching. When people ask: What is emotional agility? Emotional agility is the skills that help us be healthy human beings. It requires the recognition that we experience difficult emotions, thoughts, and stories every day. But, there are human capacities that exist in every one of us that, when elevated, enable us to do the things that matter.
So, first, being curious myself: What are my and others’ emotions indicating? What’s going on here? What aren’t we seeing? Then, how do we take values connected steps? It’s compassion, curiosity, and the courage to take values connected steps moving towards discomfort and difficult conversations. We aren’t being courageous for the sake of it. We’re doing it because it’s connected with our intentions and who we want to be in the work that we do.
A through line of your work is helping us get unhooked from the autopilot responses that often unconsciously govern our lives. It stayed with me when you explained that the primal part of our brain—that is led by urges like desire and safety—turns on 195 milliseconds earlier than the rational one. So, “it only takes 195 milliseconds for impulse to get ahead of intention.” Through the lens of your collaborations, what are your go-to practices to create the space for intention to prevail?
As complexity grows in organizations, this move towards impulsive response, which often shows up as rigidity, is pervasive. It looks like “Us vs. them” thinking and not considering the impact of decisions on other parties. It’s very siloed and happens both internally and with the people who we work with.
The first practice is compassion because, in many ways, our human brains have been outpaced by technology. From an evolutionary perspective, when you’re feeling stress, the focus is on cognitive narrowing: I need to focus on what’s going wrong, so I can attend to it. Yet, what is needed in times of complexity is cognitive broadening: being able to understand context, appreciate nuance, and connect with our values.
When people think about compassion, they often misunderstand it. They think that compassion is about letting people off the hook or not being tough on yourself in a way that will help you succeed. Whereas we know that when we’re compassionate towards ourselves and others, it creates space for connection, collaboration, and learning to grow. While it can often feel fluffy, in psychological science, compassion is one of the foundational aspects of being able to move with greater levels of intention.
You write that “to maintain equanimity, we need a nuanced emotional vocabulary.“ This is important because “if we can’t accurately label what we’re feeling, it becomes difficult to communicate well enough to get the support we need.” Walk us through how to achieve this with our teams.
SD: When we’re experiencing autopilot stress, we often lock down into very rigid labels around emotions. The team might say: “We’re stressed. This part of the organization is wrong and this part is right.” Whereas what is needed is much more nuanced language. Stress, busy, resistant to change—these are big labels that don’t describe the nuance of what people are feeling. If you say “I’m stressed,” your body and psychology don’t know what to do with the stress. First, we are conflating ourselves with it: I am stressed. What does that mean? 100% of me is stressed. There’s no space for anything else. Or, “he is resistant to change.” He is being labeled in his entirety.
If you’re really trying to bring about change, and that person is being labeled in their entirety as rigid, there isn’t space for intentionality. This is where emotional granularity becomes important. You try to understand: What are one or two other options here? This thing that I’m calling “stress” or “resistant to change,” what else is really going on for them? When we become more granular, we find that they feel disappointed or unsupported. It’s more about: “I care about the client and am worried about what this change might mean.” Nuance allows us to understand the cause of the emotion and move forward.
When we collaborate and are in an experience of uncertainty, the human impetus towards rigidity says: There’s got to be an answer or map from A to B. The truth is, sometimes we don’t know the answer because the context is changing. The idea that we just need to find the map decreases our ability to hold nuance and connection with each other. I encourage the organizations I work with to use language, like: “We’re in the messy middle.” When teams are able to use that language—“We actually don’t know the answer“—it gives permission for that space to be one of exploration, rather than exposition and definition.
You highlight writing as a tool to elevate our awareness and agency. Let’s say we’re on a team that wants to embrace emotional agility, what are a few journal prompts we can explore together?
The segmentation of emotions out of the workplace has a long history and severe consequences that we’re starting to see in our organizations. There’s this idea that we’ve got to be positive or, it’s not as activated now, that emotions have no place in the work.
A core part of my work is that emotions are not good or bad, positive or negative. They are data. They signpost our needs, values, and the things that we care about.
These are two journal prompts that we could write independently and then share. First: Name one emotion you’ve experienced recently. What value is being signposted by it?
We might add: As a team, we acknowledge that we’re in the messy middle and don’t have all the answers. Who do we want to be in the midst of this challenge? How do we want to come to our conversations?
Every organization is going through change. Most organizations spend an inordinate amount of time focusing on their strategy. However, when we look at the research, the most important predictor of successful change is the ability of leaders, individuals, and the organization to navigate the emotional journey of its people. Does this mean that people haven’t had difficult emotions? No, even in change that is deemed successful, we see an increase of nearly 200% of tough emotions.
If you’re going through change, these emotional capacities are a core leadership and organizational skill. In a journal prompt it might look like: What are some of the emotions that I and others might experience during this change? What are ways I can navigate those emotions that don’t treat people or myself as resistant, but understand that these [emotions] are data?
For Part II of this experience, how might you guide us in answering your question: “How can we experiment with different ways of being that take us to discomfort more?” What benefits are born from that discomfort?
As knowledge is increasingly commoditized, we will see the need for these human and emotional skills more and more. They’re the skills of the future. The skills often require that people move into spaces of discomfort because it’s often the space that brings us towards our values.
Every organization is saying: We want people to be inclusive, innovate, and collaborate. Here’s the truth: There is no true inclusion possible without understanding and going to the discomfort of different viewpoints. There is no collaboration possible without the discomfort of potential conflict. Collaboration requires the emotional capacity to have difficult conversations and work through disagreements. There is no agility possible in organizations without human and psychological agility.
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