Why Emotional Agility is So Important
Written by Melissa Kessler, MA, PCC
I have been working through the grief over my dog’s passing for the past several weeks, and Susan David’s book Emotional Agility has been tremendously helpful. She talks about three different ways we can handle emotions.
The first is bottling, where we push our emotions down, trying to ignore them and get on with it. The problem with bottling is that suppressed emotions cause health problems. If you get stuck in an unexpressed negative emotion and don’t move through it, it stays in your body and causes physical problems and disease. In addition, these buried emotions eventually resurface usually with surprising intensity and at inappropriate times.
The second is brooding, where we stew in misery, reliving the painful emotions over and over. Brooding involves ruminating where we get stuck in a negative emotion loop rather than moving through it. Brooding holds us back from living fully in the present moment and keeps us stuck in the past.
The third is emotional agility, where we are present and have an open heart to our emotions, noticing what comes up in a curious and accepting manner. Emotional agility has been key for me. When I feel sad about my loss (usually several times throughout the day), I just let myself feel it, and then let it pass rather than pushing it away or stewing in it.
Susan David also talks about the importance of writing to help express what we are feeling, learn from it, and move forward. The idea is to get the thoughts out of our heads and onto a page, so we can step out of the experience and gain some perspective on it. This has been very helpful to me as well. Writing not only about the experience of loss, but also about all the memories of Dexter I am grateful for and want to hold onto has reduced my fear of forgetting something about him. Since I have a journal of these memories, as well as pictures and videos, his memory lives on, so I don’t need to expend energy ruminating.
Being aware of our emotions, accepting them, feeling them fully, and consciously choosing our response to them makes us better able to handle life’s ups and downs and builds our resilience. My hope is that we can all strengthen our emotional agility and increase our resilience to live our lives more fully.
“Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.” – Susan David, PhD
“Emotions are data; they are not directives.” – Susan David, PhD
“When we show up fully, with awareness and acceptance, even the worst demons usually back down. Simply.” – Susan David, PhD
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