A Harvard Psychologist Teaches Us How to Increase Our Emotional Intelligence

[Music] We live if you like in a world that seems to value silver linings and relentless positivity. And so in that world, no one knew what was going on inside of me and I didn't think that anyone wanted to know. And I was struggling as so many young girls do. I was dealing with my sense of lack of control and turmoil by using food to numb my pain for me that took the form of binging and purging. Really refusing to accept the full weight of my grief. Welcome to Impostors, the show where I talk to world-class execs, athletes and entertainers about their personal challenges and how overcoming those challenges has shaped their careers and lives for the better. I'm your host Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. My guest today is Susan David. Susan is a psychologist, author and co-founder of the Harvard Medical Affiliate, the Institute of Coaching. She's been recognized as one of the world's most influential management thinkers and in 2016 her book, Emotional Agility, was a number one Wall Street Journal bestseller. Her 2017 TED Talk, The Gift and Power of Emotional Courage, has been viewed more than 10 million times and Susan continues to be a renowned voice in the field of psychology. Perhaps it's no surprise that how Susan came to the field of emotions research was an early life experience with a trauma of her own. When she was just 15 years old, Susan lost her father to terminal cancer. But what she has done since exploring her own grief by diving into the study of psychology and what she has uncovered about the signs of emotional resilience has incredibly hopeful and inspiring implications for the rest of us, which I am so excited to share with you today. My full conversation with Susan David right after this quick break. Susan David, thank you so much for joining Impostors. Thank you. I'm delighted to be with you today. So we're obviously going to talk a ton about emotional agility, how one navigates their emotions, how one sits with their emotions, identifies them. But I want to start with the beginning. How did you find interest in this space and how has your life journey led to the moment we're in now? You know, it's a kind of weird thing to say, well, how many emotions researchers? It's like what took you to be an emotions researcher? So I think it's a beautiful question. I think that two main threads of my journey. Firstly, I live in Boston right now, but I grew up as a white South African in the white suburbs of a part of South Africa. And it was very much Alexa country, a community that was committed to denial, denial of emotions, denial of people's pain and people's experience. And so in growing up, that was very much a backdrop for me, the seeing the pain that was going on as a child and yet in the community, almost an unwillingness to speak to that pain. So that was the first experience. And then the second one which overlaid on that is when I was around 15 years old, my father, who was 42 at the time, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And I recall my mother coming to me and saying to me one day before I went to school to go and say goodbye to my father, because we knew at some deep level that my father was going to die that day. And so I remember putting my backpack down, going and saying goodbye to my father, he was lying in his bed. His eyes were closed, he had been brought home to die. And I had such a profound experience, which was the experience of him having his eyes closed and really an extraordinary pain. And yet there was a feeling of community and a feeling of me seeing him and him seeing me and aware that was just really very comforting. And that experience then against the backdrop of unseeing, of denial becomes almost the foil of my work. Because I think the essence of my work, when we get away from the research and the data and the pragmatic strategies, the essence of my work is really about asking a key question, which is what does it take in the way we see ourselves as human beings, our thoughts, our emotions and our stories that help us to be healthy and whole in an extremely complex world. Because Alex, as it turns out, how we deal with our inner lives, our inner worlds, drives everything. It drives how we love, how we live, how we parent, how we lead our health behaviors, and ultimately our feelings of a successful meaningful life. There's so much there. One thing that I'd love to understand is obviously the backdrop of this whole conversation is around emotional agility, a topic that you have spent thousands of hours thinking about, speaking about, writing about. But I would love to know in the preceding days and weeks after your father passed away, would you say at that point in time you were able to demonstrate emotional agility? What was your emotional state after that happened? Well, my father had died. I was 15. My mother was raising three children, grieving the love of her life. My father had not been able to keep his small business going during his illness and the creditors were literally knocking. And I was spiraling down fast. And what was extraordinary to me in retrospect is that on the face of it, no one would have guessed that I was spiraling. I went to school on the Monday, two days after my dad died. My mother had wanted to keep things normal. So I went and progressed with my studies and the May went into July, into September to November. I went about with my usual smile. I didn't drop a single grade. And we live, if you like, in a world that seems to value silver linings and relentless positivity. And so in that world, no one knew what was going on inside of me. And I didn't think that anyone wanted to know. I was dealing with my sense of lack of control and turmoil by using food to numb my pain. For me, that took the form of binging and purging. And so for many months, I went on like that. And one day, I had such a revolutionary experience. I went into school one day. There was an English teacher. She had also had her father die when she was young. She had some sense of what I was going through. And she did not buy into my story of triumph over pain. She handed out these notebooks to the class. And she had this invitation to the class that is seared in my mind. She said, right, tell the truth. Right like no one is reading. She invited us to keep journals. And so Alex began a secret silent correspondence with this teacher where every day I would write about my loss and my pain and my regret and all of the things that were going on for me and my life. And this remarkable teacher would write back to me. And for many months, I had this correspondence with my teacher where I would write in this journal. And she would write back to me. And the reason that this experience was revolutionary for me was two levels. Firstly, the personal experience, the experience of turning towards myself as opposed to away from myself. Again, the world very often invites us to turn away from ourselves. Be positive. Yes, there might be a pandemic, but look for the silver lining. We become so focused on people as the doing rather than as the being. And so it was revolutionary for me firstly because it was a turning towards myself in many ways that echoed what my father had done for me. It was also revolutionary for me because I started to realise that so many of the narratives that we have in our society, things like just be positive. You need to think positive thoughts because that will manifest your reality. And if you think so-called negative thoughts, there's something wrong with you and you are somehow to blame for your circumstances, I started to recognise that so many of those narratives were broken and to a very very, very real extent, they were leading us as a culture to be less resilient and less whole than if we somehow did the difficult work of engaging with that experience. And it feels tough on the surface to describe this because it's almost like why would going to difficult emotions make you more resilient versus being positive, forced false positivity make you less resilient and yet the research supports exactly this. That when we force ourselves beyond our difficult emotional experiences, we may think that we're doing it because we're just being strong, we're just getting on with it, but over time we are much more likely to experience lower levels of mental health, burnout and there is a real cost to our relationships. I'd love to know at what point in your journey as a professional, did you get to this kind of thesis around emotional agility, what it was, the value of it to, to the point at which you really started speaking about it publicly. Yeah, no one's ever asked me that question. I firstly, you know, what I talk about the revolution for me, which is not only this personal revolution, but also this real call to challenge about the narratives that we were experiencing and that are, as I've mentioned, invasive in our communities. And this idea that when we have internal pain that is unprocessed, that internal pain always comes out and the people that pay the price are, we do, we pay the price, our children pay the price, our communities pay the price as we turn our back on the world. So I started to gradually have this recognition about the narrative versus the reality of emotional experience. It became more profound for me in a number of ways. Firstly, I was studying psychology. I was doing a master's degree. I decided that I wanted to do a PhD in the area of emotions research. And it was near impossible for me to find someone in a psychology department who would advise me on emotions research because emotions even at that time and I'm not talking that long ago, were seen as being weak, irrational, maladaptive, disorganizing. It was this idea that if you just got your thinking straight or if you could measure your thinking and your behaviors, everything else would follow suit. So emotions even at that time were seen as basically not worthy of study, which is so remarkable given that they are the essence of what makes us human. So that was my first call to action in a sense of like going, there is something very broken in the way we see emotional experience. The second was me going to various conferences where now people had started to talk about emotion, but there was always this idea that the emotions that we're talking about are happy. Let's chase happiness, what does happiness look like? Let's chase joy, let's chase awe. And I was drawn a little bit to at that point, the work of Charles Darwin, you know, Charles Darwin described this idea that emotions are actually functional, that emotions aren't these weak, fluffy, bad things, that when you experience a difficulty motion, that difficulty motion is helping you to adapt, that when you in a job where you board and you are feeling the weight of that boredom, what is that boredom telling you that boredom is signposting, value, the boredom is signposting that you value learning and growth and you don't have enough of it. We don't get to bring about meaningful change in the world without the experience of anger. And so I would go to these conferences where people would talk about the positive emotions and the negative emotions, with this idea that the good emotions were the ones that felt good and the negative emotions were bad. And at that point, I was like really digging into the research that was showing actually then people who feel emotions that are considered bad are more likely to suppress those emotions, to push them aside, that then shows up in low levels of mental health. And so at a certain point, I just was bringing these threads together and saying there is something inhuman and profoundly wrong in the way we are navigating and seeing the essence of our humanity. I think it's worth pausing for a moment to appreciate what Susan is saying here. This idea of toxic positivity is so pervasive in our culture that when we're faced with grief, depression, frustration or any other negative emotion, we are so frequently encouraged to get over it and move on. But I think what Susan is saying here is so on point. What good has ever come from someone suppressing a difficult emotion? What if instead we examine them more scientifically and wondered why am I feeling this way? What is this anger or sadness telling me? We're going to take a quick break here, but when we come back, we'll get into what Susan's concept of emotional agility really means, how we can cultivate it in our own lives, and a breakdown of my own experience with the opposite of emotional agility, emotional rigidity. Stay with us. And we're back. Before the break, Susan described the events in her upbringing that drew her to emotions research and how the philosophy of simply suppressing and moving on from difficult emotions is toxic. So naturally, what I wanted to know next was what is the solution to this problem of emotional suppression for our listeners that haven't read your book, emotional agility, or listen to your TED Talk that now has millions of views. What is emotional agility and also provide distinction between emotional agility and emotional rigidity? So emotional agility, if I'm going to give a very baseline definition of emotional agility, emotional agility is really about what it takes in the experience of ourselves. Our everyday thoughts, our emotions and our stories, our internal experience, it's the ability to be with those experiences in ways that are healthy. So that's the very short definition. The longer definition is that emotional agility is the ability to be with our difficult thoughts. The thought might be something like, I'm not good enough, or there's no point in trying, an emotion might be an emotional experience like stress or grief, anxiety, sadness, anger, or story. A story might be a story that was written on our mental chalkboard when we were five years old, a story about whether we creative or worthy. And emotional agility is the ability to be with those in ways that are compassionate, in a way that's curious because our difficulty emotions often signpost the things that we care about, our needs, our wants and our values. And so if instead of looking at it and going, oh, I'm stressed, I need to resign my job, but we say, I'm stressed, what is that stress telling me about my needs? We have more capacity to move towards those needs. And then lastly, it's the ability to be with those thoughts and emotions and stories with courage. It's difficult to face into a job that's not working out, a relationship that's not working out, an experience in which you feel exhausted or unseen. And it takes courage to move towards your values. It takes courage to move towards crafting a life that you want. It takes courage to build a business and to go through all of the setbacks and strains. But when that courage is values connected and values aligned, that is a very powerful and healthy place to be. So the long definition, emotional agility is the ability to be with ourselves, our thoughts, our emotions and our stories in ways that are compassionate, curious and involve the courage to take values connected steps. And then just for people to be able to contrast, what is emotional rigidity and how does that show up? What does that look like? So emotional rigidity is the idea that we do have these everyday thoughts, emotions and experiences. And while the narrative will tell us that you're not allowed to have them, that if you have bad thoughts, there's something wrong with you or you're going to manifest a bad reality or that you're being negative, the truth is that these thoughts, emotions and stories are completely normal, which is why we need to be compassionate towards them. And in being normal, it still doesn't mean that they get to call the shots. It still doesn't mean that we treat every emotion that we have as a fact. You might have the thought, as an example, the thought might be, "I'm not good enough." And that thought might be a thought that is born of the truth of your experience. But it's not a fact in that just because you had the thought, "I'm not good enough," doesn't mean you're not good enough. And so, emotional rigidity is when we have these normal everyday thoughts, emotions and stories. And instead of holding them lightly and curiously and compassionately, we start treating them as fact and they start to drive our action. So I'll give you some examples of what this might look like. An example might be being undermined in this meeting, so I'm just going to not contribute. My husband's starting in on the finances and I find it uncomfortable. I'm going to leave the room. I would love to put my hand up for this job, but I'm not going to get it. Therefore, I'm not even going to try. So what we're doing in all of these circumstances is we've got a fusion between the thought, the emotion, the story that takes us away from our values rather than towards our values. So at risk of embarrassment, we're going to use me as the example right now. So, and this is a very real example about just over a year ago, I stepped out of the CEO role at our company and moved into a chairman role. And I would say the preceding six months after making that move were incredibly emotionally difficult for me. And I would say largely because I had constant self-defeating beliefs. And so for, you know, I would say for six months, I very much got to a point of my identity was so I would say at risk because I'd identified as an entrepreneur for the last seven years. But all of a sudden, my belief to myself was that I don't have what it takes to be an entrepreneur or to build a business past a certain point. Because I've proven to myself, I'm not capable of that. I would assume given kind of the two frameworks he provided, I was rather emotionally rigid in that experience. Yeah, well, I've got a lot that I could say about that because I think it evokes a number of things. Firstly, I think that what very often happens is we become fused in the same way that I was describing earlier where we become fused with thoughts, emotions and stories, often we become fused with identity. And what you describe is actually not unusual. And I'll give you an example of the way that I've come across this before, which is someone might say, I'm a doctor, I'm a physician, you know, my job is all about caring for other people. This is what I do. This is my job. This is my job. And then something happens, the person may have a health issue or the person is made redundant. And suddenly this whole identity that has become all-encompassing for the person is no longer. And the person feels completely untethered from themselves. So now it's not to say you aren't an entrepreneur or you aren't a physician, it's just that if we think about the truth of our experience, I am a psychologist, but I am also apparent and a wife and a loved one and a daughter and a creative and there's a child in me and there's a 75-year-old in me. And there's just so much in me that's more than that identity. And yet when we start to fuse with that identity, we start to create a prison where by our external and internal worth are only validated by how well we do or don't do in that particular role. So it sounds like in many ways that's something that you started to experience. It's enlightening to hear a psychological explanation for exactly why my experience of stepping down as Morning Brew CEO was so challenging. Throughout my career as an entrepreneur, I've been conscious of the fact that when I'm excited about what I'm building, it's easy for me to become excited by and accustomed to the external validation. Your business is growing, people are consuming your product, but before you know it, this validation can become something like a need and the only source of confirmation for your identity. This is not uncommon. I mean we see this for example, if we think about our entire school structure and educational structure is centered around grades and achievements and externalities, being the litmus of whether you are worthy or not. And we see this clinically as well. You know, I've worked with many people who have been praised and praised and praised for their appearance, that then as they get older and maybe lose their beauty completely have a depleted sense of self-worth. And I think, Alex, this is why so much of my work is grounded on this idea of values. Because if we think about success being whether I did or didn't achieve this particular metric of myself as CEO, then of course everything's going to be grounded in that external metric. But there are other metrics that I think are worth bringing to the surface and that I think are part and parcel of every single one of us. So we get stuck in these identities, we get stuck in this kind of IAM experience this fusion. And yet when we spend a bit of time thinking about like what are some of the values that are important to me? Because if you think about your values, your value of creativity, your value of learning, then that invitation also brings with it curiosity. It means that you don't need to be quote unquote successful at everything you do. There's so much freedom that comes from that. And one thing that maybe of help just in this conversation as context is you go to a restaurant and you see a little child of 18 months old in that restaurant with its parents or caregivers and it's gorgeous. And the child does something really remarkable. The child gets off from its little chair and its little stubby legs and what does it do? It runs away from the parents or caregivers because it's exploring the restaurant. And then what is the child do? The child turns around, looks back, sees that the parents or caregivers are still there and what is the child do at that point? It runs away even more. So what you start seeing is that the child's knowledge that the parents or caregivers if something goes wrong will be willing and able to step in and help. It's that internal knowledge that enables the child quite literally to grow, explore, be curious, take risks, learn. I love that. Be joyful. It's beautiful. And John Balbee is the psychologist who described that really what the parents are doing for the child is they are providing a secure base for the child and it's that secure base that enables growth and learning. And so when we take this same idea and return it to the self, then what we are doing is we're saying, I've got my own back. I care for myself. I love myself. I'm kind to myself. I'm compassionate to myself. I'm curious. I'm learning and things may go wrong. I may not be successful in that role, but it doesn't mean that I am a failure. I've got my own back and it's that knowledge that you've got your own back that will allow you will allow everyone to pick themselves up and rethread the experience because it's it's born from a joy of life rather than a prison of some metric of supposed success. For those who are listening and whether it's the first time or not the first time that they've been introduced to this concept of emotional agility and you know, they're thinking to themselves, you know, Susan, this sounds great in theory. This idea of being more compassionate to the emotions you feel that they provide amazing information and data that can lead to better decisions in life. I get it conceptually. Where do I start? What is your answer to them? Oh, I've got many, but I will give a couple. The first is we have display rules. As I've mentioned already in our society that tells us what we should or shouldn't feel. And one of the first difficulties that we get into is when we start hustling with ourselves in our own minds as to whether a feeling is allowed or not allowed. So we start saying things like, I'm really struggling in my job, but at least I've got a job, you know, I'm better off than most people. And as soon as we start doing this, we start engaging in unclean emotional experiences. So in psychology, we often talk about type one emotions and type two and type one is you feel what you've feeling, you feeling sad, you feeling happy, you feeling angry. Type 2 is when you start saying, "I'm unhappy about the fact that I'm unhappy. I'm sad about the fact that I'm sad. Everyone else around me is more happy. I should be more happy." So the first aspect of emotional agility is gentle acceptance. Gentle acceptance is trying to end the struggle with whether you are allowed to feel what you feel, but literally just dropping the rope. You feel what you feel. And that sounds obvious and aware, but it is as it's called. It's obvious, but it's hard. It's hard. It's really hard, but there is something so often we see this. Someone feels anxious and then they say, "I'm anxious about the fact that I'm anxious. I shouldn't be anxious. And now I'm anxious and now I can't sleep and I'm anxious because I can't sleep." And we get into these circular experiences. And so when we start engaging with, "I am anxious," and what I'm going through right now is hard. There is something so powerful in gentle acceptance. Gentle acceptance is not passive resignation. It's not saying, "Oh, I feel anxious. There's nothing I can ever do about it." I feel sad. It's gentle acceptance. It's holding the self with compassion. So that is the first. Second is often when we feel difficult emotions, what we do is we either push them aside, and it's related to what I just spoke about or we get stuck in them. And there are a couple of strategies that help us to move beyond emotions in a very, very powerful way. And Alex, I think one of the great tragedies of the world right now, as well as one of the great opportunities of the world right now is that if you think about education, we taught math, we taught science, but we never taught this stuff. If we think about organizations, everything that ever undoes an organization is about how people feel, the culture, how they feel about leadership. It's all about these skills, and yet there is no teaching around that. Yeah, it's crazy. It's profoundly ridiculous. It's like something I really feel very passionate about. So let's think about some of these strategies. Okay, so let's go to an example. Someone is listening right now and their person is feeling stressed. One of the most common things we do when we think about our emotions is we think in big broad brushstroke terms. So we'll say something like, "I feel stressed, I feel overwhelmed." Okay, so here's a strategy and the strategy is thinking about what is in psychological terms called emotion granularity. Any emotion granularity what you're doing is you are, instead of saying, "I'm stressed, I'm stressed, I'm stressed," your body, your psychology, doesn't know what to do with stress. So when we instead say, "I'm calling this thing stressed, but what are one or two other options?" What is it that I'm really feeling here? We recognize that there's a world of difference between stress and disappointment. Stress and feeling unsupported. Stress and that knowing, knowing feeling that you're in the wrong job or the wrong career. When we label our emotions more accurately, it literally moves us from a place of feeling immobilized by stress into a place of, "Oh, actually I'm feeling disappointed." And it starts engaging what is called the readiness potential in our brains. The part of our brains that starts saying, "What do I need to do? I'm feeling disappointed. Oh, I need to have a conversation." Or, "I'm feeling unsupported. How can I get more support?" So that simple act of going into emotions compassionately and labeling the emotion accurately actually helps us to move beyond the emotion into outcomes and action that is meaningful in our lives. This concept of using language to help us identify and therefore cope more productively with our emotions is reminiscent of multiple science-back strategies for dealing with mental health. For instance, if you're an anxious person, naming your anxiety is a good practice to help you distance yourself a bit from the experience of anxiety. And Susan says it's extremely important for us to remember the power of language. Words met up when it comes to emotions and so often we'll say things like, "I am sad. I am angry." And if you think about that language, that is fusion language. "I am all of me. 100% of me is sad." But no, our emotions are part of us. But they aren't all of us. So when you say something like, "I am angry," there's no space for wisdom. There's no space for values. There's no space for the other person in the conversation. There's to use that beautiful Victor Frankl, that sentiment, that idea between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space is our power to choose. And it's in that choice that lies our growth and our freedom. When we start engaging with compassion, when we start engaging with curiosity, what is this emotion telling me? When we start engaging with granularity, what are you starting to make sure it creates space so that you can think about, "Oh, who is this person? What are their needs? What are my values here? How do I bring these values forward?" So one other thing that gets raised for me that I've sort of talking about is this idea of when we say, "I am," there's no space for anything else. And it's almost like the emotion is a cloud in the sky and you have become the cloud. You are the sad cloud. You are the angry cloud. And so another way we start creating space is by just noticing our thoughts, our feelings and our stories for what they are. To your example, "Oh, that's my, I'm never going to be a good enough CEO story." Oh, I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. When we start just noticing our thoughts, our emotions and our stories for what they are, which is their thoughts, emotions and stories, not fact. Then what you're starting is you start creating space for you to say, "That's my story. Who do I want to be right now? What action do I want to move towards? What value is important?" And so what you're starting is you start moving from this idea that you are the emotion, you are the cloud into recognizing that you are not the cloud. You are the sky. You are beautiful and capacious and capable enough to have all of your difficult emotions and messy stories and still choose to be who you want to be in the world. I think I'm going to have to change the background on my phone to Sky and Cloud as a constant reminder of that amazing analogy. Susan David, this has been so incredibly valuable. It's amazing to have gotten to have this conversation with you. So thank you so much for joining in Poster's. Thank you so much for all you do. I appreciate it. I find Susan David's research on emotional agility to be so profoundly important, not only because it's key for helping us to embrace our own humanity, but also because while these solutions are relatively simple to implement, they are so easy for us to miss. It can be so natural for us to fall into a funk or a depression or a fit of rage and forget that these emotions aren't actually who we are. But if we take a moment to slow down, notice how we're feeling and be curious about why it is that we may be feeling a particular way without any judgment. I think we stand the chance to improve ourselves and our behavior in amazing ways. Now in Poster's listeners, we need your help. We would love to hear from you on how the conversations on impostors have impacted your life. How does this show help you in your career or your personal life? Are there any particular guests or episodes that have stood out to you? Tell me the stuff that you haven't liked where you want the show to get better. Our goal is simple. We want to make this as valuable as humanly possible and make the show worthy of your time. So shoot me an email at [email protected] and I'll get back to you as soon as possible. Imposter's is a production of Morning Brew. Our senior producer is Vishnu Valbonani and Michaela Heck is our producer. Brian Henry is our executive producer and AB Silver is our booking producer. Our sound engineers are Dan Bausa and Rosemary Minkler. Greg Jacobs is our video producer and Sarah Singer is our VP of multimedia. Our theme song is by the mysterious break master cylinder. Original music in this episode is by Rosemary Minkler.