Susan David, Ph.D On The Power of Emotional Agility & Why Discomfort Is The Price Of Admission To A Meaningful Life

The way we navigate our inner world – our everyday thoughts, emotions, and self-stories – is the single most important determinant of our life success. It drives our actions, careers, relationships, happiness, health; everything. For example: Do we let our self-doubts, failings, shame, fear, or anger hold us back? Can we be determined, persevering toward key life goals, but just as importantly, have the insight and courage to recognize when these goals are not serving us, and adapt? According to this week's guest, the key to successfully navigating our inner world isn't immunizing ourselves against stress and setbacks. And it doesn't involve ignoring uncomfortable feelings. Instead, it's developing something called emotional agility – the teachable ability to confront difficult emotions, gain critical self-insight from these feelings, and ultimately use this newfound awareness to adaptively align our values with our actions and make changes to bring the best of ourselves forward. A pioneer in her field, Susan David, Ph. D is an award-winning psychologist on faculty at Harvard Medical School, CEO of Evidence Based Psychology and co-founder of the Institute of Coaching (an affiliate of Harvard Medical School). She also serves on the Scientific Advisory Boards of both Thrive Global and Virgin Pulse. In addition, Susan is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life*. Based on a concept Harvard Business Review heralded as a Management Idea of the Year, it's a powerful roadmap for real behavioral change — a new way of acting that will help you to reincorporate your most troubling feelings as a source of energy and creativity, and live your most successful life whoever you are and whatever you face. Susan is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. She is a sought-after speaker and consultant, with clients that include the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, Google, Microsoft, NASDAQ, and many others. If you are new to Susan, start with her moving TED Talk, The Gift and Power of Emotional Courage. A viral sensation and the inspiration for me seeking her out for the podcast, it's accumulated almost 2 million views in the month since it's online publication. This is a conversation about Susan’s life growing up in a South Africa divided by Apartheid, and how this experience informs her work today. It’s about how and why our emotional landscape, the everyday thoughts and stories we often hide from the world and oftentimes ourselves, are the single most important determinant of life success. And why navigating life’s twists and turns with self-acceptance, clear-sightedness, and an open mind leads to empowerment and agency. It's about why we must overcome the urge to ignore difficult emotions and behaviors to instead face them willingly, as a neutral observer, with curiosity and kindness. It's about identifying your core values as a path to willpower, resilience and effectiveness. And it's about how developing this skill called emotional agility – essentially mastery over our emotions, thoughts and stories — can benefit not just ourselves but our children, helping even our youngest become better problem solvers. Enjoy! Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:06Susan David?

  In order to navigate the world as it is, not as we wish it to be, we need to be able to strengthen our capability with the full range of this beautiful, messy, difficult human experience. And really, the reality of life is that tough emotions are part of our contract with life. We don't get to have a meaningful career, or raise a family, or leave the world a better place without stress and discomfort.

• 1:36Rich Roll?

  That's Susan David, this week, on the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:54Rich Roll?

  So much of what determines how we navigate the world, how we inhabit our environments, how we choose and pursue our careers, our ability to successfully cultivate and maintain our relationships, how we parent, really how and why we do everything we do, is in so many ways dictated not by rationality or logic or intellect, but instead by emotions. And it is this landscape of our emotions that truly drives, often in mysterious ways, we don't consciously understand, our decisions, our impulses, our reactions, pretty much everything we do, and commonly, if you're at least anything like me, to our peril.

• 2:38Rich Roll?

  I can't tell you how many times I've made a bad decision impulsively and then wondered, you know, why did I do that? What can be learned from this mistake? How can I better understand myself and the hidden impulses that drive me? In other words, how can I be more emotionally agile? Which is a term that's going to come up a lot today in this conversation, such that I can make better future decisions and simply navigate my world in a more mindful and conscious way, rather than in the reactive and impulsive manner that always seems to lead me astray. My name is Rich Roll. How you doing? I am your host. And today, we explore this terrain with Susan David,

• 3:21Rich Roll?

  who I think it's fair to say is both a pioneer and one of the world's leading thinkers in this field. Susan is an award-winning psychologist on faculty at Harvard Medical School. She is the CEO of a company called Evidence-Based Psychology, as well as the co-founder of the Institute of Coaching, which is an affiliate of Harvard Medical School. She's on the scientific advisory boards of Thrive Global and Virgin Pulse, and she is the author of a massively bestselling book, a number one Wall Street Journal bestseller entitled, you guessed it, Emotional Agility, which is a very compelling read that walks us through the psychological skills critical to thriving in times of complexity and change.

• 4:06Rich Roll?

  In addition, Susan is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. And she's a sought-after speaker and consultant with clients that include The World Economic Forum, the United Nations, Google, Microsoft, NASDAQ, and many, many others. If Susan and her work are brand new to you, I suggest you start with her TED Talk. It's entitled "The Gift and Power of Emotional Courage." This was my first introduction to her and her work, and it's what inspired me to reach out to her on Twitter and get her on the show. It's quite moving, and although it was published online only about a month ago, it already has almost 2 million views. A couple more things I want to say about this amazing and lovely person before we dive into

• 4:50Rich Roll?

  the conversation, but first, a couple announcements. The first of which is, I spent the last year rewriting my first book, my memoir. It's called Finding Ultra, and the brand-new, updated, and revised edition is now available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in the US and Canada in paperback form, just $7.67 on Amazon, which is amazing, as well as on Audible in audiobook format, and ebook Kindle versions are coming soon if they're not available already. For my international friends who have been having trouble tracking it down, we have signed copies available on my website at richroll.com. And even if you read the first edition and you enjoyed it, I think you'll get a lot out of this new version. There's about 30% to 40% brand-new

• 5:33Rich Roll?

  material. I'm super proud of it. If you want to know more about why I rewrote it and what you can expect to find in this revised edition, you can check out my most recent blog post on my site at richroll.com. And secondly, our new cookbook, The Plant Power Way: Italia, is now available for preorder. Reserve your copy today, and if you're a female, please make sure to check out my second-most recent blog post on my site at richroll.com for a chance to win a free spot on our upcoming retreat in Tuscany, May 19 through 26, 2018. It's a $5,000 value. The contest is only open through April 24, so you've got to jump on it now. And those are my two big self-promotional announcements.

• 6:24Rich Roll?

  Okay, Susan David. This is a conversation about Susan's life, growing up in apartheid South Africa, and how this experience impacted how she sees the world and informs the work that she does today as this pioneering psychologist. It's also about how and why our emotions, our everyday thoughts and stories, things that we often hide from the world, and even at times from ourselves, are really the single most important determinant of life's success. It's a conversation about how our impulse to deny or avoid uncomfortable emotions does not serve us, because it really is these tough emotions, emotions that we

• 7:06Rich Roll?

  all experience, that are really the price we pay for a meaningful life, for a life of more conscious agency. And ultimately, it's about how developing this thing called emotional agility, which is essentially mastery over our emotions, our thoughts, our stories, can benefit not just ourselves, but every generation, even helping the youngest among us become better problem solvers, engaged learners, and less likely to develop things like anxiety and depression. Very excited to share this conversation. Have I droned on long enough? I think I have. Shall we talk to Susan? Let's do just that.

• 7:49Rich Roll?

  Ready to go. Susan, thank you for coming out here.

• 7:53Susan David?

  I'm so grateful to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

• 7:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I'm sorry you had an Uber driver that left you with a bumpy ride, but hopefully your stomach will settle.

• 8:01Susan David?

  My stomach is settled. It's fine.

• 8:02Rich Roll?

  Well, it's a pleasure to talk to you. I've been wanting to talk to you for a while. Ironically, I just had a phone call today with my friend Jonathan Fields, and I know you were on his show, and I adore him. So he said to say hello.

• 8:16Susan David?

  Oh, hello, Jonathan.

• 8:19Rich Roll?

  I'm excited because one of my favorite obsessions is the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and how these stories become powerful predictors of future behavior.

• 8:35Susan David?

  Yes.

• 8:36Rich Roll?

  And really can define our lives and really set us on a trajectory to live reactively and not as intentionally or as mindfully as we should. And this is the sweet spot of your research.

• 8:49Susan David?

  Absolutely.

• 8:50Rich Roll?

  And this incredible new book that is going crazy right now. And this TED Talk that just went up a week ago that already has, you said, I know it has over a million views and you said there's a snippet that has 19 million views right now?

• 9:03Susan David?

  Yes, there's an excerpt of it and in one week, the TED Talk has had a million views and the excerpt has had 19 million views. But beyond the metrics, the incredible notes and emails from people are just indescribable in the way they're connecting with this. So I just feel so encouraged and, you know, doing any of these kind of things is a huge investment. And so when you feel that it's had meaning, it's great.

• 9:27Rich Roll?

  Well, I would imagine that you had to know, I mean, after, right, you published this article that was the foundation of what would become this book and what was in, it was in the Harvard Business Journal? And that went off like wildfire. So that was sort of proof of concept, like, okay, people are really responding to this. So you knew there was an interest in an audience and really more than that, like a need, like everybody can relate to this issue because it's something I think we all struggle with on the spectrum.

• 9:54Susan David?

  Yes, both from my personal experience and then from my research, I started to become aware of how so often we experience things in society. Society tells us to think positive or to be happy or we get these messages. And I started to become aware firstly of how sometimes the messages that we get are unhelpful. And then also to your point earlier of how our thoughts, emotions, and the stories that we tell ourselves can start driving behaviors in ways that are not connected with who we want to be in the world. And so. I very much see this at work, I see this in parenting, in our personal lives. And so I felt like I wanted to write a book that really started to convey

• 10:39Susan David?

  both the ideas of emotional rigidity, which is when we reactive or on autopilot, but also what are the key components of emotional agility, where we are able to be intentional and effective.

• 10:52Rich Roll?

  So before we even parse the differences between agility and rigidity, maybe we should just define what we're talking about when we're talking about the emotional landscape.

• 11:04Susan David?

  So my work really traverses emotions. So both the physical sensations and the physiological sensations and also the feelings. So when we then construct something that says, I am sad because of something, the feeling, the thought that we might have, self doubts, and the stories. So my work traverses this whole idea that our inner world, our thoughts, our emotions and our stories often drive every aspect of how we love, how we live, how we parent and how we lead. And yet, so much of the writing that exists on success is effectively writing that's either about set goals and achieve them,

• 11:48Susan David?

  or about the landscape of what success looks like. But there's very little that focuses, I think, in an evidence-based way. Not to say that there isn't any, but in an evidence-based and research-based way about what it takes internally in the way we deal with our thoughts, our emotions and our stories.

• 12:04Rich Roll?

  Right, and I think that begins with really understanding that as these emotions well up inside of us, as they do, that they are part and parcel of what it means to be human. They're entirely natural. And the starting point is really to discern the fact that you have a choice when they arise as to how you behave, that you don't need to necessarily self-identify with them to the extent that they become that predictor of behavior that leads you astray.

• 12:32Susan David?

  Absolutely, yes. So the first point that you make, which is that they're naturally occurring experiences in us as human beings, is one of the first things that I explore in both my TED Talk and the book, which is that as a society, What has started to happen is that these naturally occurring experiences that really are incredibly important signals to ourselves in terms of how we're doing, what's working for us in our lives, uh, what's missing in our lives. What's started to happen is that emotions either feel dirty, that they're seen as being disruptive, feminine, irrational, illogical. Or what happens is we receive this narrative from society

• 13:14Susan David?

  that says to us that there are good emotions and bad emotions. The good emotions are the joy and the happiness and you should chase happiness. And the bad emotions are anger, grief, sadness. And so one of the most critical aspects, I think, of my work is starting to really challenge this idea that they're good or bad emotions.

• 13:36Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 13:36Susan David?

  And to really put out that our emotions have evolved in us as a human species to help us to respond and survive. And when we start getting into the space where we either block or suppress or push aside emotions, we actually stop ourselves from being our most effective, successful beings.

• 13:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, this idea that there's a duality is a socially projected notion.

• 14:04Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 14:04Rich Roll?

  That perpetuates that vicious cycle of, of, you know, unhealth, I guess. Because if you feel, if you feel sad and then you know, like, well, that's a bad emotion, then you're going to then feel shame or guilt for having that. And you're just digging that hole even deeper and deeper.

• 14:22Susan David?

  Yeah, that's, that's exactly. So it's this fascinating thing where, you know, we have, in psychology, we sometimes talk about a type one and type two. And type one is where you start saying, I feel sad. And type two is when you start having an emotion or judgment about the emotion. So you say, I'm sad that I'm sad. I shouldn't be sad. I push it aside. And in some of my work, I, for example, did a survey of 70,000 people. And I found that a third of us, which is a remarkable number, a third of us treat our normal emotions, emotions like sadness or anger or even grief. As being bad. And so we push them aside. Or if we don't do it to ourselves, we often do it to people we love, our children. We jump to solution.

• 15:08Susan David?

  And I think a critical aspect of well being is moving beyond the struggle with our emotions into the other space, which is, this is how I'm feeling. What do I need to do about this context that I'm in?

• 15:26Rich Roll?

  Right, to detach from the self judgment that usually is accompanying that.

• 15:31Susan David?

  Yeah, the radical acceptance of all of our emotions, our grief, our sadness, our anger is a hallmark and a cornerstone of resilience and a cornerstone of effective relationships. That's not to say that because we feel angry, we have a right to be angry and we should act on our anger or because we feel wronged, we have been wronged. But rather, what's at the core of my work is this idea that our emotions contain signposts to things that we care about. They're these flashing lights, you know, if I feel guilty as a parent, it doesn't mean that I should be guilty.

• 16:12Susan David?

  But it does mean that there's a value often that sits beneath that emotion, that I value presence and connectedness with my children. And that I'm not feeling enough of it, I'm not experiencing enough of it. So instead of judging the emotion, if we can rather be open hearted and accepting and compassionate of it, we can start moving into the space where we are able to discern values that are underneath it.

• 16:37Rich Roll?

  Right, I like the idea that the emotion really sheds light on the extent to which you're invested in that value. So that guilt reaction really just reaffirms to you that that impulse to be a good parent is valuable to you, right? And that's almost, that's an affirming way to perceive what you would ordinarily, you know, feel lousy about.

• 17:00Susan David?

  That's exactly, and then, and then we start being able to make tweaks or changes or shifts. That bring us towards those values. Because the way that I think of values is values often seen as these abstract ideas, these, these things that are, you know, on walls in offices and mission statements in businesses where values are packaged in with it. And so values can often seem these very abstract ideas, but I see values as being qualities of action. So what I mean by that is every day, every day, we have opportunities to either bring ourselves towards our values. If you value health, for instance, you get to make a choice that's either towards that value, depending on what you choose to put in your mouth, or away from that value.

• 17:45Susan David?

  So we have these choices every day and they're qualities of action. And having the sense of what our values are that gets informed by our emotions is hugely protective of social contagion, of, you know, going down a path where you then go, how did I get here? I didn't want to be here. How am I in this career? And they also allow us to shape our lives in really meaningful ways.

• 18:10Rich Roll?

  And by social contagion, you mean that impulse to compare ourselves to our peers? Or what do you mean specifically by that?

• 18:17Susan David?

  Yeah, so there's, there's social contagion. There's this fascinating research on social contagion. And the idea behind it is that we catch behaviors and we catch emotions from other people without even realizing it. So for instance, we've all had that experience where we get in an elevator and someone's on their phone. And we, without even thinking about it, take out our phone and we on our phone as well. So if we extend that, if you, for instance, are on an airplane and you're trying to lose weight, for example, and your seatmate buys candy, even if you do not know that person, what the research shows is that your chance of buying candy increases by 70%.

• 19:00Rich Roll?

  Seventy percent.

• 19:01Susan David?

  Seventy percent.

• 19:01Rich Roll?

  Oh, my God.

• 19:02Susan David?

  So now extend this out. What we know is that large scale epidemiological studies show that if people even within, that we don't even know, two or three degrees of separation from us. Uh, get divorced or put on weight. It significantly increases our chances of getting divorced or putting on weight. So you're like, oh, my goodness, what is actually going on here? But we've all experienced that we got for dinner and someone orders dessert. And so we order dessert. So what starts to happen is in so many ways, without realizing it, we start wanting things that other people want. We start comparing, we start normalizing behaviors. And we see this at work. Everyone's stressed. We get stressed. We sit at home. How do you protect against that?

• 19:46Susan David?

  How do you stay the course of what is important to you? And there's just this wonderful, wonderful work that shows that what is called values affirmation, so even spending 10 minutes thinking about who is the parent that I want to be, who is the leader that I want to be, starts to bring those values front of mind and actually protects us from the social contagion.

• 20:08Rich Roll?

  Right. So, excuse me, a couple of observations on that. The first thing is, is that so much of your, I mean, this, this idea of values is really at the foundation of everything because it creates this cascading effect on behaviors down the line. But it requires maintaining your, like a sense of clarity about what those values are and keeping them front of mind, right? As a driving force. So I would, I would presume that requires some practice and some effort to always be like, okay, well, what are my values and what am I doing? And how do, how do my actions align or, or not align with what I'm doing presently or what I plan to do? And then secondarily, how do you distinguish values from goals?

• 20:52Susan David?

  So, um, so the first thing that I would say is I think that, you know, values are foundational here, but in order to even start understanding our values, we need to be able to be in a space with ourselves, with our emotions, with our being that is not in struggle, where, where we are able to be accepting and where we are able to be, um.

• 21:14Susan David?

  Compassionate towards our experience because it's out of that that we we discern, we discern our values. The difference that I the just difference that I make between values and goals is that goals have an end point. You know, you might say, um, you know, I want to run this amount and that is that is a goal and it's something that's actually achievable. But a value is actually different. It's a it's a life direction. So you never reach a stage, for instance, where you say, I am a good friend, or I am a good husband, or I am, you know, I am a fair person. Rather, a value is a direction that you're trying to move yourself in.

• 21:58Susan David?

  But you never reach a point where you say, you know, I am X.

• 22:02Rich Roll?

  Right, but you would say intimate relationships are a core value or or like sort of, you know, basically fertilizing the intimacy of my relationships is important to me.

• 22:13Susan David?

  Yes.

• 22:14Rich Roll?

  And as opposed to, I want to run this far, it would be, I want to live a active, you know, fitness oriented lifestyle.

• 22:21Susan David?

  Right, so when applied to relationships, for instance, you might say, um, being connected and intimate and being one of the things that I think about in my relationship, for instance, is I want what I call a clean relationship. That so that that for me is a value. It doesn't sound like a value, but what I mean by clean relationship, I mean a relationship in which um, I am able to have conversations that are important and meaningful with my husband without there being a lot of baggage about the conversation. So I feel like it's super important for us that we can go to difficult places and have meaningful conversations, whether it's about religion or money or raising children, without there being these kind of no go zones because each of us are bringing our stories.

• 23:06Susan David?

  So that's what that might look like. You know, you might have a value about a particular relationship. The way you might enact that value is through particular goals. So you might be saying, you know, I'm going to make sure that a couple of times a week. I have good one-on-one time with this person. So that's what a goal might look like, which is very tangible, but it's the value that.

• 23:27Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, one of the examples you used is, you know, when your spouse comes home or your partner, like, don't be on your phone, like, put the phone down or make sure that you're not, that you're present and available for whatever exchange.

• 23:38Susan David?

  So, so this is, this is exactly, you know, when you were saying earlier about, of course, the values are these things that when they are front of mind are very, very powerful. We know that values help us to enact and access greater levels of willpower to create effective, sustainable changes in our lives and so on. Um, but of course, they're, they require some cognitive effort because you're always trying to be, you know, what's the, what's the value? And so this is where habits become so important, and this is where work on habits and how to create habits become important. So for instance, in the example that you give, if your value is a value about intimacy and connection in your relationship,

• 24:19Susan David?

  but you know that you have a particular habit and that habit is to bring your cellphone to the table every night.

• 24:27Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 24:28Susan David?

  And that stops your opportunity. I can see a look of recognition there.

• 24:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, I live in the modern world.

• 24:34Susan David?

  So, but if that, if that focus is something that's important to you, then one of the things that I describe in my book is how we can make values-aligned habit changes and tweaks. So say for instance, you come home from work and you always put your keys in a particular drawer. We know that there's a very powerful way of changing habits called piggybacking, where you've already got a habit that you're engaging in, and so you now piggyback a new habit onto that. And so you put your keys in the drawer and you put your cellphone into the drawer as well.

• 25:03Rich Roll?

  Right, which makes the habit adoption a lot easier.

• 25:06Susan David?

  Correct. And so you're not needing to constantly think about, oh my, you know, what is my, what is my value here? Because you're making habit changes that are values-aligned.

• 25:15Rich Roll?

  What about people, I feel like we skipped way ahead because we're talking about values, which is kind of like the end, but let's stay on this. Yeah, because I want to go back into the hook and all that. But on the subject of values, what about the people who don't have clarity about what those values are, you know, the people that are living reactively, that are living in the, that are sort of prey for the looping of the, of the impulses that have them hooked, that prevent them from seeing clearly what it is that is important to them?

• 25:44Susan David?

  So I talk about this a bit in my book and it's not, you know, it's not something that's unusual. I will often, when I give talks, have people come to me afterwards saying, you know, either this is something I've never thought about, or I have had parents who effectively have told me what my values are and I've never really been able to sort through what my own values are, or I'm so busy, or I have been so busy taking care of children, or earning a living, or, you know, this is not, I've just not had the opportunity to give thought to it.

• 26:19Rich Roll?

  I'm just trying to get through the day.

• 26:19Susan David?

  I'm trying to get through to the, through, through the day. What are some ways that you can start guiding that process? So there are a couple of things that, that I think are useful. The first is, if listeners are interested, I've got a free quiz that's available that many hundred thousand people have taken on my website, which is at susandavid.com/learn. And that's got a whole list of different values and what those look like. But some very simple questions, things like, you know, when we, when we finish at the end of the day, looking back on our day and saying, you know, what today was worthwhile for me? Not what gave me the most fun, what was most exciting, what was most worthwhile?

• 27:00Susan David?

  Because stuff that's fun and exciting isn't necessarily a value. You know, you can go to clubs night after night and have a lot of fun, but it's not necessarily a value. So things like what is worthwhile? And the reason that worthwhile is really important is because There's often a level in worthwhile of even discomfort or effort that's gone into that thing, but has been important.

• 27:24Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:25Susan David?

  Um, and I, and I go through a couple of questions that one can ask oneself to start discerning this. It's, it's a really, you know, important aspect. Another thing that comes up is people say, what if my values are in conflict? You know?

• 27:38Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 27:38Susan David?

  What if, this is a very common thing, like what if my values are in conflict? What if I value work and value my career, but I also value parent, like being present with my children, for instance? And one of the things that I talk about is this idea that values, you know, values are not these, again, dichotomous things that you either have them or, your values are your values. And so the, the, the way that I describe this is if you imagine a diamond and you imagine that some values are front and center at some times in your life, it doesn't mean that the other facets of the diamond aren't there.

• 28:16Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 28:17Susan David?

  You know, we are complex in a good way and capable and whole enough as human beings that we are able to have many values. Unfortunately, because we are mortal, you know, we can't be in two places at once. And so sometimes we have to make difficult choices. And, and so I explore about how these difficult choices that we make. For instance, now, you know, I'm in LA and my husband is at home with my two sick children. So you make choices, but, but the choices, instead of being choices that are laden with conflict and guilt, become choices that have far greater levels of clarity to them.

• 28:59Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 28:59Susan David?

  Because they informed values led rather than emotions driven.

• 29:04Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. So for example, you being here, you're not at home, your parent, your, your, your husband is at home with your children. So rather than browbeat yourself for not being home and not being available as a parent, like what can you do while you're here to serve that value? What actionable things can you do?

• 29:21Susan David?

  There's this beautiful, there's this beautiful concept in psychology called, um, social snacking or psychological snacking. And it's this idea that, you know, it's not, it's not either or. I can be in LA right now because it's important for me to be doing the things that I'm doing. And that's consistent with other values of mine. Which is about getting my message out or um connecting with people in particular ways about this, doesn't mean I don't care about my children. What it does mean is that I can look at the context that I'm in and I can make choices, for instance, that when I talk to them later on tonight, that I'm actually present with them.

• 30:00Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 30:01Susan David?

  Or so, so and that's just an example, but these examples apply to our workplace, it applies to our health, it applies to our relationships, that we can have multiple values and they're not necessarily in conflict. Some might be more front and centre at particular times.

• 30:17Rich Roll?

  So let's take a step back. I want to talk a little bit more in depth about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the kind of emotional rigidity that goes hand in hand with that. But I think in order to properly contextualise it, it's worth kind of going back into your own personal history because this is not just an academic pursuit for you. This, this was born out of your own challenges growing up.

• 30:43Susan David?

  Yeah, yeah. So I um, I, yeah, absolutely. These, these ideas are not born out of, you know, the hallowed halls of Harvard.

• 30:53Rich Roll?

  I am at Harvard. What am I going to study?

• 30:56Susan David?

  Yeah, you know, exactly. So, so even though I am, but really, I mean, my, my life's work really started when I was, when I was young. I, as you can hear by the accent, I'm not American. I was born as a white South African in Tuapata, South Africa. And so as you grow up, you have this growing sense of horror at the society and what that society is doing to its fellow human being. And really, this is a society that was founded fundamentally on denial because it's denial

• 31:39Susan David?

  that makes 50 years of racist legislation possible while people are convincing themselves that they're doing nothing wrong.

• 31:47Susan David?

  And so that was, that was my context. And from very early on, I started to, you know, ask questions about, you know, what does it take internally to thrive in a world where there is both this beauty and there's this fragility and difficulty? And then when I was fifteen years old, my father, who was forty two at the time, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And I remember, and I describe in my TED Talk, my mom coming to me and it was on a Friday and my mom saying to me, go and say goodbye to your dad. And me putting my backpack down, it feels like yesterday, you know, me putting my backpack down and walking this passage to where my father, the heart of our home,

• 32:30Susan David?

  lay dying. And I said goodbye to him and I went off to school. I didn't know that he was gonna die that day. And he did. And then the months after that, or even the days after that, I went back to school on the Monday and people don't know how to have these conversations. They don't know how to talk about grief or death. So suddenly, you know, all my school friends dropped the word father from their vocab. You know, they, they didn't say, what did you do with your father this weekend? It suddenly fathers became non-existent. And I, you know, am growing up in this world where there is this denial going on around me and where we as a culture, even in today's culture, even in America beyond, we value

• 33:14Susan David?

  this idea of I'm okay positivity. You know, what you feel attracts everything else to you. And so when people asked me how I was doing, I would say, you know, I'm okay, I'm okay. But in truth, in truth, back home, we were struggling. My father had not been able to keep his small business going. My family was in incredible debt. My mother was raising three children single-handedly. And I started to spiral, you know, I really was struggling to deal with this. And then, you know, again, I just remember this so clearly, this eighth grade English teacher handed out notebooks to the class and. She said it to the class, but I felt like she was saying it to me.

• 33:58Susan David?

  And in fact, I believe she was saying it to me. She handed out these notebooks and she said, write, you know, tell the truth. Uh, write like no one's reading.

• 34:08Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 34:08Susan David?

  And I started this correspondence in this journal that I've kept to this day. And what I realized afterwards is it was that. It was not the, I'm okay. You know, positive thinking, et cetera, that actually helped me to be resilient. It was about being able to go up close to my emotions, to understand them, to be able to get insight into them, be compassionate with them. That ultimately was the process of healing and resilience. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-happiness, which we can get to.

• 34:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 34:43Susan David?

  It's, it's the false bravado

• 34:48Susan David?

  that we, we construct often that keeps us in a stage of being disconnected with our authentic emotional experience.

• 34:55Rich Roll?

  Right. The phrase you use is the tyranny of positivity, which I love, and I think it's so accurate. And what's amazing about that story is, is like the power of somebody giving you permission to feel in a, in a, in a climate of denial, saying it's okay. And in fact, this is where you need to go and I support you and I have your back.

• 35:19Susan David?

  And it's, it's life changing. I would write in this journal and, you know, poetry and thoughts. And I would hand it in every day. And this was as this secret silent correspondence with this teacher.

• 35:32Rich Roll?

  It's beautiful.

• 35:33Susan David?

  And she would write back to me and, you know, this went on for, for many months.

• 35:39Rich Roll?

  And you still keep it up now.

• 35:40Susan David?

  I still keep it up, not in the same journal. I've got the same, but, but yeah.

• 35:43Rich Roll?

  You still have the original journals?

• 35:46Susan David?

  And what was fascinating is that experience then became the catalyst of my life's work.

• 35:51Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:52Susan David?

  This idea of trying to understand what it is that we often experience in society. Because it is often a tyranny. There's, there's this idea that, you know, boys don't cry, that girls should smile, that women and people who are discriminated against should not be angry. And so what this does is it is it these are what we call in psychology, display rules, this kind of implicit shaping of what it's okay or not okay to feel. You know, the flip side of that, or the really dark side of that, is it leads people into situations where we know that social policies, for instance, can and do affect people's wellbeing.

• 36:36Susan David?

  And so when we start having a narrative in society that says, oh, it's all about the fact that you aren't thinking positive enough. What it starts to do is it starts to abrogate our societal responsibility in recognizing that our choices can and do impact on people's wellbeing.

• 36:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think that was one of the biggest epiphanies that I took from your book that I hadn't really thought about in any kind of meaningful way before, which is how these things act on the micro and on the macro.

• 37:05Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 37:05Rich Roll?

  And what and how the macro is impacted by, you know, these denial patterns or these sort of unhealthy social mores that we adopt as a culture and how they play out, not just in your in your family or with yourself, but in your community and the planet at large. And when you really track that and look at that, you realize how powerful all of this is.

• 37:29Susan David?

  It's it's so it's so incredibly powerful. Internal pain comes out.

• 37:36Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 37:37Susan David?

  And it comes out in a lack of compassion for the world. It comes out in a lack of compassion for life. It also comes out in, for instance, in our parenting and being very solution focused with great, wonderful, beautiful intentions with our children, but in ways that don't necessarily help to develop their own emotional skills.

• 38:01Rich Roll?

  I feel like that's changing, though. I mean, we all kind of intellectually know if you're going through something difficult, like seek out help, like ask for help, go to therapy, confront these emotions. But I don't know how widely adopted it is, or how, the extent to which it's practiced with, you know, the less sort of cataclysmic events that we experience throughout our lives.

• 38:27Susan David?

  Yeah, yes, that's, and I think that's right. I think it's, you know, one of the things that I explore in the book very much is I try to take the book, both in the very practical, everyday, you know, here are strategies, into the wider context of when, when we in grief, you know, what does that look like? And in many ways, it's these every days of being able to shape our intentions in our relationships and in our, in our health and in our wellbeing, that often those kind of ideas don't get explored, because there's, there's still this idea that there's, again, good and bad emotions, or we should just think positive.

• 39:13Rich Roll?

  Let's fast forward a little bit to like the hooked section in the book, which is really about these stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. Because I think, you know, as, as we kind of discussed earlier, you know, we all do this on some level, whether it's feelings of unworthiness, or undeservedness, or, you know, our inability to find the right partner for ourselves, how we kind of view the world, the lens through which we perceive everything, is by definition, this prism that distorts reality.

• 39:40Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 39:41Rich Roll?

  Right? So how do we, like, how does this happen? And then how do we develop the capacity to see it objectively, so that we can begin to unpack it and move beyond it?

• 39:53Susan David?

  So, yeah, so the, but definitionally, what I mean by hooked and being emotionally inagile, is when your thoughts, your emotions and your stories are driving your actions, rather than your values and your true intentions. So examples might be, a thought might be something like, I'm not good enough, I want to apply for the job, I know I've got the skills, but I'm not going to get it. So I don't apply. Or Um, I, you know, would love to go to the party, but I'm anxious of being rejected. So I'm going to stay home or my husband's starting in on the finances and I don't like it. So, so when we hooked, what's happening is, you know, there's this beautiful, beautiful idea that I talk about in the book, which many of your listeners will have heard, which is

• 40:38Susan David?

  this Viktor Frankl, Viktor Frankl, who survives the Nazi death camps, speaks to this idea that between stimulus and response, there is a space and in that space is our power to choose. And it's in that choice that comes our growth and freedom. When we hooked, when our thoughts, our emotions and our stories drive us, there's no space between stimulus and response. So we have a thought, we have an emotion, or we have a story about whether we're good enough, valuable enough. Some of these stories were written on our mental chalkboards in grade three and they've become a prison around ourselves. And so what starts to happen is, uh, there's no space between stimulus and response. We

• 41:16Susan David?

  think, we are, we feel, and we just act. So core aspects of becoming unhooked and the core underpinnings of emotional agility, I talk about it in four very practical ways in the book. And that's not to imply that like it's step one, step two, step three, step four. But really I talk about these four movements, if you like. The first is about being able to show up to ourselves in ways that are curious and compassionate and not in struggle with ourselves. So where we're actually able to extend compassion to the fact that you might have a story about your value in life, or you might have

• 42:00Susan David?

  a story about what relationship you deserve. And that story's probably come from somewhere.

• 42:06Rich Roll?

  Right. There's something that happened.

• 42:09Susan David?

  Yes.

• 42:09Rich Roll?

  But what's interesting, kind of psychologically and neurologically about that is there's always going to be some inciting event. There's some, there's some hook to which you're hanging, you know, your evidence for why you tell this story. Something happened, you got fired, or you got rejected, or something like that. Um, but what makes, you know, it's like, that becomes... The sort of locus of your attention, even if it's rebutted or refuted by a hundred other examples of things that occurred in your life

• 42:40Susan David?

  Yes.

• 42:40Rich Roll?

  That contradict that. But for some reason, we make these decisions like, no, that's, that's the way it is. And we hold on to that.

• 42:48Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 42:48Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 42:49Susan David?

  So, human beings are story making machines. And, and actually, we, we as human beings, one of the things that sets us apart is this making of stories. And the idea that creating stories helps to keep a coherent narrative in our lives.

• 43:06Rich Roll?

  Makes sense of our world.

• 43:07Susan David?

  It, it helps us to say, well, you know, the noise that I'm hearing is the whirring from the washing machine. You know, we, we can't, we would be on cognitive overload if we were assessing every single stimulus in our lives anew every single day. So, human beings are story making machines. We have sixteen thousand spoken thoughts every single day and many millions more course through our minds. Um, so what starts to happen is we, we, we have all of these thoughts, emotions, and we've got a particular area of our brains called the angular gyrus. And the angular gyrus is the crossroad of our memory, taste, visual sensation. And so what starts to happen is we don't just have a thought like,

• 43:51Susan David?

  Dr. Spock, you know, I'm having a thought that I'm being attacked. Or I am, you know, I'm having this emotion. Our thoughts are experienced in technicolor. We have memories, the last time this person spoke to me, how this felt when I was a child. And so as human beings, we are wired to have these visually real experiences that are these stories woven in these particular ways. And this is actually a key aspect of our survival as human beings. It enables us to say, this person who is about to attack me is not smiling. They're about to attack me because I've got a memory of what happened previously.

• 44:36Susan David?

  So, stories are normal. And I think one of the things that I really stress in this book is that it's not that the having stories is bad. In fact, sometimes the stories that we've had in our childhoods, have helped us to survive those childhoods, have been functional and helpful for us. But what starts to happen is when you bring an old story into a new situation in ways that don't serve you. So for instance, if you have a story that I don't deserve to be loved, and you then find someone who loves you,

• 45:14Susan David?

  and we're then acting in ways to push that person away, you've got a story that's not serving you.

• 45:18Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right.

• 45:19Susan David?

  And so in the book, I talk about these ideas of, you know, being able to be open to what that story taught you, how it might have actually helped you in the past. And then ways to start getting some perspective around that story and noticing the story for what it is. A story, one of many stories, but that doesn't need to own you.

• 45:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think that that the process of becoming open to a more objective perspective on your stories would begin with understanding something that that we're not really taught, which is that you can become an observer of your thinking mind. And you can call it your higher consciousness, the terminology, you know, is up to you, but but we do have the ability to bifurcate and understand that the looping of the thinking mind is something outside of who you are as an individual, and that you have a choice to whether you you want to engage with that or disengage and become a dispassionate observer of that.

• 46:25Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 46:26Rich Roll?

  And I think for me, and I mean, my kind of perspective, you know, just for a little background on me, is I come from, I'm a long time sober

• 46:35Rich Roll?

  and and have learned through the process of recovery and that community, you know, a lot of tools for managing this. But I remember it being a revelation, like, wait a minute, like, I don't have to self identify with this. Like, I can actually, like, I even, just that idea that I have a choice or that I have agency over that was like, oh, my God.

• 46:55Susan David?

  Completely mind boggling.

• 46:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 46:57Susan David?

  And in the book, I talk about this, this first movement, which is showing up. But the second movement is exactly this, this idea of stepping out, being able to notice your story and be compassionate towards your story, but not be your story.

• 47:09Rich Roll?

  To be neutral, to be the neutral observer.

• 47:11Susan David?

  And so, so, you know, just really some, some kind of fascinating strategies around this. And we've all experienced this, even in, you know, subtle ways. We've experienced that, that thing when you are outraged with some customer service agent down the telephone and you wanna kind of vent at the person and you, you on fire. And then that little voice goes off inside your mind that says, Susan, if you rant at this person, they will conveniently lose your file and not solve your problem. And so we've all had that experience of being upset or angry with someone and then had what is, you know, a meta thought or a meta cognition, a thought about our thought that helps to create that sense of separation between stimulus and response.

• 47:56Susan David?

  And so, you know, simple strategies that help us to do this are, for instance, we often will say things like, I am sad, I am angry. And what that does is it makes you, all of you, one hundred percent of you sad. Whereas you are more than sad. You, you, you've got other feelings, you've got other thoughts, you've got other stories, you've got other values. And so simply just noticing the thought for what it is, which is what you describe. I'm noticing that I'm feeling.

• 48:26Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:26Susan David?

  I'm noticing that I'm thinking.

• 48:27Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:28Susan David?

  I'm noticing that this is my victim's story. What that does is it starts to create separation. Um, another way that we can do this is to start labeling our emotions accurately. When you say something like, I am stressed. Again, it's all of you and it's this very diffuse. Difficult to describe emotion. What does that mean? There's a world of difference between I'm stressed because I was let down by my team versus I'm in the wrong career versus actually I'm kind of grieving for lost time. And you know, so we know there's this, there's this fascinating research in emotions called

• 49:11Susan David?

  emotion granularity, which is this idea that if you said to yourself, you know, what are two other emotion words to describe my stress? I'm disappointed or I'm angry. What this does is it starts to activate our understanding of the causes of those emotions and also starts to activate what's called the readiness potential in our brains where we are start, we're starting to be able to set goals towards what I need to do about the situation. So there are many different strategies of perspective taking and being able to move into that observer space, but it's incredibly powerful.

• 49:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, oh, so much so. I mean, in, in, in recovery, it's sort of, they, they call it the inventory, like, which is sort of journaling, right? Like, which helps you gain a little bit of clarity over these emotional states, the more you kind of flush them out on paper. But I would also imagine that the journey towards the process of trying to expand that space that Viktor Frankl is talking about can be significantly enhanced through meditation and mindfulness practices because it really helps you become that dispassionate observer.

• 50:18Susan David?

  Yeah, yeah. So people will just, you know, people will disagree with me on this. I'm, what I talk about in this book is I think that, you know, mindfulness is very, very powerful. I don't think you necessarily have to be mindful when you take out the trash and mind, you know, mindful every second of the day. But this creation of space, especially with emotions that, that trigger you or thoughts that trigger you in particular ways, mindfulness is just so powerful because what you're doing is you are. Noticing the thought for what it is a thought, noticing the emotion. These are data, not directives. There's valuable information contained in them, but they're not directives. And it's that mindfulness is incredibly powerful.

• 51:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the data directives thing is huge. And I think you also say, you know, who's in control here? Is it the, is it the thought or?

• 51:08Susan David?

  Or the thinker, yeah, who's in charge?

• 51:10Rich Roll?

  And I think most people are living reactively. Like, nobody's been sort of indoctrinated into these ideas to understand. Like, you don't have to be reactive or responsive to these stories in that kind of impulsive, compulsive way that most of us just sort of live.

• 51:27Susan David?

  Yeah, and it's so, it's such a powerful thing. I see this in so many different spheres, but, but, you know, as an example, in children. When we, when we are experiencing a child who is in pain, for instance, a child who says something like, you know, mommy, I didn't get invited to the birthday party and I'm so upset and everyone else got invited. So what we can start seeing is that there's no space between stimulus and response when that child says, Jack didn't invite me, now I'm not going to invite him. And one of the most powerful questions that we can start asking our children

• 52:06Susan David?

  that helps to develop their character and their compass is, who do you want to be in this situation? You know, what does being a good friend look like to you? What that starts to do is it starts to help the child to understand that they, you seeing them firstly, you helping them to label their emotions, but you're also helping them to empower themselves to make a choice about the situation. That's not necessarily their first impulse.

• 52:35Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 52:36Susan David?

  And it's so powerful.

• 52:37Rich Roll?

  What about the person who is? A professional victim. It's everybody's fault. You know, nothing ever works out for me. You know, just doom and gloom with the, you know, the, it's raining on them wherever they go, no matter what. And my experience with this kind of personality type is you can provide them with some, you could say, here, read this book, or why don't you try this? Or why don't you try that? And that person is generally disinterested in that and more interested in searching for evidence that reaffirms the victim narrative. Does that, have you come up against this?

• 53:15Susan David?

  Well, it was, it's fascinating. One of the most remarkable studies that I came across when I was researching this book is, and it just sounds completely, you know, at odds with what you would expect, but it was research showing that when people who've got a story that is very much about a victim and, and, you know, low self-esteem in the world is against me and

• 53:40Rich Roll?

  And so self-identified.

• 53:42Susan David?

  And very, very identified in this way. So imagine you've got someone who's experiencing that story and that person is in a job and that person gets promoted. Okay, so now what they're getting is they're getting disconfirming evidence, like they're getting evidence saying, actually, you, you know, you are of value, you are worth something. So what is absolutely stunning is that those people are more likely to then leave the job. Because it feels so, it feels so discordant. And so, you know, one of the things that I think is just so powerful is that I think that these stories have functions.

• 54:23Susan David?

  And sometimes the function is an excuse. And sometimes the function is self-protection because if, if I'm a victim, then I don't need to take responsibility. And sometimes the function is, you know, that, that this allows me to self-sabotage. And I think what's really important here is to distinguish that kind of thing versus someone who, you know, is truly experiencing depression and, you know, so, so, because I think that's a really, really important distinction. But I think what starts to happen is, is When you start to explore, what you often start to realize is, and what the person

• 55:05Susan David?

  will start to realize, is that it may be a story and it may have a function of protection, but that it's not serving

• 55:13Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 55:13Susan David?

  them. And so instead of becoming kind of judgy about the story, if we can help them to identify what are values that that story is taking them away from?

• 55:24Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 55:26Susan David?

  Or what are relationships, or you know, what are, what are other parts of them that are not being enabled?

• 55:34Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. Yeah, I would, I could see that. You know, I'm just, as you're describing that, I'm thinking, you know, somebody's walking around their whole life with a certain story, like the idea that you're gonna then say, well, do this, and then suddenly the story no longer applies. Like, it's complicated, right? This is a, this is a very difficult thing.

• 55:51Susan David?

  It is. And I think this is where, you know, this is where being able to be more attuned and nuanced to the, for the person of the emotion that they're experiencing, this is where, you know, writing is incredibly helpful because it starts to gain insight. This is where exploring, you know, what are, what are things that you're wanting to move in the direction of that you're not, you know, this is not a one conversation thing, but I think that these, what are ways that you can start experimenting with different ways of being that are more

• 56:26Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 56:27Susan David?

  connected and that take you to discomfort more is just very powerful.

• 56:31Rich Roll?

  Let's go back to this conversation about the good and the bad emotions and our sort of inability to just embrace that the human condition is, it requires all of it. You have this beautiful phrase in your TED Talk, something about how, you know, the beauty and the fragility of life go hand in hand. I can't, I'm butchering it, I'm sure, but. This idea that we need to embrace all of ourselves and that the path towards healing and wholeness and self-actualization requires us to, you know, have, have a meaningful embrace of whatever life throws in our path.

• 57:11Susan David?

  Yeah, yes, it's, it's, it's this idea that life's fragility, life's beauty is inseparable from its fragility. And, you know, I explore in the book this idea, you know, I think we've all had this, it's like you, you walk around and you young, and then one day you realize that you're not young, you, you sexy, and then you realize actually no one's even looking at you anymore. You, you nag your children to clean their room and one day there's silence where that child once was. You healthy until you get a diagnosis that brings you to your knees. And really, the reality of life is that tough emotions are part of our contract with life. Like, we, we don't get to have a meaningful career, or raise a family, or

• 57:54Susan David?

  leave the world a better place without stress and discomfort. And yet, we live in a culture that pays lip service to like going towards your, you know, going out of your comfort zone. But that at its core really has this idea that there's good and bad emotions. And so you start looking at the just frightening, you know, public health crisis, which is that depression is now the leading cause of disability globally.

• 58:22Rich Roll?

  Right. It's crazy.

• 58:24Susan David?

  Ostriching cancer.

• 58:25Rich Roll?

  It's insane.

• 58:25Susan David?

  Ostriching heart disease. And so I, I think that what starts to happen is we start almost creating a situation where we aren't able to process difficult emotions when we're in a society that tells us positive thinking is all that matters, or positive emotions are all that matter. And so we, we actually don't, we don't develop skillsets around this. And so I, you know, the core ideas behind emotional agility is this idea that in order to navigate the world as it is, not as we wish it to be, we need to be able to strengthen our capability with the full range of. This beautiful, messy, difficult human experience.

• 59:11Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right, right. In a, in a culture in which we're actively encouraged to go out of, you know, go out of our way to avoid all of these unpleasant emotions. And if you should find yourself in the grips of them, you should be ashamed of yourself.

• 59:25Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 59:26Rich Roll?

  And whether it's as simple as security and safety and luxury and comfort and all of that and being squarely within your comfort zone, or just, you know, the, the sort of daily emotions that we all experience on some level along the spectrum of guilt, shame, fear, you know, abandonments, whatever it is.

• 59:46Susan David?

  So, and, and, and even just our language, which we often, again, it's with, with good intentions. A friend of mine recently died of breast cancer and she said to me, you know, we were talking about this tyranny of positivity and she said to me, it's so difficult because when you, when you have cancer and when that cancer is terminal, every person you come into contact with tells you to just stay positive, just stay positive. And what she described is that it took her away from actually being able to have authentic, meaningful, end of life conversations that she needed to have, that

• 1:00:29Susan David?

  even in her dying, she was living and she was able to and wanted to be able to, be able to have real conversations with people that she loved. But it becomes very difficult when you try to have those conversations and people are like, oh, you're being negative or you, or you know, you're not going to beat this cancer.

• 1:00:51Rich Roll?

  It, it says more about the discomfort of the person delivering that because it is so uncomfortable for most people to talk about death and these things are scary. So when they, they may be well intentioned, saying stay positive, but most likely they're uncomfortable with anything other than that, right? So, so it's their way of like, well, I have to say something.

• 1:01:11Susan David?

  Yeah. Well, it's a Band-Aid for the end of it. You know, and again, it's done with great, it's, you know, I'm not trying to, you know, but it's, it's a Band-Aid for the person who's delivering that rather than actually being fundamentally helpful so often. I'm not saying, you know, there might be many people in the world who. Experiencing illness where someone saying stay positive is helpful. But I know that there there are many people that I've spoken to who find that it feels like, okay, now not only do I need to beat my cancer, but I've now got to deal with these somehow bad thoughts that I'm not allowed to be having.

• 1:01:48Rich Roll?

  Right, and and hold up this face of strength when you don't feel like it and and feel badly if you can't live up to that.

• 1:02:03Rich Roll?

  You know, kind of inside of that also is this idea that you explore, which is that the more we do actively deny these emotional states, the more we empower them. Like below the surface, the more we try to pretend they're not there, the stronger they become. They're doing pushups in the dark.

• 1:02:20Susan David?

  Well, it's so fascinating. So again, I just want to stress that I'm not anti-happiness or like anti being positive. What I'm anti is, what I'm anti is a narrative that constructs good and bad around these things and then leads us into stages of expectation that I should be happy or that I can't be unhappy. And yet it's fascinating when you look at, when you look, for instance, at people who have a very strong expectation that they need to be happy and you track those people over time, those people become less happy. That there's this, when you, when you hold this idea that happiness is more important than meaning, is more important than purpose, is more, then what it is, is it sets up some kind of

• 1:03:04Susan David?

  goal that is fundamentally unattainable. And so people who actively strive to be happy become less happy over time. What it also does is it leads to greater levels of, in the book, I talk about different ways of dealing with emotion that are difficult and one way is bottling our emotions where we push aside difficult emotions. The other is brooding where we dwell on. And what's fascinating is when you bottle emotions, when you push aside difficult emotions. There's this, uh, there's this effect that's, that's an amplification or a rebound effect, that these emotions actually come back stronger and more. And people have experienced this. If you, you know, gain on a diet and you're trying not to think of chocolate cake, we know that you start dreaming of chocolate cake.

• 1:03:50Susan David?

  When you ask people to not think a particular thought and you time them for a minute, most people will have that thought that's been banned forty times within that minute. So this idea of trying to push aside, suppress, move away from these difficult thoughts and feelings, it just doesn't work.

• 1:04:10Rich Roll?

  Right. Allow yourself to feel them as part and parcel of being human, but also understand that thoughts are just things and emotions are just things. And, you know, one of the kind of tools or lessons that I've learned in sobriety is, you know, addicts and alcoholics drink because they don't want to feel, they want to change their emotional state. They don't want to feel however, however unconscious that decision is. It's a decision to try to not feel however they feel, right? And, and sobriety is about understanding and learning and embracing the fact that these emotions, although they may feel like they're going to kill you, they're just emotions.

• 1:04:48Susan David?

  Yes.

• 1:04:48Rich Roll?

  They have the power that we attach to them.

• 1:04:51Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:51Rich Roll?

  And if we can allow ourselves to just be okay feeling them, there is one thing that is certain and that ultimately they will shift and pass.

• 1:05:00Susan David?

  Absolutely.

• 1:05:01Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:05:01Susan David?

  Absolutely. The radical acceptance of our emotions, even the difficult ones, is the cornerstone.

• 1:05:08Rich Roll?

  But it's so scary. It's scary.

• 1:05:11Susan David?

  It's scary. And, and this is again, when you're parenting, we're helping your children very young to start labeling their emotions, not trying to rush in and save your children from difficult emotions. Because when you save them from difficult emotions, they don't learn, oh, I was feeling sad fifteen minutes ago and that emotion has now passed.

• 1:05:29Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. So how do we step out?

• 1:05:33Rich Roll?

  We talk a little bit more. I mean, we talked about it a little bit.

• 1:05:35Susan David?

  Yeah, yes. So there, there are a number of things that are so really this idea of stepping out is about creating the space. So there's firstly, and I explore many different strategies in the book, but the first one is this, instead of I am feeling, you know, I am sad, I'm noticing that I'm sad. Being labeling your emotions, what are, what are two other emotions that I might be feeling? Writing, very, very powerful. There's incredibly valuable research showing that through writing, through putting things into language, you start generating greater levels of insight. And this writing is not about ruminating or dwelling, it's about trying

• 1:06:17Susan David?

  to understand. Perspective taking, fascinating when you're working with people and, and I don't work clinically anymore. I work often with individuals who are running companies and you know, it's fascinating when someone is stuck and they say to themselves something like, you know, there's no ways I'll be able to shift my career, or there's no ways we're going to have success on this project, or there's, so we're stuck in a story. And I used to experience this when I was working clinically, as you would say to someone, you know, what do we need to do about the situation? The person would say, I've got no idea, there's

• 1:06:58Susan David?

  nothing I can do, there's no hope. And then you might ask them a very like, simple question, like you would say something like, if the wisest person in the world was advising you what to do, what would they say? And suddenly, this person who's now starting to physically, mentally, look at things from a different perspective, now the wise person says, oh, well, they would tell me that I should do this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this.

• 1:07:29Rich Roll?

  So they already know the answer.

• 1:07:31Susan David?

  It's, it's, it's fascinating. It's fascinating, but but often when we are stuck, we're stuck in our first person perspective. And so when we start using this perspective taking capacity, what would the person who loves you most in the world be advising? We start being able to shift this in in therapy. When I was working as a therapist, we'd we'd often do this physically, which which sounds kind of bizarre, but it's it's very helpful is we would actually sit two chairs next to each other and we would ask the person to move physically from one chair to the next, having a conversation with themselves. So the person who's stuck and the wise person.

• 1:08:10Susan David?

  And it sounds, you know, but but what's just incredible is it starts to create a palpable shift. Um, another thing that I would say is, you know, often when we when we stuck, we talk to ourselves in the first person. So we'll say something like, I'm stuck. I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do.

• 1:08:30Susan David?

  Try shifting where you say, so Suzy, what do you think you should do right now about the situation? Again, it sounds kind of crazy, but it works. It works. We're starting to create space. And in that space is something incredibly powerful, which is empowerment and ownership of choice.

• 1:08:53Rich Roll?

  Within that, there is the development of an intellectual understanding, a more objective understanding of what the problem is and what the way forward looks like. But I feel like all too often, there's this massive gap in between the intellectual understanding and the tangible or sustainable behavioral change.

• 1:09:13Susan David?

  Yes.

• 1:09:13Rich Roll?

  Right. It's sort of like, I know I need to do that. And yet it still doesn't happen. Or there's something hamstringing that person that prevents them from taking the action. They have enough awareness to know is what they were they're supposed to be doing. And yet they just can't muster the the the will or whatever you would deem it to get it done.

• 1:09:32Susan David?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:09:33Rich Roll?

  So what's going on there?

• 1:09:34Susan David?

  And and so often what's going on there is is um, people, people, even though they've got the intellectual expertise around it, are still actually kind of in the contemplation stage. And it's it's it's really, you know, th- this is almost like when you're in a job in with your KPIs and your boss says, you've got to do these 10 things today. Otherwise, you're not going to get a promotion or. You know, it feels abstract and it feels like this is a list of stuff that I've got to do, but I don't have any intrinsic investment in it. And so what is absolutely just critical to on the ground behaviour change

• 1:10:15Susan David?

  is moving from this intellect into this is where these values come in.

• 1:10:22Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:10:22Susan David?

  This is where these values come in, like what is, what is the value to me? Not, okay, I've got to lose weight in an intellectual sense. But what does this being healthy mean to me in being able to watch my children grow up? And I can give you, you know, I'll give you an example of this. As many years ago, I was working with a client who's now a very good friend. And he had adopted a child from Nicaragua. And so this, this friend of mine had gotten married very late. He hadn't been able to have children and he adopted this kid. And this child had lived in the most heartbreaking

• 1:11:05Susan David?

  conditions in an orphanage where for three years, the child had been fed through bars of a crib and untouched and unheld. And my client, for many, many, many years, had been trying to make health changes. He had gone to doctors, his wife was at him. He had, you know, he had, he had done it all and he hadn't been able to shift. And he very much had the story of he travelled a lot. I'm a consultant, I can't get into a routine, I just can't do it. And his child, as the child grew up, had profound learning difficulties that had likely been precipitated by this experience in this orphanage. But the child turned out to be a remarkable artist.

• 1:11:50Susan David?

  And one day, this little boy.

• 1:11:55Susan David?

  Draws a picture and the picture is of this individual in pain, like excruciating emotional pain. And the little boy now at the age of sixteen titles the picture, The Orphan. And my client says to the little boy, or now to the adolescent, you know, I understand that you often draw experiences that you had when you were in the orphanage. But why is it that you're drawing a kind of sixteen year old version of you, but calling it The Orphan? And this little boy just started sobbing and he said to his dad, because I know I will be orphaned again. You know, I know that I will be orphaned again.

• 1:12:38Susan David?

  And my client describes how, and I explore this in the book, is his goal that was a have to goal, I have to lose weight, which is this prison that he had somehow wrapped himself around shifted into a want to goal. The want to goal is the goal that's intrinsically felt and values aligned. And he was able to, and now long standingly has made successful changes to his health and wellbeing. So I think what so often happens is we think that we can make changes by exerting brute force against ourselves. You know, we know we need to do it intellectually, but we exert brute force. But sustainable change actually doesn't happen in that way.

• 1:13:20Susan David?

  Sustainable change happens when there's an intrinsically felt motivation that is not a have to, but a want to, a value that is important to us.

• 1:13:33Rich Roll?

  It's a beautiful story. It's heartbreaking, but has a nice ending to it. It's powerful and I think you're, I think that's absolutely correct. I think that, you know, if somebody has a huge capacity for self will and dedication and devotion, they could white knuckle themselves through the achievement of some goal. But ultimately it's not a sustainable situation unless it's value, values aligned. And, and you know, that's why I always kind of talk about willingness and what a gift it is, because it's something you cannot. You can't give to somebody, like if somebody's willing or they're not.

• 1:14:09Susan David?

  Yes.

• 1:14:10Rich Roll?

  Like, like, somebody is willing to do whatever it takes to get sober, or they're not. Right. And how do you ignite that in another individual? And from what I'm gathering from what you're saying, like, I've always thought, well, that's just, there's, I'm powerless when it comes to that, if I'm trying to help another human being. But what you're saying, which is very interesting, and I haven't really, I'm just thinking out loud. But if you can get them to direct their attention towards their values, and then link up whatever that goal is, or that aspiration is, in a way that aligns with that values, that's a starting point to try to get them to a place where perhaps some, some willingness can begin to flourish.

• 1:14:50Susan David?

  Yes. And, and then there's the habit, you know, then there's the cues in the environment and the habit change. But I'll, I'll give you just a practical, research-based example of this. Imagine you are, you know, I keep going back to chocolate cake, because I'm obviously obsessed with chocolate cake today. But, so, okay, so imagine you've got a goal that you're trying to lose weight. I have to lose weight. Okay. And there's a piece of chocolate cake in the refrigerator. What we know is that when you've got a have-to goal, so it's not out of a sense of values, but more shame and obligation, very often, that piece of chocolate cake, we know in research studies, that what it does is it actually ramps up temptation. So have-to goals actually ramp up temptation.

• 1:15:33Susan David?

  They make us want the thing that we can't have, and we focus and focus and focus on it.

• 1:15:38Rich Roll?

  There's resistance.

• 1:15:39Susan David?

  There's resistance. So now you take that, and so you might say, well, what about willpower? You know, what about this, what you were talking about, this white-knuckled willpower? What about willpower, just brute force against it? But what's fascinating is, your brain processes taste sensation 195 milliseconds, before you even know you are making a choice. So what that means is-

• 1:16:04Rich Roll?

  We have no self-well.

• 1:16:05Susan David?

  You, you, willpower is this completely overrated idea. Your brain knows whether you are going to eat the chocolate cake, before you even know that you are making a, a, a choice here that involves willpower. So your brain's already decided you're eating the chocolate cake. Now you take that same goal, and you derive a sense of want-to motivation. So intrinsically values aligned, this is, this is why I don't want to eat the piece of chocolate cake. When you go to that refrigerator, instead of only seeing the chocolate cake, you see everything else. It ramps down temptation and it actually helps you to create sustainable behavior change.

• 1:16:46Susan David?

  So this is critical. And I think so much of the, so much of the conversation about how do we change habits? Is, is superficial because what it does is it's very much just about how do you change your environment? How do you cure your environment? All that stuff is really helpful. But it is the intrinsic stuff that allows it to be sustainable in a real way.

• 1:17:06Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. Yeah, I have my own experience with this. Eleven years, eleven years ago, I was like 50 pounds overweight and just junk food addict, couch potato type person. And my wife, of course, you know, was like, why don't you try this? Why don't you do this? She's like a spiritual seeker, you know, her, by her bed stand are all these amazing books about expanding your consciousness and stuff.

• 1:17:32Susan David?

  I'm expanding my good. What do you mean expand my consciousness?

• 1:17:36Rich Roll?

  Like it's her second nature to be in this, this sort of like self-improvement gestalt at all times. And I'm just like, I'm more like, I was practicing lawyer at the time and I was like, that's cool for her. Like that's, let me do my thing, you know? And she was never vibing me or anything like that. She could just see like a better version of me beyond.

• 1:17:56Susan David?

  That you're honoring yourself.

• 1:17:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's like she, she's like, you're better, like you can be like, I see you. You know, you can't see yourself. I see you. Let me help you. But the more she extended her hand to help me, the more I recoiled. Even when it was completely loving and not vibing or anything like that. Until she got to a place where she's like, she really had to like decide like, if this guy never changes, do I still want to be with him? And she decided that she did. And she really, not in a perfunctory lip service way, like she let it go. Like she just totally let it go. And she actually apologized to me and said, I'm sorry. Like, it's your life and I love you and I love being married to you. And like, I release you to your experience.

• 1:18:38Susan David?

  Yes.

• 1:18:39Rich Roll?

  And there was something that I was not conscious of at the time that was very powerful. Because what it did was it shifted my awareness from, to use your vernacular, from a should to a want. Because suddenly, I didn't have to do anything for her.

• 1:18:56Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:56Rich Roll?

  But it made the mirror suddenly present itself in front of me and led me to question, what do I want for myself? Which is a question I hadn't asked yet. Because I was so focused on, on, you know, like what other people were expecting me to do.

• 1:19:12Susan David?

  And the resistance to that.

• 1:19:14Rich Roll?

  And, and, and nothing was changing, right? And so when I finally did ask that question, I was able to, I was, this was all just in a very muddled, intuitive way. I wish I had had this book. This is a book that Julie would have given it, she would have said, you should have.

• 1:19:29Susan David?

  And you would have been like, no, I refuse to read it.

• 1:19:32Rich Roll?

  Yes. But that did really kind of lead me into trying to better define what my values were and what I aspired for myself. And that was a huge, tremendous shift that completely changed my life.

• 1:19:46Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:47Rich Roll?

  I mean, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you. Yeah, we would not be having this conversation. So in the moment, I guess what I'm getting at is, you know, I'm, I'm validating everything that you're saying, but also wanting to make the point that sometimes it's these tiny little subtle things that can have massive impact. That we shouldn't just give short shrift or skip over. Like, it can be those tiny gestures that in the moment, we may not feel are significant and yet have profound implications.

• 1:20:18Susan David?

  They are, they, I, I think one of the biggest misappreciations, if there's such a word, is this idea that in order to make change in our lives, that it needs to be, you know, let's sell up and go live on a farm in Greece or let's. And actually, there's just huge power in tiny tweaks, in small shifts. And they might be shifts in the other. Shifts in someone seeing you, you know, this beautiful saubona, I see you. And I still love you.

• 1:20:52Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:20:52Susan David?

  And that being able to be experienced as someone who's having the love regardless can free you.

• 1:21:00Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:21:01Susan David?

  And being able to make tiny shifts in our own lives can make a huge difference.

• 1:21:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I love that phrase. How do you say it again?

• 1:21:09Susan David?

  So it's this beautiful, it's I talk about in my TED, which is this in South Africa, there's this absolutely profoundly beautiful phrase, which is saubona. And anyone who's gone to South Africa, you hear it a hundred times on the on the streets. Saubona literally translated means it's a greeting, it's hello, but literally translated means I see you. And by seeing you, I bring you into being.

• 1:21:32Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:21:33Susan David?

  It's just.

• 1:21:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's beautiful.

• 1:21:35Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:35Rich Roll?

  So beautiful. Um, how does this? Well, let's talk about the the these little these little steps, the tiny tweaks. Because this is also like right in the sweet spot of the things that I like to to talk about and I talk about often. You know, we're in this culture of life hacks and shortcuts and like, what's the least amount of effort that I need to expend in order to get this result that I want? And we kind of celebrate these people that do extraordinary things. And we project onto them that this happened in a condensed period of time or was without failure and all of these things. And I think what gets lost in the discussion around people that do extraordinary things is that the path towards that

• 1:22:19Rich Roll?

  is contained fully and completely in the tiny little things that we do every single day anonymously, that in and of themselves seem insignificant, but which ultimately over time move mountains.

• 1:22:32Susan David?

  Yeah, so.

• 1:22:34Rich Roll?

  And no one likes to talk like, just change that one little thing.

• 1:22:37Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:37Rich Roll?

  And it's so doable.

• 1:22:38Susan David?

  I mean, not not to, you know, I'm I'm by no means an Elon Musk, but. But you know, when I think back to my own career, you know, the failings, I mean, I dropped out of university and went backpacking around the world for two years because I didn't know what I wanted to do. And then came back and, you know, did my PhD and did my postdoc, but it was this idea of being able to start shifting my understanding of myself in terms of what I wanted. But even in my own, you know, day to day life, the ways that I managed my time, that are tiny tweaks. Like, one of the most important things that I did even in trying to write this book is, I think there's this idea often that like, you know, you, you, you,

• 1:23:22Susan David?

  I don't know how you write, but for me, I certainly, you know, get zero inspiration when I'm on an aeroplane and jet lagged. And so I realised that for me, focus was just incredibly important. And so a tiny tweak that I made, just even in terms of my own productivity, was having one day a week, which is my appointment frictional day where I do, you know, all of the other stuff. And then I've got deep work. Now, that's such a small shift that I made, which is literally just a shift to my calendar, but it was completely, completely changing in terms of my productivity.

• 1:23:58Rich Roll?

  Right. And it's, there's nothing sexy about that.

• 1:24:00Susan David?

  There's nothing sexy about it.

• 1:24:01Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 1:24:02Susan David?

  Yeah, there's nothing sexy about it, but it's, but it's, it's one of the most powerful changes that I've made.

• 1:24:07Rich Roll?

  Right. Like, what are the tiny little things that you can do that are small shifts that you can then master and then move on to the next thing?

• 1:24:14Susan David?

  Yes.

• 1:24:15Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 1:24:15Susan David?

  Yes. The same, the same. And I talk about this in Emotional Agility, that, you know, if you're in the wrong career, or if you, the idea that you've got to give up your job and completely change your life. Whereas if we start engaging with something that we call job crafting, this idea that you might feel stuck in your job, and yes, you may just give up your job and move, move on to something else. But actually, what we can start doing is we can say, you know, what is, what is this, again, what is this emotion, this feeling of disengagement? What value is it pointing to that's important for me? It might be about growth, or it might be about creativity that's missing. And then we can start saying, well, where can I start finding more?

• 1:25:00Susan David?

  Growth. Where can I start finding more creativity? Where can I start finding more collaboration? And so, you know, we can put our hands up for different projects. We can engage in going to some meetings that we might not have otherwise. We can start crafting things. We can, we can start networking in different ways. So there are these small things that ultimately create another ecosystem for you.

• 1:25:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Everyone wants to think that it's just about up and quitting your job. And now I'm going to be a stand up comic or whatever. But it begins with like, well, why don't you just write a joke? You don't have to quit your job yet. Maybe you shouldn't. You probably shouldn't, right? But how can you bring expression to that repressed thing that is, that is calling to you in a way that doesn't need to disrupt your life, but ignites that spark that will then lead you to whatever comes next?

• 1:25:51Susan David?

  Yes, yes, which is, which is just so powerful. And I think the other thing that it does is it builds on the idea. And I, I have a lot of people contact me saying, you know, I'm unhappy in my job. What should I do? You know, should I just give it up? But something called you some, most of the time, not all the time, but something might have called that person to that particular job. And they might have developed a particular expertise that is valuable and that becomes a stepping stone to their other thing.

• 1:26:21Rich Roll?

  Right. It might inform, it might benefit them in the other thing. But I think it goes back to emotional agility. Because let's say you're in your job and to use the example of the stand up comic, you're repressing that impulse because you have this story that that's not the purview of the responsible breadwinner, right? And so you're pushing it aside. You're exerting all this energy to deny it. You know, it's there, but you're trying your best to not consciously engage it. Emotional agility would be, oh, that's kind of, that's tapping on me. Yeah, let's like, maybe let's explore that. Like, okay, I'll write a joke, you know, let me, but I can do it in a way that's somewhat dispassionate and I don't have to be, you get all crazy about it. But like, hmm, okay.

• 1:27:04Susan David?

  Yes.

• 1:27:05Rich Roll?

  Notice.

• 1:27:05Susan David?

  Yes.

• 1:27:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:06Susan David?

  Yes.

• 1:27:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's beautiful. And then on top of that, to kind of piggyback onto that, there's this idea that you talk about, which is the teeter tottering. Right?

• 1:27:15Susan David?

  Yes. You want to talk about that?

• 1:27:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I do.

• 1:27:18Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I love this too, and I have ideas about this, but explain what that means.

• 1:27:23Susan David?

  So it's this idea, so, so, you know, again, in the book, what I do is I talk about these four movements. I talk about showing up, which is noticing your thoughts and your emotions in compassionate ways. Stepping out, which is creating the space. Walking your why, which is this, how do we make values aligned choices? And then moving on, this is this tiny tweaks as well as this tita tota principle. So the idea behind this is that

• 1:27:47Susan David?

  often when in life, whether it's in relationships or at work, we develop strong levels of over competence. So the idea here is that you can do your job with your eyes closed or you know what to expect. And this doesn't mean you aren't busy, you might be very busy doing something in a rote way. And when we over competent, it's a very strong risk factor for just feelings of disengagement and ultimate, ultimately a sense of disempowerment. So over competence is very difficult for us, but by the same token, human beings like comfort and we rarely struggle with the opposite, which is over challenge.

• 1:28:29Susan David?

  Over challenge in a job is where you keep feeling like you're being thrown in the deep end. You never know what's going on, the goals keep on changing. It's again, a very strong risk factor for disengagement. And so the, the sweet spot of growth in our lives is where we're neither over competent nor over challenged. So what we're doing is we are working at the edge of our ability. So keeping on again, pushing the boundary, not just for the sake of it, again, in a values aligned way. You can take that same idea and you can apply it in relationships. Were you in a relationship where you, you know, go out with your spouse? You go to a movie, you know what the person's opinion is of the movie? You know what they're going to order at dinner? You know what you're going to talk about at dinner?

• 1:29:14Susan David?

  You're over competent in that relationship and it's a risk factor for that relationship. You also don't want to be over challenged, where you're walking on eggshells. So what do we do when we are trying to work at the edge of our ability? Usually what we're trying to do is we're trying to either expand breadth or depth. Breath might be we trying new things, we moving into environments that are maybe new, we maybe, instead of going out with the same group of friends with our spouse every week, or the same movie, we're trying different things. So that's breath. Depth is where you start going deeper, where you start developing greater levels of expertise,

• 1:29:56Susan David?

  or with your spouse, you start having conversations that you might not have had for the past 20 years. You know, when you actually ask the person what their dreams were, or what their fears were, or. So depth and breath are usually ways that we start expanding the edge and moving at the edge of our ability. And it's in that zone that we have our greatest levels of growth, and yes, discomfort, but discomfort is, again, the price of admission to a meaningful life.

• 1:30:24Rich Roll?

  Right. And I think in the, in the book, you use the example of the gymnast on the, walking on the beam, right? And, and as that person loses their balance, it's their core strength, AKA their emotional agility, that allows them to then stabilize themselves once again. Yeah, and it's sort of like, I had, a couple of weeks ago, I had the climber, Alex Honnold, in here, you know, who's just, just brilliant what he does. And it's, it's so extraordinary, what he's able to do. And I think it, it really is a testament in many ways to this principle, because he doesn't just up and climb El Cap without ropes, you

• 1:31:05Rich Roll?

  know, out of the blue. He's been doing this his whole life. And, you know, it's just, okay, one wall, a little bit more challenging than the last one. In the same way, you know, Laird Hamilton can surf this gigantic wave. It doesn't happen overnight. He doesn't go from a six foot wave to a 20 foot wave. He goes from a six foot wave to a six and a half foot wave, right? Taking these incremental little steps to push that envelope of comfort or discomfort, just the tiniest amount, until there's an acclimation, and then you're ready for the next challenge.

• 1:31:35Susan David?

  Yeah. And it's, it's a dishonor to our

• 1:31:39Susan David?

  Human imperfections to sell the narrative that it's simply something that happens in one fell swoop that, you know, just happens.

• 1:31:48Rich Roll?

  Right, and that is the narrative.

• 1:31:50Susan David?

  That is the narrative.

• 1:31:51Rich Roll?

  We read it and we love that hero's story and we believe that that's how it occurred. But because we want to, we want, we want these people to be bigger than life.

• 1:31:59Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:59Rich Roll?

  But they're all humans, just like we are, you know?

• 1:32:02Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:03Rich Roll?

  It's hard, though. How does this work? Do you, have you had any experience working with people in the throes of some form of addiction? Because that throws in an additional variable into this equation. Because if somebody is, if it's a substance addiction, then they're being compelled physiologically in a way that kind of makes it a little more tricky than the average person who's just stuck in a thought pattern. But I think looking at addiction from a broader perspective and as a spectrum, I think on some level, we're all addicts. We're, we all engage in compulsive behaviors to some form or another in ways that lead us astray. So is there, is there a tweak on this? Or do you have any sense of, I mean, would it be the same application?

• 1:32:49Rich Roll?

  If you were like treating somebody who's dealing with something like this?

• 1:32:52Susan David?

  So a lot of these ideas have been applied in, you know, across many clinical contexts. Pain, addiction, depression, anxiety. And, you know, they, they are powerful. I mean, I think the thing with addiction that you alluded to earlier is that addiction is very often a emotion regulation strategy. You know, what's happened, not in the addiction as it ultimately presents, but what's happened very early on is that it is a way of regulating our emotions. And so, you know, we start being able to pass out short-term strategies that are effective and ineffective, and long-term strategies that are ineffective and ineffective.

• 1:33:35Susan David?

  And short-term strategies that people use to regulate their emotions that are effective, of course, are things like exercise or going to the gym or getting enough sleep. And the ineffective ones are the overeating, overdrinking, you know, drinking. It's all of those kind of things. The long-term effective.

• 1:33:55Susan David?

  Is when we are starting to face into the situation in a way that is active, that's actually starting to move us into action. And that is direct, that's recognizing the situation for what it is. And so, so these ideas are absolutely applicable across all contexts. But I think with the, you know, additional layer of recognition that addiction has often started early on as

• 1:34:29Susan David?

  a maybe not even fought out, but, but avoidant strategy of pain.

• 1:34:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, of course, you know, of course. Yeah, there's some discomfort. That you're, I mean, the, as the adage goes, you know, the, the drugs and the alcohol. That's not the addiction, that's the solution. Right. The, the addiction is rooted in the emotional pain that is often can be traced back. Are you familiar with Gabor Maté and the work that he's done with early emotional trauma? Yeah. And all of that. Like, so that's that. And then, and then, once you get sober, the, the delusion is that you've solved the problem. But actually, you've just taken away your medication.

• 1:35:11Susan David?

  The layers of.

• 1:35:12Rich Roll?

  Then, you know, then you have to like, treat the underlying condition, which is that sense of disease, that emotional, that emotional pain. And that involves confronting it in a way that I think, you know, these tools are highly applicable to.

• 1:35:27Susan David?

  Yeah. And the active learning of new coping strategy, like new different adaptive coping strategies.

• 1:35:34Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right, right. How do you see this playing out? We talked about the micro and the, and the macro. Most of what we've been talking about is, is the micro. But like, what's a good example of how emotional rigidity is creating social societal problems that we need to look at? Do you have an example for that?

• 1:35:57Susan David?

  Well, well, it's, it's.

• 1:36:00Rich Roll?

  I mean, apartheid is obviously.

• 1:36:02Susan David?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that there, I think that there are many examples. There are many examples where. Our difficulty in even seeing our own pain and being able to recognize our own sadness or anger cuts us off, cuts us off from being able to be empathetic and compassionate to the other.

• 1:36:27Rich Roll?

  Right, and intimate to the extent that you're capable of with the people that you care about the most.

• 1:36:33Susan David?

  Yeah, yeah, so I think it plays out, I mean, I think it plays out into the way we treat the earth, I think it plays out into the dehumanizing of the other, because when we, when we, cutting ourselves off from our own, you know, and we're talking at the extreme here, but if we're cutting ourselves off from our own difficulty emotional, even experiencing this narrative where we're saying things like, well, you know, it's all just about being positive. What that starts to imply is that people who are in pain, people who are in poverty, people who are in discrimination, should, you know, just choose a better attitude.

• 1:37:17Susan David?

  Basically, you know, there's this very, very, you know, it is the abrogation of societal responsibility, because there's, there's, there's this idea that's baked into a narrative, that's a narrative that says that only positive emotions are the ones that matter, and that you should simply just choose your positive emotions, rather than be open and compassionate to the fragmented reality of human experience. That, the flip side of that is what it then starts to imply is that when people are in, and obviously, again, this is the extreme, that when people are in difficulty, it's because they've got a bad attitude, because they haven't been able to move themselves into this positive space.

• 1:38:02Rich Roll?

  Right, and the irony, of course, is that if you can embrace all of that emotional complexity, you could potentially get to a place where you have a positive attitude.

• 1:38:13Susan David?

  Yes. So back to my point, which is that I'm not anti-happiness. I actually think that what I'm talking about is the pathway to authentic happiness. It's, it's, it's.

• 1:38:23Rich Roll?

  Well, happiness is a tricky word.

• 1:38:25Susan David?

  Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's absolutely. Yeah.

• 1:38:28Rich Roll?

  As a, you know, a life of purpose and fulfillment, a life of personal meaning to you.

• 1:38:33Susan David?

  Yeah. But, but even if we think about, if we think about hate in a political spectrum, you know, there is, there is this idea that there is the other, that there's, there's this good and this bad, there's the, the right and the wrong, there's, and sometimes we just, we, you know, if the gods of right came down and said to you, you know, you are right, that person is a complete idiot, you still get to choose how you want to engage with them. And unfortunately, I think what happens is in our being hooked and being emotionally rigid about being right, we've lost our ability to have the conversation that really matters.

• 1:39:14Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. Yeah. And I think in that example that you just gave, you know, to, let's say you, somebody wronged you and you have justifiable anger or you hold a resentment towards that person. Ultimately, you're the one who's suffering as a result of that, right?

• 1:39:29Susan David?

  Yes.

• 1:39:30Rich Roll?

  It's like, it's not serving you in that way, no matter how correct that you are.

• 1:39:35Susan David?

  I'm, I'm often, I'm often interviewed by Harvard Business Review and, you know, and people will often ask questions like, what if my boss is a complete idiot? Like, what if my boss really is a complete idiot? Or what if this organization has really done me wrong? Or what if my team member really is a slacker? And it just reaches the point, and, and with complete compassion, you can kind of understand that frustration. But if the gods of right came down and said, you are right, like, you are right, you are being mistreated, you are right.

• 1:40:07Rich Roll?

  Where does that leave you?

• 1:40:08Susan David?

  You know, where does that leave you? You know, is your action workable or is it not workable? Is your action bringing you closer to being the person you want to be? You know, if you are feeling wronged by your coworker and so you disengaging, shutting down in your career, not contributing, how is that serving your career goals?

• 1:40:31Susan David?

  You know, and it might be that, yes, this is a case where you want to make a shift, where you want to make a tweak.

• 1:40:35Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:40:36Susan David?

  Um, but, but I think, you know, one form of rigidity, of emotional rigidity, is being hooked on being right.

• 1:40:44Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, that's a big one, I think, right?

• 1:40:47Susan David?

  Rather than, rather than asking the question of, is my reaction serving?

• 1:40:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:40:53Susan David?

  What I'm trying to be?

• 1:40:55Rich Roll?

  In, in sobriety, they say, do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?

• 1:40:59Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:59Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 1:41:00Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:00Rich Roll?

  And so, and, and happy would be recontextualized in your example as, you know, do you want to, do you want to be right? Or do you want to live a life in accordance with your values?

• 1:41:08Susan David?

  Correct.

• 1:41:08Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 1:41:09Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:10Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:10Rich Roll?

  All right. Well, we got to wrap this up here, but, but let's just leave the listeners with,

• 1:41:17Rich Roll?

  um, you know, some sense of a first step. Perhaps somebody who's listening, the lights are going on for the first time and they're like, oh my God, I've been telling myself this or that. Of course, you know, pick up the book Emotional Agility and this will see your, see yourself through and, and hopefully raise additional awareness around these things. But what is like a first step for somebody who's on the very first page of beginning this process of trying to better understand their motivations and what their values are?

• 1:41:46Susan David?

  Absolutely. So just to sum, emotional agility is the ability to be with your thoughts, your emotions, your stories in ways that are compassionate, curious and courageous, and to take actions that are concordant with your values. And so I think a first step is if you're someone who becomes judgy about whether you're right or wrong, whether you should or shouldn't have a story. One of the most critical aspects is ending the struggle by dropping the rope.

• 1:42:16Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:42:17Susan David?

  And what I mean by that is, um, just making a conscious choice to notice your emotions.

• 1:42:26Rich Roll?

  It's a great first place to start. Well, thank you very much.

• 1:42:30Susan David?

  Thank you for having me. I'm so glad it worked out.

• 1:42:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's great. Um, the book is amazing. Congrats on all your success. It's super well deserved. I mean, what's, what's next for you?

• 1:42:42Rich Roll?

  Do you feel like, do you feel this pressure now? You gotta like?

• 1:42:45Susan David?

  No, no, no. There are a couple of things that I wanna, there are a couple of things that I wanna do. If anyone, so I, I want to, firstly, I wanna write a children's book because I just think it would be a beautiful, fun project around some of these ideas. I was interviewed by the New York Times on these ideas as they're related to children. And I wanna write a book for kids. So if Jamie Lee Curtis is listening and you wanna collaborate on it.

• 1:43:09Rich Roll?

  Ah, she's your, she's your number one?

• 1:43:11Susan David?

  Well, I think, I just love her work. I love her work. So that's, so that's something that I wanna do. One of the other things that I'm working on is taking these ideas and when, often people struggle with, how do I actually enact change?

• 1:43:27Rich Roll?

  Right, like a workbook.

• 1:43:28Susan David?

  You know, I'm stuck, what do I actually do? Well, what I'm working on at the moment is designing a, um, a computer program. So it's, it's a kind of system-based application where people can input some of the issues that they're struggling with and will answer some questions about that. And what it starts to do is to actually use that information to coach them through the process.

• 1:43:53Rich Roll?

  That's cool. So like in an app format?

• 1:43:55Susan David?

  Yeah, so it's a combination of a, of a kind of survey where people are completing information, but it, but it's actually providing evidence-based coaching feedback to them. So that's, that's what I'm starting to work on.

• 1:44:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're, you're on the road speaking all the time, right?

• 1:44:10Susan David?

  I do a lot of speaking and, you know, I do work with Harvard Medical School. And so I've, um, yeah, but, but those are, those are things that I'm starting to explore now.

• 1:44:19Rich Roll?

  Awesome. And if people wanna connect with you, they're inspired by your message, where's the best place for them to go?

• 1:44:24Susan David?

  Yeah, please do. I love hearing from people. So I'm on all social media, I think, that gets out of, gets out of hand as to what social media is. But I think I'm on, I think I'm on everything. But also on my website, the quiz is at susandavid.com/learn. And if anyone wants to connect, there's, there's information on my website as well.

• 1:44:47Rich Roll?

  All right. Thanks so much.

• 1:44:48Susan David?

  Thank you.

• 1:44:51Susan David?

  Bye.

• 1:44:54Rich Roll?

  Okey dokey, excellent. We did it. I hope you enjoyed that one. Make a point to let Susan know what you thought of our conversation by hitting her up on Twitter @SusanDavid_PHD. And check out the show notes, the links, the resources related to today's conversation on the episode page at Richroll.com to more deeply immerse yourself in the world of Susan and her work. And on that note, if you would like to learn more about your own emotional agility, something I highly suggest, check out her quiz at SusanDavid.com/learn. Once again, there is a brand new and revised edition of Finding Ultra that is now available in the US and Canada. Check it out on Amazon. 35% new material, really proud of it. We

• 1:45:37Rich Roll?

  have signed copies at Richroll.com for all my international friends. We ship worldwide. And I'm really excited about that. And excited about this book in general. And I really want to share what I put into it with all of you. And in addition, Plant Power Way Italia, our brand new cookbook, which is amazing, is now available for preorder. Reserve your copy now from your favorite online bookseller. And if you are a female, make sure to check out my second latest post on my blog for a chance to win a free spot on our upcoming retreat in Tuscany, which is going to be going down May 19th through 26th of this year, 2018. It's an extraordinary $5,000 value. The contest is only open through April 24th, so jump on it now for all the rules and the form to fill out and all that kind

• 1:46:22Rich Roll?

  of good stuff. Again, it's on my blog, Richroll.com, second most recent post. If you would like to support my work, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or on whatever platform you enjoy this content. As always, it really helps with the show's visibility, extending reach and audience. It helps me book the finest guests for future episodes. So it would mean a lot. It only takes you guys a minute, doesn't cost you a thing. You can also support the show on Patreon at Richroll.com/donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, interstitial music. Michael Gibson for videography. Theme music, as always, by Analemma. And I've got a new team member here. Michael Gibson took a gig.

• 1:47:07Rich Roll?

  And I had to find a new video guy. So Blake Curtis is coming on board to handle future video projects as well as the graphic assets which he put together for this episode. So, thank you Blake. Thanks for the love you guys. I'll see you back here soon. Peace, love, plants, namaste.

• 1:47:27Rich Roll?

  Talk to you soon.