A few months ago, I finished reading Emotional Agility by Susan David.  I’m a bit of a productivity/self-help nut, and the byline in the title caught my attention – “get unstuck, embrace change, and thrive in work and life.”  Generally speaking, I’m incredibly satistied in my work and profession, but I’m always trying to make sure that I don’t calcify when it comes to learning new things and embracing opportunities for reflection and growth.  Specifically, staying flexible is a real priority for me.  I don’t just want to endure or survive change, I want to embrace change, just like the title of the book says.  

So, I picked up the book and started reading.  The general framework for developing emotional agility, according to David, is comprised of four key elements: 1) show up, 2) step out, 3) walk your why, and 4) move on.  By showing up, we commit to honestly describe and confront our emotions and behaviors.  Then, when we commit to step out, we develop the ability to get outside of ourselves and try to look at our emotions and behaviors with a more detached, objective lens.  Walking your why means staying connected to core values and goals as we analyze our emotions, and then determine whether our daily choices are, in fact, aligned with those values.  Finally, we move on, or commit to keep moving forward.  This can take the form of continuous improvement, slowly tweaking and iterating our way towards better day by day and minute by minute decisions.  Or, sometimes we take a more risky crack at new behaviors, followed by time to allow ourselves to integrate our new actions and practices into our regular routines and ways of working.  

In other words, the book begins with a strong invitation to examine ourselves and our emotional routines.  But the main metaphor and contribution of the book, I believe, is what comes next.   David introduces us to the idea of “the hook.”  That’s not a new term.  As educators, many of us were trained in the Essential Elements of Instruction and the need to start off the daily lesson with a “hook” to get students’ attention and launch into the learning of the day.  In the case of Emotional Agility, “the hook” has a more sinister connotation.  “The hook” here refers to “a self-defeating emotion, thought, or behavior.”  These hooks are thoughts or reactions that drag us down, and are embedded within the scripts that are running in our heads; scripts that predictably take us to emotional places that we don’t necessarily want to be.  The agility part comes when we learn to unhook ourselves and engage in the 4 practices described earlier – to show up, step out, walk your why, and then move on.  Instead of running our scripts on autopilot, we interrupt the emotional algorythym to give ourselves time to objectively analyze our emotional reaction and then deliberately make adjustments that reflect our values and bigger purposes.  It sounds like a straightforward recipe, and would be, if we weren’t talking about emotions.  

My favorite chapter comes towards the end of the book, when David talks at length about how you can teach your children to develop their emotional agility.  As a father of six, I found tips for raising emotionally agile kids to be one of the book’s most practical contributions.   She uses ideas like “fear-walking” and “taking the plunge” to reinforce the idea that parents should help kids acknowledge their fears and identify their emotions, but then to also be skeptical and interrogate those emotions.  She encourages parents to lead by example by articulating the thought routines they use to question their emotional reactions and to craft productive responses.  She also cautions about the overuse of external rewards and stimuli in shaping the behavior of children, worrying that such mechanisms can sometimes bring about the desired behaviors but not the corresponding thought processes that will lead to more productive responses in the future.  

Overall, the book is a strong invitation towards greater self-awareness, and then, self-mastery.  Rather than allowing our emotions and fears to drive our reactions on auto-pilot, our emotional agility is measured by our ability to interrupt our natural reactions and more deliberately and productively rewire ourselves to act in accordance with our values and goals.