Susan David and Jonathan Fields on Resilience and Emotional Agility

[Music] Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life. And so if we can instead of pushing aside our difficult emotions and instead recognize this that our emotions often beacons of things that we care about that we can look at our emotions with courage, with compassion, which is really important, and with curiosity. Then what we can often do is we can start making choices that are difficult but values aligned. Today's guest, Susan David, is an award-winning psychologist. She's on the faculty of Harvard Med School, co-founder and co-director of the Institute of Coaching at Mlean Hospital, CEO of evidence-based psychology, and the author of a massively bestselling book called Emotional Agility. I wanted to sit down with her because emotion is at the heart of so much of what drives us, especially all these hidden drivers, things that control to a certain extent or make us feel like we're being controlled by this sort of, you know, like below the radar impulses. And Susan is somebody who has devoted an incredible amount of time to researching what's really going on here when we move out into the world and build the things we want to be able to interact with people and what are the hidden drivers, the emotional drivers, how do we handle ourselves emotionally and cognitively when we bump up against incredible challenge in our lives. So I'm really excited to share this deep diving conversation. We also really explore her journey from South Africa, what it was like growing up there and and her journey to the United States and what led to that adventure. Really excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project. So, as we sit here, you are uh about 6 months post the release of a a pretty powerful and interesting book which man is so relevant to the times. And I want to get into some of the ideas in that book, but as people I'm sure can hear, your accent is not Brooklyn. It is not Brooklyn. It is a very unique combination of South Africa, New Zealand, Australia. I now live in Boston where I'm a co-founder of the Institute of Coaching at Harvard Medical School. And I also have 2 years of backpacking accent thrown in there. Okay. What's a backpacking accent? Backpacking accent is where you pick up a backpack and you go traveling for two years and you go to India, Nepal, Kashmir and along the way you get twangs. Got it. All right. So we're going to have to unpack this a little bit. So if I ask you where's home? So home is Boston. Okay. Home is Boston. But I grew up in South Africa. And one of the things that I talk about in emotional agility is how that experience really impacted me and actually shaped my entire career in terms of the questions that I ask and the book that I wrote. Yeah. So tell me more about that. So emotional agility really focuses on these key ideas which is what does it take internally in the way we deal with our thoughts, our emotions and the stories that we tell ourselves that help us to thrive in the world. Because while we live in a community that is all about discipline and apps and so on, um in fact the way we deal with our inner world drives everything. It drives the relationships that we have, how we interact in those relationships, how we parent, what we put our hands up for in our careers, every aspect of how we love, live, parent and lead. And so when I was growing up in South Africa, I was a white South African and I grew up in apartate South Africa and while I was a white South African and therefore not subject to the same cruelty and trauma as so many of my fellow South Africans, it was nonetheless a time of real chaos and real complexity. So for example, when I was growing up in South Africa as a female, your on average chance of being raped was statistically higher than your chance of learning how to read and write. So just to give you some sense of, you know, what life was like for so many. And so you grow up in this environment and there's no way as a sentient feeling person you can be numb to recognizing what so many people are going through. So for example um so many South Africans and as did I had a nanny who looked after us who tended to our skin knees and this woman Anna became a mother to me and I realized with growing horror as I got older that Anna had her own children and yet apartate laws prevented her from living on the same premises as her children. So she was allowed to live and work in what had been determined by parted laws as a white suburb and yet she was not allowed to live with her own children. So she would once a year go back to her home to mother her children. And as a friend of mine said, you know, it landed up being and I think for Anna's children as well, this generation of kids that grew up with shoes that were too small, you know, they had seen their mother at the age of five. Anna would come back to our home and work and save to buy shoes for her kids and would go back the next year not recognizing, not realizing, not metabolizing that an entire year had been lost, that her child who was five was now six. And so I grew up very much focusing on this question which is we grow up in a world we live in a world that is imperfect. And no matter where listeners are today we live in a world that is imperfect and we live lives that are imperfect where our contract with the world life's beauty is inseparable from its fragility. And so the questions that I ask myself in my work, in my emotions research are truly this. What does it take internally in the way we deal with our thoughts, our emotions, and our stories that enable us to thrive in the world? And one of the things that I explore in emotional agility is how so many of the narratives that exist in our culture, I think, actually undermine our ability to thrive and undermine our resilience. So, growing up, how aware of of I mean, you say that you saw this happening and unfolding. You It's interesting. Couple months ago, I I sat down and we shared a conversation with um a friend of mine, Frank Libman, who's a doctor here in New York, who also grew up in South Africa and then ended up doing his early training as a doctor in Sutoto. Mhm. and you know shared a bunch of his experiences and he grew up in the way he described it as sort of a very contrarian family where they were more activists and they were more aligned with the ideals of Mandela even though they were white in apartai South Africa. I'm curious what the sort of the family dynamic and the family culture was for you coming up. So interestingly I grew up in a similar family a similar context but even in that context what was really interesting so for example at the age of 16 I was we were literally not allowed in many ways not from my family but by law we were not allowed to interact or truly have friends across color lines. though schools were segregated. You couldn't go to the same movie theater. And so a group of friends and I developed this really it was a social club where people from different communities and from different walks of life were coming together to meet one another to interact and to befriend one another. And the South African security police was so paranoid and so controlling in society at that time that they literally staked out my friend's house uh tapped her telephones and harassed her parents because their child and and me their children were doing this. So it was a situation that was really interesting because even if you were growing up in a family where you absolutely could not hold to or abide by or believe in or have any stake in these ideas, you were impacted in so many ways. But one of the things that's really interesting then is in my trajectory and I think what led me to become a psychologist and an emotions researcher is when I was around 16 years old, my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And I experienced what so many people experience when they or a loved one have an illness and that is that so many people came to me and said just be positive. Everything will be fine, everything will be okay, everything will be okay. And in many ways, what was being experienced in South Africa was this complete avoidance of the truth of what was going on in society. And so I went through this really difficult experience where on the one hand, everyone was saying to me, "It'll be okay. It'll be okay. Just be positive." A friend of mine who recently died of breast cancer described this as the tyranny of positivity. That we live in a society that effectively tells us that if we're just positive, if we just pretend everything will be okay. You know, you unhappy in your job, just grit through it. It'll be okay. At least you've got a job. Or you miserable, just focus on the bright side. and she said to me, "You know what's really interesting is if it was just a case of being positive, the friends in my stage 4 breast cancer support group would be alive today." And by telling me that I just need to be positive, what it does is it implicates me in my own death because it seems to imply that by not being positive enough that somehow I've failed to change the course of my reality. And it stopped me from being authentic with myself. And so this was a really interesting experience for me because on the one hand, I had all of these people telling me to just be positive. Everything's going to be okay. But it wasn't okay. My father, the person who I most loved in the world, was dying and then dead. and an English teacher who to this day I, you know, hold to with such a spirit of gratitude engaged me in what became a secret silent correspondence. So, she invited us to keep journals. And I remember I've still got this black journal that every day I would write in. And I would write about the pain that I was going through, the difficulty that I was experiencing. And every day she would hand this journal back to me with questions and comments and poetry and really helping me to unpack my regrets, my difficulties, everything that was going on for me. And what I realized afterwards was it was that it was me being shown up to and me showing up to my own emotional experience that ultimately helped me to thrive and to have a sense of myself as resilient and capable in the world. And that really sparked my entire career because so much of our narrative is about this be happy be positive. And yet what's fascinating is by 2030 the World Health Organization predicts that depression, not diabetes, not heart disease, not cancer, depression will be the single cause of disability, the leading cause of disability globally. And so what's so interesting for all of us is, you know, while we might not be dealing necessarily with death in that very real way, every day we face setbacks. We face a project that doesn't go through effectively or a hope that we had that isn't being realized or we're frustrated in our jobs or our child comes home from school and says, "Mommy, no one would play with me today." And so often with very good intentions, what we do is we try to forge forward, push along, make it better and make it better. And our difficult emotions are often signposts to things that we most care about, to our values. And if instead of trying to push them away, we can end a struggle that we have with them and be willingly open to them, we can move into a place where we can make real change in our life because ultimately acceptance is a prerequisite to change. Yeah. Yeah, I mean what's really interesting also I want to circle back to the ideas but I also don't want to skip this quote intervention with this one teacher. It's it's been fascinating for me to sit down with now hundreds of people who have been through multiple heroes and heroine's journeys and struggles and challenges and the frequency that I hear within the story of somebody who has emerged of the teacher, the mentor, the interested person showing up and engaging and saying in some way giving you permission to be who you are, to feel what you feel and interacting around that and investing in wanting to know more. That seems like such a stunningly powerful moment in so many people's lives. What I'm always curious about is that so many of the folks who I end up sitting down with tell that story in their own life. I don't hear that same thing when I step out of these conversations anywhere near the same level frequency. So I'm always curious what the role is of having somebody touch down in your life very often in the earlier parts of your life who says tell me who you are tell me what's going on and opens the door and validates sort of the experiences that you're having in the world I'm curious what your lens is on that I so this idea of being seen and then also that I --- you and by seeing you I bring you into being. That is just so beautiful. You know I see you and by seeing you I bring you into being. It's so profound and I think that she got chills as you said. It's so that's that's what you know we come home from work and we've had a tough day and we want to be seen. We want to be seen and to see. And yet what happens so often is our habits get in the way of seeing and being seen. So, you know, we'll say to our 16-year-old son as he walks through the door, "How was your day today?" without looking up from our cell phone and our son will grunt back fine without looking up from his. And so one of the things that I talk about is the importance of starting to connect with values aligned tweaks, values aligned habit changes in very very practical ways that can help us to live lives that are more intentional and active. But before we go there, I actually one of the things that I think is just critical is this idea of being seen by other people and also being seen by ourselves. And one of the stories that again gave me chills. So Levi, Primo Levi, who survived the Nazi death camps writes about one of the most difficult experiences that he had in his life. And it was that when he was released from the death camps, he boards a train with his fellow prisoners, now released, back to his hometown, so relieved and traumatized and excited to be alive. And he describes this idea that as he pulls in with a train into his hometown just so filled with gratitude to be alive but also this experience this body of experience that he's had that he's gone through. and he gets off the train and the fellow town's people come to him and come to his fellow travelers and say, "What has happened to you?" Because these individuals are so struck by how emaciated and how scal the prisoners look. And Levi talks about as the words come tumbling out of his mouth about this is what happened to me. This is what happened to me. That the town's people turn and walk away unable to hear, unable to metabolize what it is that they are experiencing. And so Levi talks about this core human need to be seen. And this other aspect to it, which is to be seen by others, but also to be seen by ourselves. And when we go through a difficult experience, and it might be a setback at work, it might be an idea that's been stolen, it might be something else. And instead of just pushing through to the positivity, there are very practical and very important ways that we can be with ourselves and our own emotions that actually then start to activate our readiness potential, our goal setting and our capability to make real change in our lives. But the first part of that is showing up to ourselves. Yeah. So by showing up to ourselves then it sounds like because I want to make sure I understand what you mean by that phrase. What I translate that is in in my brain is is a awareness. Awareness of who you are, what you're experiencing and a willingness to to own that this is my reality and not automatically judge it as being bad or wrong. Is is that tell tell me more. Absolutely. There so there are a couple of aspects to this. The first is that because as I mentioned earlier, we live in a world that tells us if you've got a bad thought, it's going to create a bad reality and you're not going to, you know, get the house you want, the car you want, the outcome you want, so therefore we should have good thoughts. What starts to happen is we start to treat our thoughts and emotions way too seriously. You know, I have this thought and therefore it's my reality. And so we start to get into a space with ourselves where the thought lands being in charge. You know who is in charge though, the thinker or the thought? And so so often what happens is we land up being in situations, you know, I'm feeling undermined at work, therefore I am being undermined, so I'm just going to shut up. Or my partner's starting in on the finances. I feel uncomfortable, therefore I'm going to walk out the room. And so what we start doing is we start creating a fusion, a lack of space between thinker and thought where it's like I'm having this thought. I am being undermined. I am going to mess up this presentation. And we start treating these thoughts and our emotions as reality. But you know emotions are data. They're useful. They're valuable data, but they're not directions. Ultimately, we get to choose. And so to speak to some of these ideas that relate to the question that you asked, a very important aspect, I think firstly is to end struggle that you might have within yourself quite literally by dropping the rope. And the struggle that we want to end is the idea that my thoughts are wrong, my thoughts are right, my emotions are good, my emotions are bad. Our emotions just are. Our emotions have evolved to help us to survive in the world. And when we just push them aside, we lose a core position point that enables us to respond effectively. So that's one aspect. Another aspect is starting to connect in with who am I and what is important to me? Who do I want to be in the world? What do I stand for? So, you know, so often when we think about values, values sound cheesy. You know, they're things that are put on bulletin boards or sent out by companies. You know, these are our values this year and different from our values last year. And so, they can start seeming very abstract and almost corny. And yet, values are qualities of action. I see values as being qualities of action. Every single day we have choice points. Do I make a move towards my value? So for example, if my value is to have what I call a clean relationship with a loved one, a relationship in which that person is allowed to be busy or allowed to have an interaction about something that's difficult without it being a no-go zone in our lives. Like a lot of couples move into spaces where they don't talk about the finances although they don't talk about raising their children because it's too difficult. But if we are able to move into a space where we recognize for example that a value of ours might be a clean relationship and this is important to me then it enables you to create space between the thinker and the thought. Oh, I'm just going to walk out the room or there this person goes again. I'm just going to shut down. And it enables us to make moves that are in the direction of our values. So, every day we get to make moves that are towards our values. You know, do I choose the healthy option here or the unhealthy option here? Do I have this conversation because it's important or do I avoid it? And so, values are qualities of actions. And I think that a really important part of thriving and success in the broadest way that we can be successful in our lives is by knowing who we are and what we want to bring to the world. Yeah. And so agree with that. It's been a lot of my focus lately over the last few years really. And it's interesting because I've like I'm sure so many other folks who are, you know, listening to this, we've all done values exercises, you know, whether it's in a company or on somewhere online or whatever it may be. Very often at work, either there we see the corporate values or we we've had some sort of training or where it's like, okay, let's do the values. And my challenge with the way that it's very often presented is that so the phrase you just use, I want to have a clean relationship with my loved ones, is not the way that it's presented when you're actually doing a values-based exercise. And you know, usually it's sort of like you choose a single word or you choose three or four or five or six or seven single words. My struggle with that, my frustration has always been that it's not phrased the way you just phrase it, which is that it's not a it's not immediately actionable. You know, a single word in my experience, I'm curious what you think about this, does not guide your daily behaviors and decisions without you having to think constantly, does this align with my values? Because if you said, you know, for example, relationships is, you know, a classic thing that appears on every value survey. But what does that mean? If I say relationships are, you know, something that's massively important to me in my life. Well, when I have an opportunity to take a job, you know, that is double the money but requires the family to move to another place, how does the value of relationship guide that behavior? A lot of my exploration, it sounds like this is a lot of your exploration, too, is how do we make that actionable so that it actually guides decisions and behaviors? And I'm a huge fan of attaching verb phrases to values, which is what you just did. Yes. I think it's this idea that's so critical which is that values are qualities of action. They are qualities of action. And so if we can think about values in that way, it enables us to really start also accessing what are very practical ways that I'm then being discordant. So an example might be and I talk about this a lot in emotional agility. We can talk about values, but ultimately it's when you move your values into habit-based action that those values become freeing for you. So, for example, I mentioned earlier, you know, you you come home from work and your partner comes home from work and you barely even say hello to each other because you're at your computer and they're at their computer and you know, you love the person and you've got a value around that person and about that relationship and yet your habit that you've gotten into is disconnected with that. And so one of the things that I talk about very much is if you can start kind of connecting with this idea that values are qualities of action and that we can use the science of habit change to start creating habits that are values aligned. It can be very powerful. So for example, you know, I talk about this idea of piggybacking where we've all for example got a habit of we brush our teeth hopefully every morning or we've got a a drawer that we put our keys into. We've all got habits that we have every day. So if you can, for example, you know that your most precious time of the day is with your family and with your children at the dinner table and yet you've gotten into a habit of bringing your phone to the dinner table. Piggybacking is where you take a habit that already exists. I put my keys in this particular drawer when I come home from work. and you piggy back a new values aligned habit onto that. So you're now putting your cell phone and your keys into the drawer. So it's these values aligned habits that are just really crucial. Right now I want to share a little bit about today's sponsor with you. Camp GLP. That's short for Good Life Project. You guys have heard me talk about it before. That is our once a year gathering. We literally take over a kids sleepa away camp 90 minutes from New York City. Gorgeous 130 acre place and people from all over the world. Grown-ups come to drop the facade to just be safe to have those conversations that you thought you'd left behind when you were a kid. Those all night things where it just bypasses the BS, the fluffy stuff and says, "Let's just go deep. Let's tell stories. Let's create stories. Let's laugh until our sides split. Let's find new friendships. And at the same time, you get to learn. We have incredible workshops going deep into vitality and connection and contribution and do all those super cool fun things that you did or maybe you never had a chance to do as a kid at summer camp. S'mores, campfires, bonfires, talent show, running around doing everything. Three and a half days where you get to step out of your everyday life. Come play with me, our crew, and a whole bunch of amazing humans. Also, the final $100 early bird discount ends on June 28th. In fact, we may end up selling out all of the remaining spots by then as well. So, if you want to be sure to get in under the wire and pay $100 less, make sure that you grab your spot by June 28th. Even better, go jump on and do it now. We'll be waiting for you with open arms. All right, back to our show. [Music] There's something really powerful in making values-based choices. So often people will say things like, "I've got a values conflict." Okay? I value my career and I value relationships. And so these two things are in conflict because my career is requiring me to spend a lot of time at work and that means that I you know and so what starts to happen is that our values become almost in our minds pitted against each other and the way that I think of values is really that similar to you know facets of a diamond when you look at a diamond sometimes there's a part of the diamond that faces more squarely --- can I then activate those other values that are really important in the context of the fact that I'm traveling a lot. So you know am I activating and making sure that I, you know, have a Skype call with my children every evening? What are things that I can be doing that allow me to be values congrent? So I think it's a really, you know, making choices as a human being. It's hard. It's hard, but it's so powerful because when you make those choices when you recognize in yourself, autonomy is something that's so important to me. This kind of relationship is so important to me. What it does is it it can be freeing. It's tough, but it's also so powerful and so freeing. Yeah. Uh completely on the same page with that. I mean, I really feel like the you know, a good life is an intentional life. And if you got to start from that place, I mean it's this idea of values conflict is fascinating to me also because it's come up in a lot of conversations that I've seen and and there is one conflict that's sort of a twist on what you just shared which has come up so many times in the world I live in which is that I'll be speaking with somebody who feels like one of their you know like deepest values is you know desire to be creative and they know exactly the domain that they want to be creative in and you know maybe they want to be a painter like they are absolutely they're fiercely drawn to painting. But one of their other values is to provide financially for their family and they perceive this as being a fierce conflict because they look at the universe of people who are able to provide for you know their family in the way that they see as honoring that value and then they look at the people who are have chosen a vocation of painting and they don't see how it's possible. So they feel like they just have to walk away from that one value to honor this one other thing rather than sort of the process we were saying where it's like let's go deeper into both and see if there's a way to navigate this. So that's exactly what I would describe there is I would say that this is less about a values conflict and it's more about a goals conflict. Okay. So so let me unpack that in a very simple way. For example, I value you know the example that I was using earlier. I value my family and I value my career. Okay. And it so happens that today I'm in New York speaking with you and am, you know, missing an important event in my child's life. You know, that doesn't mean my values are in conflict. That means that I've got two goals. And as a mortal, and this is a difficult thing for us to recognize as human beings, we cannot be in two places at once. And I know that we know this, but I think sometimes we we beat ourselves up about not being able to be in two places at once. And so what we land up often having is a goals conflict. And one of the things that I talk about in emotional agility, which is hugely practical, is for the example that you give, the person might be in a space where they start seeing things as, you know, an all or nothing. Okay. So, I've either got to do this very vocational process and not provide for my family or I provide for my family and don't do this particular thing. And I think, you know, so often we see change in that way that it's this big thing. I've got to move to a deserted island. I've got to. And so, you know, I think that if we can find if we can recognize our want to goals, not our have to goals in our life, our want to goals, which is a very important distinction that that that we can explore, but if we can find our want to goals, our goals in life that are values aligned. And we can then look for spaces in our world, even in our workplace, even at our desk that allow us to make tiny tweaks where we are using high levels of creativity or using high levels of relationship in that space. Those tiny tweaks we know from a psychological perspective are what actually create real change in our lives. You know, no one usually moves to a space where they just I've done this creative endeavor and now I'm successful. Everyone has had setbacks and failures. I mean I I was I was talking to someone yesterday who was asking me about my career as a psychologist and you know was asking me like say oh like you you know you've got a PhD in emotions and you you know I did my you know you did your postto at Yale and oh my goodness that sounds so interesting and I was like yeah but you know the the more interesting part of it is the time when I dropped out of university where I started getting into speaking how because I got a job after I dropped out of university teaching shortorthhand like literally at a secretarial college teaching shorthand. You know, that's that's the kind of texture that so often people, you know, when they're thinking about the choices that they're making, it's like an eitheror. Whereas if we can create these tiny tweaks and recognize that in the space of our lives, there's space for many setbacks and those setbacks if we don't deny them, but we learn from them and keep on moving in the direction of what's important. It's just so powerful. Yeah. No, it makes a lot of sense. It seems like there's some interesting overlap between what you're talking about and I guess the the idea of job crafting as well. Correct. So one of the things that I talk about is the important process of job crafting. And the idea really of job crafting is how can you make tweaks right to your job. But very importantly again I'm not suggesting job crafting in the context of oh you unhappy in your job. Just pretend your job is fine and craft it. It's not the poly. If you can't if you can't surface this want to goal. If you can't surface this want to goal, a goal that is values aligned in that then it may be time to move on or make a change. So really importantly I think also is in emotional agility it's it's a very practical book. So I talk about showing up. I talk about the idea of stepping out where we can use our emotions as data but not directions. I talk about walking your why, how you can use your values to make real change in your life. And then I've got this chapter around moving on, how we can use the science of habit change to make these like real practical alterations to our mindsets, our motivations, and our habits. And one of the things that I explore is the idea of the difference between have two goals versus want to goals. Have to goals are goals that we set very often through a sense of obligation and shame. So, I have to lose weight because my wife's at me about my beer belly or I have to have a difficult meeting with my staff member or I have to go to another client conversation today or I have to be on dad duty. And so so often what happens is in our lives we create havetos that are a sense of obligation or shame and then we kind of crawl into that story and the impact of that is a sense of resentment and rejection of that thing. You know when you have to not eat chocolate all you want is chocolate. And so have to goals are goals that we very often create even in in trying to change habits but that are sense of obligation and shame. Now have to goals are very very different from want to goals. And want to goals are goals that are goals that are inspired by our values. Who do I want to be in the world? What is important to me? And what's really interesting is have two goals versus want two goals quite literally change the physics of our human motivation. So in a practical way, I'll give you an example. Imagine you are trying to lose weight. And you have a have to goal. You know, I have to lose weight and I'm not allowed to eat chocolate cake. And so I go to the refrigerator and someone has bought chocolate cake and it's there in the refrigerator. I open the refrigerator. Now, a lot of times people will talk about willpower. You know, do I have enough willpower? Don't have enough willpower to resist this chocolate cake. What's really interesting is that willpower actually doesn't really come into it. Your brain processes taste attributes 195 milliseconds sooner than you even know you are making a decision. So before you even get to decide whether you are going to exert willpower or not, your brain has already decided whether or not you are going to eat that chocolate cake. Now what's interesting is when you've got a have to goal, you open that refrigerator and your brain quite literally experiences ramped up temptation. So you open the refrigerator, all you see is the chocolate cake. All you want is the chocolate cake and there is nothing else that you see in that refrigerator. There is no perspective. Now contrast that with a want to goal. A want to goal is where you've got the same goal. I want to lose weight, but it's generated by a sense of true values. And I'll give you an example. I recently worked with a client who became a friend and was a consultant and he traveled a huge amount for work and kept on struggling and struggling with his weight and his wife was at him and his doctor was at him and everyone kept on going on and on about how he needed to lose weight and he could not move to a place where he was able to change his habits. Now, this individual had gotten married fairly late in life and had been unable to have children and had adopted a child from Nicaragua. And this little boy who had been adopted had lived in the most horrific circumstances. For the first three years of his life, this little boy had quite literally been fed through bars in a crib, untouched, unheld. So just fed through their bars in this crib for 3 years. And when my client adopted this little boy, the boy turned out to have profound learning difficulties, but to be an extraordinary artist. And as this little boy grew up, he would often draw these pictures of his experiences and his memories. And one day he drew a very powerful and fairly kind of horrific image of himself. And it was beautiful but troubling. And the image was called the orphan. and he showed it to my client and my client said to him to his son, you know, I can see what you've drawn here and I can see that you've drawn this experience of yourself as an orphan, but why is the child in the image a teenager rather than a baby? And with that, this teenage boy now started sobbing and said to him, "Because I know I am going to be orphaned again. I know that you are going to die because I look at you and I can see you getting more and more unhealthy, slower, less connected with me and I know you are going to die." And my client described how in that moment, the have to goal that he had been carrying for years became a deeply held want to goal. Now, let's examine the physics of motivation. When you have a want to goal and you go to that refrigerator, we know that temptation actually decreases with a want to goal. We know that your chance of generating and activating and sustaining habit change becomes real. We know that you see the chocolate cake but that you see everything else in the world. Now take this idea and apply to any change that we want to make. If we can surface I want to in the conversation that we have been avoiding. You know I recognize that fairness is important to me. How fair is it to my staff member if I don't have this really important and really difficult conversation with them about their performance? How fair is it to the rest of the team? How fair is it to me? And if we are able to think about this difficult thing that we might be avoiding in the context of the values that we want to bring to the conversation, what that does is it completely alters the experience that we have and how we navigate that difficulty. Now that doesn't mean that the conversation will be successful. It doesn't mean that you're going to get what you want. But no one in this world ever achieved anything without some level of discomfort. You know, as a friend of mine said, if you want to climb Mount Everest, you are going to expect that there are some cold, dark, stormy, and lonely days on Everest. This idea of, you know, I want to be stressree. There's no such thing. Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life. And so if we can instead of pushing aside our difficult emotions and instead recognize this that our emotions often beacons of things that we care about that we can look at our emotions with courage, with compassion, which is really important, and with curiosity. Then what we can often do is we can start making choices that are difficult but values aligned because this idea in society of let me get rid of my fear. How can I get rid of my fear? Let me do away with fear. Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is fear walking. Courage is being able to notice your fear. Notice --- t what is the origin of the language change that is the real value that is and that's why when I when I move through this process that's why the first parts of the model are actually about the showing up So, for example, I talk about how if you come home from work every day and you just say, "I'm stressed. I'm stressed. I'm stressed." Um, language matters. There is a world of difference between stressed versus disappointed, stressed versus angry, stressed versus I thought my career would be so different, stressed versus a sense of real loss in my life. And we know the emotions research tells us that people who are able to be more nuanced and differentiated around their emotional experience do better in the longer term. I recently published a couple of articles on the power of writing. So what that teacher did with me circling back so many years ago, why did that writing help me to become resilient? because what it did is it enabled me to show up to integrate label understand where I was at and then in doing so to be able to move forward. So there's this incredible power in the first aspects to it because it's not simply about oh my goodness let me be positive. Just being positive is a sure way to ultimately undermine your capability to shift effectively in your life. Yeah. Which actually brings up something interesting. What's your lens on the language that we use in the context of I am versus I feel. So I've had conversations around the topic of passion lately with some interesting folks. And one of I guess the prevailing ideas in the literature these days is that the the shift between an interest to a true passion whether it's harmonious or obsessive very often is signaled by somebody who when you ask them what do you do you know or you know their answer to a question is not I paint but I am a painter in the context of emotions like talk to this is critical this is critical so we've all had that experience where you say I am angry I am sad, I am being undermined, I am a painter, you know, all of these kind of things. So, we we all do this. What sometimes starts to happen is we sometimes start to crawl into emotions, crawl into stories. Some of the stories were written on mental chalkboards in grade three about who we are. You know, I am unlovable. I am, you know, not destined for. So, what we start to do is we start to in emotional agility. I use the word hooked where our emotions, our thoughts, our stories start to dominate our actions and start to take on too much of our identity in ways that are not helpful. And so, you know, very simply, for example, if someone says something like I am stressed or I am anxious, what they are saying is I am all of me, 100% of me is stressed. And so the second part of my model is stepping out, showing up, stepping out, walking your why, moving on. The stepping out part is if we can start to notice our emotions, our feelings, our thoughts, our stories as emotions, thoughts, stories, feelings. Who's in charge here? The thinker or the thought? The emotion or me, the person who can experience many different emotions. So very simply if I'm sitting in a meeting and I'm saying I am being undermined that starts to become the fullness of my reality. Yeah. It's the identity. It's the identity. Whereas if we can say I'm noticing very simple strategy but I'm noticing the feeling of being undermined. I'm noticing the urge to shut down. I'm noticing the thought that I'm a fraud. Yeah. Then it's examinable. Then what we do is we start it's examinable and what we started to the psychological term for this is develop a meta view where we've all had this you know you phone a customer service agent and they've gotten your bill wrong for the 3,000th time and you are in a rage and as you start on the phone telling this person why you so angry with them that little voice goes off inside your head that says if you carry on in this the person will conveniently drop your call or lose your bill. So what you experience is this feeling of being able to feel emotions but also being able to observe them develop this meta view and this is the absolute underpinning of perspective taking of empathy. It is one of the most critical skills that we can give our children and in emotional agility. I've got an entire chapter on these skills in children because when your child comes home from school and says no one would play with me and what we do is we say oh don't worry I'll play with you and we take away that emotional capability for them to learn this important thing which is that emotions pass that I can notice that I had an emotion today and that that emotion passes and so this is called a meta view the ability to experience an emotion but also to be able to observe And I talk about very simple strategies that enable us to do this in very powerful ways. My go-to strategy for this or my go-to not strategy really my go-to daily practice which is not an interventionbased practice but for me has built over time is is I have a daily mindfulness practice. So that's one of the things that for me has and it we've used similar language. I've always described it as meta awareness. It's like your awareness of your awareness or your awareness of your attention at a given moment in time. And that's the thing that lets me pull back. What I found is that my daily mindfulness practice has over time deepened my ability to kind of zoom the lens out and look down on a particular situation, say what's really going on here and process it differently and and lean into things or or lean out or let go of things where and ultimately what you're describing there is the capability then of being an agile flexible person who is able to respond effectively to the world. So yeah, those kind you know practices around I'm noticing emotion, I'm noticing my thoughts that development of meta awareness. I talk about even just this idea of labeling your emotion effectively the power of that trying to discern the function of the emotion. That's interesting which is such an interesting idea. It's like what is this emotion buying me? You know what is this emotion getting me? Because sometimes our fear and then the avoidance that we attach to our fear gets us something like it gets us safety. It gets us off the hook but it also gets us a lack of growth in our lives. And then also other very practical strategies. I mean one of the things that I spoke about actually recently on a NPR here and now interview is this third person perspective taking which is we all talk to ourselves you know we all we all have some kind of inner language in a dialogue very often that inner language is oh what an idiot okay I'm so stupid one of the things I I explore in emotional agility is the need for self-compassion and how self-compassion actually helps us to be uh more capable and and enables our motivation So often self-compassion is thought of as a sign of weakness or laziness. Whereas the research shows the opposite. But a simple strategy with within this self-t talk is third person. You struggling in a situation. You struggling in a relationship. You you've got a difficult conversation you need to have or you feeling stuck at work. You know our dayto-day reality of our experiences. And so often when we are feeling stuck, we get very immersed in that experience and so we struggle to have that observer view. So even very simply, if I was going to ask the wisest person in the world what their advice would be to me about the situation, what would it be? You know, LeBron talks about using this when he was making difficult decisions in his life about which team he should play for. So this idea of, you know, if I was going to ask the wisest person, what would that be? I use this sometimes with my child when my son comes home from school and he says to me, "This and this and this happened, you know, and I'm so upset about it is sometimes just but again within the context of the child being seen, right? If there was a fly on the wall at the school and I was interviewing the fly, what would the fly tell me?" And sometimes we have this really kind of cute and cool conversation about him now pretending to be the fly. But what he's really starting to do here is engage in an alternative perspective. So the situation that seems so difficult of this person said such and such to me or this is a very difficult situation. Now what we're starting to do is we're starting to broaden our perspective. We're starting to see the other players involved. what their intentions were or maybe weren't. And it's a healthy way of starting to move from what is the world as I'm seeing it to what is a broader perspective of the world? What is the context? And how can I be effective in that context? Makes a lot of sense. And it also sort of, you know, comes back to this idea of the full sweep of emotions is actually good. Yeah, that's exactly that's so often sadness and anger are seen as being bad emotions. So, circling back to what we were talking about earlier, the research just doesn't support that our emotions have evolved to help us as a species. And so if we can end this struggle and connect with the fullness of our emotional experience and be willing willing to experience difficulty because ultimately we actually often don't get to choose. So we can kind of suffer into that difficulty or we can recognize that gee I'm feeling angry now or gee I'm suffering now. And that's that can be difficult because sometimes we've grown up in a household that tells us, you know, when you're angry, go to your room and come out when you've got a smile on your face. In in psychology, we call this a display rule where we have display rules around what emotion it's okay to show or not show. And these display rules are cultivated often in society, in our culture, in our families. So we can often get into difficult relationships with high emotions instead of being able to embrace the fullness of emotional experience because ultimately that enables us to embrace life. Yeah. Love that. So let's come full circle. The name of this is good life project. So if I offer that phrase out to you to live a good life, what comes up? So for me what comes up is moving into a space with yourself where you end struggle with yourself where you engage with yourself in a way that is kind and curious and where you are able to connect with the wanttos in your life and then look for practical real ways to bring that to greater levels of fruition. because ultimately this way we deal with our inner world impacts on every aspect of how we love, live, parent and lead. Thank you. Thank you so much. Just one thing that I wanted to ask just in case your your listeners are interested is I've got a quiz. I don't know if that would would people be interested in that. Yeah, I'll certainly we'll link to that. Great. It's not susand.com/learn and 50,000 people have taken it and it's a 5minute emotional agility quiz that a lot of people awesome have found useful. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If the stories and ideas in any way moved you, I would so appreciate if you would take just a few extra seconds for two quick things. One, if it's touched you in some way, if there's some idea or moment in the story or in the conversation that you really feel like you would share with somebody else that it would make a difference in somebody else's life, take a moment and whatever app you're using, just share this episode with somebody who you think it'll make a difference for. Email it if that's the easiest thing, whatever is easiest for you. And then, of course, if you're compelled, subscribe so that you can stay a part of this continuing experience. My greatest hope with this podcast is not just to produce moments um and share stories and ideas that impact one person listening, but to let it create a conversation, to let it serve as a catalyst for the elevation of all of us together collectively because that's how we rise. When stories and ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change happens. And I would love to invite you to participate on that level. Thank you so much as always for your intention, for your attention, for your heart. And um I wish you only the best. I'm Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project. [Music] And just a quick reminder as you head out into the world, we would love to see you. I would love to see you at Camp GLP. We are actually um running out of spots and the final price discount, $100 early bird discount ends June 28th. So, be sure to check it out and grab your spot. You can find more information at goodlifepro.com/camp or just click the link in the show notes now.