Susan David ON: Why You Shouldn’t Avoid Difficult Conversations & How to Respond with Emotional Intelligence

You know and love this podcast. Jay’s exclusive Genius workshops and meditations take your well-being to the next level. Try them today at https://shetty.cc/OnPurposeGenius At 15, Susan felt like she had so many emotions swirling around her head she could hardly speak. Now a world-renowned psychologist, Susan has not only learned to navigate her emotions--she has written the book on it. This week, Jay Shetty speaks with Harvard Psychologist Susan David and author of Emotional Agility about how to better understand and befriend your emotions, and how this emotional agility will make you a better communicator. Quiz: https://www.susandavid.com/quiz Book: https://www.susandavid.com/about-emotional-agility Ted Talk: https://www.susandavid.com/the-talks See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. 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.

• 0:00Jay Shetty?

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• 0:43Jay Shetty?

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• 1:26Jay Shetty?

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• 2:01Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by AG1. Are you feeling September reset too? Shorter days, longer to-do lists, earlier alarms, all those routines you promised to yourself you'd pick back up. It can feel like your whole life is recalibrating. And when everything around you is changing, it helps to have a few things you can rely on. AG1 Next Gen is one of those easy habits to keep. It's the clinically-backed, comprehensive daily health drink that supports your gut health, energy production, and foundational nutrition all in one scoop. AG1's ingredients are sourced from quality partners for absorption, potency, and nutrient density to deliver the foundational nutrition your body needs. And alongside a proper diet,

• 2:45Jay Shetty?

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• 3:10Jay Shetty?

  Are you in a toxic, negative place and need to get out of it? Are you looking for better ways to navigate life, career, love, friendship, and more? Then Genius is for you. I do a few free workshops a year for the public, but the majority of the time, I'm going live in weekly private Genius workshops and meditations. It's been shown that just 90 days of Genius workshops and meditations improve happiness by 40%, reduce anxiety by 25%, and increase daily motivation by 75%. It's incredible. But how does it work? Genius lets you access personal coaching with me in three different ways. You'll meet me inside weekly live coaching workshops and meditations with the group. You'll be able to access hours and hours of personal coaching with me on the Genius app,

• 3:56Jay Shetty?

  and you'll get to go on Genius journeys and experience curated workshop sequences that are designed to achieve a specific goal for you. You can sign up at jshettygenius.com today. I can't wait to welcome you into the Genius community. See you on the inside.

• 4:23Jay Shetty?

  Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every single one of you who come back every week to listen, learn and grow. Now, I'm really proud of the incredible community that we've been able to build together. And I'm really excited to introduce you to today's guest because I think this is something we've all been struggling with for the past year. And I've been really trying to find the right person to have a conversation with about 2020, about the new normal, about our emotional wellbeing. And I think this is the one. I think this is it. So I'm really, really excited to introduce you to none other than Susan David, who's a Harvard Medical School psychologist and bestselling author.

• 5:07Jay Shetty?

  Her most recent book, Emotional Agility, describes the psychological skills critical to thriving in times of complexity and change. You may know Susan from her famous TED Talk on the topic of emotional agility. And if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. And as it went viral with over 1 million views in its first week of release. Susan is the CEO of Evidence-Based Psychology, a co-founder of the Institute of Coaching, and on the Scientific Advisory Board of Thrive Global and Virgin Pulse. Please welcome to On Purpose, Susan David. Susan, thank you for being here.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Thank you. I'm delighted to be with you today.

• 5:46Jay Shetty?

  I'm so excited for this. And I really meant what I said. I think what's been happening over the past year, and as we were just connecting a few moments ago, you were talking about, you know, the start of the year. I've really been trying to find the right person to have this conversation with because I think there's a lot of aspects of your work that are, even though you wrote this book five years ago, so much of it is so integral to what we're experiencing today. So I'm really fascinated. But I wanted to start with a quote you shared on Twitter the other day. And I'm going to read it out because I don't want to mess it up. But you recently posted something on Twitter, and it floored me.

• 6:28Jay Shetty?

  And it says, "Courage at its most powerful is rarely loud. Mostly, it's a whisper. Those moments every day when you do what matters." Tell me more about this idea of courage being a whisper.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  So firstly, yes, I mean, my work that I started so many years ago is really finding, I think it's a moment in a world that feels like very often it's delivering gut punch after gut punch to us. So Jay, let me start in a story and then you'll see what I mean by courage is a whisper. I think often we think about courage as being very loud, it's very active and it's very out there. When I was around five years old, I became petrified by the idea of death. And this might sound like an unusual fear for a five-year-old, but in fact, at around that

• 7:29Speaker 01

  age, children become aware of their own mortality and the fact that their parents won't be around forever. And I recall going into my father's bed. I would lie between my mother and my father, and I would say to my father, Daddy, promise me you'll never die. Promise me you'll never die. And my father would comfort me, and he would comfort me with soft pats and with kisses, but he never lied. And he said to me, Susie, we all die. It's normal to be scared. And what he was inviting me into in that moment was a whisper of courage, you know, a whisper of courage

• 8:13Speaker 01

  for him as a parent, where our impetus or our impulse is always to fake positivity or make things right, or to do away, or to storytell our way out of something. It would have been so easy for him to say, you know, don't worry, everything's going to be fine. But his message to me was this idea that courage is a whisper, and courage is not about not being fearful, but rather about walking in the direction of your fears, step by step. So what do I mean by a whisper? When we have an argument with our spouse, and we love that person,

• 8:55Speaker 01

  It takes courage to reach out for a hug rather than pull in and develop a wall of disconnect. It takes courage sometimes to speak up, but sometimes it actually takes courage to slow down and to not speak and to listen. And so the idea with courage is again, that it's often seen as being something that's only available to heroes. And yet I think that life, every single day invites all of us into choice points. The choice point might be, you know, do I reach for the muffin or do I reach for the fruit?

• 9:37Speaker 01

  The choice point might be, do I speak up or do I slow down? The choice point might be, do I have a difficult conversation or do I not? And these are the pieces of courage that I think get expressed in a whisper. And why I think it's so important is because there is a ground swell of whisper that makes change. And it also speaks to what we know about a human capability. And that is that human capability is not often this idea that I'm upset and I'm frazzled and therefore I need to go sell up and go live on a wine farm in France.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  So often the change that we bring about in our own lives is through these incremental moments of values-aligned choices. This whisper that can often be fearful because it often says, you know, when we experience high emotions, it's often this idea of like, you shouldn't speak up, you shouldn't do those things. But when we move into that courage, we actually ground ourselves in the enormous change.

• 10:50Jay Shetty?

  What a beautiful answer. I love that story you told and I'm going to come back to that later. I'm withholding my temptation to dive into a subject that I want to share. I want to save for later. So, anyone who's listening, if you see me going that way, I'm pulling myself back right now, if you're listening, to asking a question that I think is going to help us build to that. When we speak about courage, Susan, tell me about the last time you, or the most recent time, that you felt you did something courageous, but it may not have looked that way to anyone else? Because I think sometimes we think of courage as being perceivable, right? And that's what you're saying. When you're talking about courage being a whisper

• 11:35Jay Shetty?

  and you're talking about big change actually coming from a groundswell of whispers. When recently did you act on courage, but actually no one really would have sensed it that way apart from you?

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Well, I think one of the most profound ways that we can be courageous is what I describe in Emotional Agility, and that is courage with our own difficult emotions. And certainly, I am in Boston and we are nearing the first year anniversary, so a one-year anniversary of basically being, I don't want to say housebound, but certainly in the last year I have not been to a restaurant, a coffee shop, or anything else. I'm married to a physician who's very much in the context of this experience that we are all having.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  And so, the courage on a day-to-day basis is the courage for myself of compassion, because I'm home and remote schooling two children. And that courage, it's a whisper, but it's the courage of...

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Being able to feel my feelings. It's the courage of being able to recognise that when things are difficult, actually, things are difficult and I don't need to judge myself for that because this is a moment that many of us are finding difficult. And so I think courage in its most quiet and most powerful is expressed in the conversation that we have with ourselves. If, if we are not able to see ourselves, how do we create change in the world? How do we see other people? How do we relate to our partners in an effective way if we are not able to see ourselves? And so being able to see ourselves, our difficult thoughts, emotions and stories,

• 13:24Speaker 01

  I think is one of the, the, the most elemental building blocks of courage.

• 13:32Jay Shetty?

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• 14:17Jay Shetty?

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• 15:02Jay Shetty?

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• 15:46Jay Shetty?

  I couldn't agree with you more, and I think we're hearing about this more and more now, the idea of looking into your fears, sitting with a difficult emotion, trying to understand those feelings. But practically, what do we actually do with it? Because I find that we see two extremes. We see some people say, "Jay, I think about my feelings so much that I end up feeling overwhelmed and overthinking and procrastinating, or maybe pushing myself into feeling completely burdened by my feelings." And then you hear the opposite, where it's like, "Jay, I don't even know what my feelings are. I don't even let myself feel that because I'm so scared." And that's the courage part that you're mentioning. But when you actually look at your feelings,

• 16:31Jay Shetty?

  when you sit with a difficult emotion, what do you do with it? What does that practically look like?

• 16:37Speaker 01

  So Jay, what you allude to is exactly profoundly important. And...

• 16:44Speaker 01

  I wonder if I can share a story and I hope it's not the one that you were gonna draw me on a little bit later.

• 16:49Jay Shetty?

  No, please.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  You know, I gave the example earlier of um my father and these conversations with my father. So I'm five at the time. Fast forward uh ten years. My mother calls me and she says to me, go and say goodbye to dad. Because now my father's forty two years old and unbeknownst to us, when I was five, ten years later, when I was now fifteen, he was gonna be diagnosed with cancer and so my mother is calling me to go and say goodbye to him. And I'm this little girl now walking with courage to say goodbye to my parent.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  And what's kind of remarkable in that experience is afterwards I had what so many of us have, which is this idea that like, what do I do with my difficult emotions? My father has died. We live in a world that seems to conspire against our feelings. Even though there's a lot of like, feel your feelings, still the meta-message of our emotions is that we've got to be positive, that we've got to be happy. And so I am this fifteen year old and I become the master of being okay. I'm not dropping a single grade, I'm getting on with life.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  And I have this teacher who um recognizes my pain and who says to me, as she hands out blank notebooks to the class, she says, write, tell the truth and write like no one is reading. And so what do you have there? You have this invitation to come into the self. And what this does is it sparks off then my career as a psychologist, as a researcher into the world of emotions. And so what you describe, which is often when people are dealing with difficult emotions, they tend to do one of two things. The the first is to bottle emotions. Bottling is where you push them aside, you disconnect it from them. You're often doing it with very good intentions.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  You're saying things like, I've just got to get on with my goals and my job and my my life, you know? So I don't have time to feel these feelings. And so it's almost like you've got this, this uh stack of books and you walking, but you've got the books like really held very tensely away from you. And what we know psychologically is you will drop the books. It might take you a little while to drop them, but you will drop the books. And dropping the books when you've been bottling your emotions either looks like, you know, you, you say something that you didn't intend to say over the Thanksgiving table or to your colleague at a meeting. Um, dropping the books can often look like just when life hits you,

• 19:38Speaker 01

  not have the capacity to cope because you haven't been practicing difficult emotions. And dropping the books can um often play out in what we see in high levels of depression, lower levels of wellbeing, high levels of anxiety. And obviously there are many factors that play into these, but that's what bottling looks like. But on the other hand, what we can do is we can become so immersed by how I feel. We become victimized by our Twitter feed or what someone else said and whether the relationship is toxic or not toxic. And it's this like overwhelm of emotions and it's almost like taking books and holding them so closely to yourself

• 20:23Speaker 01

  that you are unable to hug your child. You are unable to live in your life because you are so closed into yourself. And so what does emotional health look like when it comes to emotions? Um, it is fundamentally about the courage of gentle acceptance. You know, gentle acceptance in the same way as if you went outside and it was raining. A lack of gentle acceptance would be like, why is it raining? I wish it wouldn't rain when I, you know, wanna go and have fun. Why does it always rain when I wanna do? That's not gentle acceptance. Gentle acceptance is, gee, it's raining. You know, that's what gentle acceptance is.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  So the first component of emotional health of that middle ground where it's not bottling, where it's not brooding, but it's actually being healthy and whole as a human being is gentle acceptance of our own and other people's emotions. But there are also Core components of skill that become necessary here. So I know one thing that you've spoken a bit about and certainly something that I've found in my own research is that often when people are struggling, they'll use labels to describe what it is that they're feeling, but they're often these big umbrella labels.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  I'm stressed is the most common one. You know, everything's I'm stressed, I'm stressed. But, but there's a world of difference between stress and disappointment, or stress and feeling unsupported, stress and depleted, stress and that knowing, knowing feeling of I'm in the wrong job or the wrong career, or this relationship isn't working out. So when we label everything as stress, as an example, and I've got other very practical strategies that I can share, but when we label everything as stress, physiologically, we don't actually know how to manage that. So if we just take that one example of stress and we say, what are two other emotions

• 22:34Speaker 01

  that I'm actually experiencing? I'm depleted. Oh, I need to take some time for self-care, whether that's a walk or a piece of music. Oh, the thing that I'm calling stress is actually I'm worried about a difficult conversation and I'm avoiding it. Okay? And this thing that I'm calling stress is actually anxiety about the conversation. When we label our emotions more accurately, literally what it does physiologically is it enables what is called the readiness potential in our brains. And it's the, it's the action readiness that allows us to start saying, what's the cause of that emotion?

• 23:17Speaker 01

  And what do I need to now do in response to it? So literally the action of moving out of bottling, moving out of brooding, but moving into gentle acceptance, but then also recognizing that we own our emotions, they don't own us. And so how do we own our emotions? We own our emotions by accurately labeling as one example. What this allows us to do is to breathe into the space of what it is that we do next. And I can give some other practical examples of how this can be helpful or strategies that people can use, but I just want to. Yeah, please.

• 23:57Jay Shetty?

  Oh no, please, please, let's hear them. I think, I think I'm so glad that you introduced the idea of labeling emotions. I'm so happy that you went there because you're spot on that we use these umbrella terms that even we don't know how to define. And not only do we not understand them, we challenge our partners because we think they don't understand us either. And so we are trying to get them to vocalize and verbalize and articulate what we're feeling to us. And we feel, no, that's, that's not how I feel right now. And it's like, because you don't know how you feel. So it creates a lot of issues. But yes, please give us some of those practical steps in the direction, please.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  For the practical steps, actually, you, you kind of evoke an idea or a memory of mine, which is, I remember a couple of years ago, working with a client. And this particular client wouldn't label everything as stress. He would label things as angry. He was very quick to anger. And every time you said to him, you know, what's going on for you? He would say, I'm, I'm just angry, like, I'm, I'm angry. How's your team doing? My team's angry. You know, my team's angry. And it was, it was this fascinating conversation. And I started to just do this, this very quick thing with him, which is saying to him, what

• 25:18Speaker 01

  are two other options? What are two other emotion options? And he started to say, he was in a new role, and he started to say, maybe I'm not angry, maybe I'm scared. You know, maybe I'm scared. And maybe the team's not angry, maybe the team is actually distrustful because they've had a really bad experience with a previous leader, and maybe they're trying to build trust. Now, you can see, if you go into a conversation with someone of I'm angry and they angry, well, what's the next step? The next step is that we all get locked into right versus wrong. But if you're going into the conversation with...

• 26:04Speaker 01

  I see that my ego wants to do well. But actually, I want to connect with my values here, which is that I want to care for this team and I want to see their mistrust. And that the team's coming up from a different place. That's a completely different conversation. And so Jay, a couple of months after having this conversation and working with my client on this. He and I, um, it was a consulting client and I became friendly with his wife as well and we went out to dinner and she said to me, this simple skill actually completely changed the tenor of their relationship.

• 26:41Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  He would come home from work and he would say to her, oh, you, you seem angry. And she would be like, I'm, I'm not angry, I'm just tired, you know, I'm just tired. Or I'm not angry, I just need some support.

• 26:57Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  And so this is, it, it seems so subtle. But to not, I don't want to make too big a thing of this, but we actually know that children as young as two and three years old, who are encouraged to label their emotions more accurately. Actually, over time, have not only a greater levels of psychological wellbeing. But you can actually see that you are more able to regulate yourself and to develop perseverance. If you have a greater level of accuracy around your emotions. A child who's now sixteen years old, where someone says, oh, I've got a great idea, let's let the air out of the principal's car tyres.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  The child who's able to say, this thing that I'm feeling that, that feels really exciting. But actually beneath the excitement, I've got a sense of disquiet about this. And the child who's able to elevate that disquiet is the child who's able to resist peer pressure. Who's able to have the cornerstone of saying, you know, I want to go to the party, but I actually also want to study. And how can I bring myself to that latter option? So it is a profoundly important skill. So anyway, I, I promised other practical strategies, but I wanted to detour into that example if that's helpful.

• 28:28Jay Shetty?

  Oh, that example is absolutely brilliant. And I think it's great because you're spot on that even when we see other people, we project our idea of what their behavior suggests. So like you said, like your client who would go home and say, oh, you look angry. That's him projecting what he thinks anger looks like. And I've done that for so long. As soon as you said that, I was thinking, oh, yeah. Like, when I see someone really uncomfortable, I get really uncomfortable around them, even though it has nothing to do with me. But maybe they're not uncomfortable. Maybe they're just feeling another emotion that I'm not actually aware of, and I haven't checked that. So I think that's brilliant. And I didn't even know about the, to hear about that in children's psychology.

• 29:13Jay Shetty?

  I'd never heard that before. And so that level of emotional agility in a young person, to be able to decipher between two choices, whether that be trouble or whether that be study, I think that's really, really interesting. I didn't know about that study at all. So that's really, I loved it. I'm so glad you went there.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I mean, it's such an important skill. So some other practical strategies or some other ways that we can kind of think about emotional agility? Because if you said to me, or if you say, you know, well, what is emotional agility? Let's ground this. Emotional agility is basically about our ability to be healthy human beings. Okay, to be healthy with ourselves. The idea that every single day we have thousands of thoughts. You know, thought might be, I'm not good enough, or being undermined. An emotion might be an emotion of sadness, or grief, or loneliness. We have stories. Some of these stories were written on our mental chalkboards.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  When we were five years old, stories about what emotion is good or bad, what emotions are allowed versus not allowed. And that can lead us to be comfortable, uncomfortable with emotions, even in our adult life, and feel like we've either got the skill with them or we don't. Um. But we also have other stories. We've got stories about whether we're creative, what kind of love we deserve, whether we leaders. You know, again, some of these stories are written on our mental chalkboards. When we were just little, when we were little. And a very important aspect of emotional agility is that these thoughts, emotions and stories are normal. A very important part of emotional agility is not this idea that there's good emotions and bad emotions,

• 31:02Speaker 01

  and we should only feel the good emotions. Or that there's good thoughts that we allowed and we not allowed bad thoughts. A very important part of emotional agility is the recognition that when you have difficult thoughts, emotions and stories, this is literally your evolutionary history doing its job, which is to try to protect you. So there is nothing inherently good or bad about any of this. So what is it that makes us in agile or ineffective or unhealthy in the world? The litmus is this idea that when we get stuck in

• 31:48Speaker 01

  our thoughts, our emotions and our stories, where we either stuck in the avoidance of it or stuck in feeling that it's a directive and that it's telling us what to do. You know, I'm feeling undermined, so I'm gonna leave the room. Or I'm feeling shut down in this meeting, so now I'm gonna stop contributing. When we do this, we are letting our thoughts, emotions and our stories drive us rather than us driving them. Okay, rather than us owning them. So what is, you know, what are other parts of emotional agility that are critical? I've already spoken about showing up to difficult emotions with acceptance.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  And I would add in there, very importantly, with compassion. You know, that it takes and is necessary for us to be compassionate towards ourselves as human beings. Um, but then we also want to be able to step out of our difficult emotions. And so the example that I've given is emotion granularity. But I'll give you another example, which is, um, when we feel, and this will probably connect with you in terms of your background and your experiences. But often what we do is we use language to describe our emotions. That is a linguistic trap.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  So we'll say things like, I am angry, I am sad, I am being undermined. And you can hear that when you do this, I am sad, all of me, one hundred percent of me is sad. There's no space for anything else. There's no space for intention, for values, for breathing, for our wisdom. We've all got wisdom inside of us. That when there's all this noise going on about what we're allowed to feel and not feel, and whether we're hustling with our emotions, we are unable very often to connect with our wisdom. So when we say, I am sad, you are defining yourself by the emotion.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  But you are not the emotion. You are a human being who is more than your emotions or stories or thoughts. And those are part of you, but they're not definitional of you. And so a beautiful metaphor of this is it's almost like when people say things like, I am sad, it's almost like the sad is the cloud and they are the cloud. You know, you have become the cloud. But you are not the cloud, you are the sky. You know, you are the sky. You are capacious and able to have all of your clouds and to still be the sky.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  So how do you develop this meta view, this ability to observe your emotions? One um strategy that's very practical and you can use even in a difficult meeting or a difficult conversation is to simply notice your thoughts, your emotions, or your stories for what they are. They are thoughts, they are emotions, they are stories, they are not fact. So what does this look like? I am sad, I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad.

• 35:10Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  I'm being undermined. I'm noticing the thought that I'm being undermined.

• 35:16Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  It sounds very subtle, but what you are starting to do is you are starting to create linguistic space between you and the emotion. And in that linguistic space, you are then allowed and enabling yourself to bring the other parts of yourself forward. Um and one of the core parts that we want to bring forward is our values. That's a very important part of emotional agility.

• 35:43Jay Shetty?

  Excellent. I hope everyone who's listening and watching right now is taking notes because those, no, I I mean it because that is such a simple, subtle, but yet so practical and such a powerful tool. And I recommend that everyone writes this down. Draw draw a line down the middle of the page and write down what you say you are on the left hand side. So you may say right now, I am sad or I'm unhappy or whatever it is. And then on the right hand side, I want you to perform the activity that Susan just said to us and write down how you're now going to rewire your linguistic understanding of that. Because when you get this out of your head and onto a page and write it down and scribble it down, you start seeing how distant it is from you rather than it being yourself.

• 36:27Jay Shetty?

  So please use this as a moment, uh take a screenshot of where you are right now if you need to come back to this later. Come back to. This time and do that activity with any of the emotions you've been feeling this week or in the last 12 months.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company for me of the explosion on our rig.

• 36:43Speaker 03

  On October 2.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 36:48Speaker 03

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 36:56Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 37:00Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 37:03Speaker 04

  I'm not the earth then.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd, rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 37:10Jay Shetty?

  In your fashion, Susan, I'm going to take a bit of a random detour back to where I want to go. And this detour is, I was, we've always already started talking about your book Emotional Agility. It's right here. I wanted to ask you this question, just not because I don't judge books by their cover, but I'm fascinated by choice and art and imagery. Yes, yes, I want to ask, what is this fish sugar cookie?

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Tell us about the fish. So as you know, firstly, having published your own book, we often don't have a lot of latitude in the very final say of what goes on the cover. That said, that said, a core metaphor of if we think about what is emotional agility? Emotional agility is about being able to be with ourselves with compassion, with curiosity, and we'll get to that, you know, what is, what is this emotion telling me? And with courage, which is a core part of my work, so that we can experience difficult thoughts and emotions and stories

• 38:18Speaker 01

  that are part of a complex, changing world, a world that is both beautiful and fragile, a world in which we aren't happy all the time. And that is the reality of our experience. And so emotional agility is about being able to breathe into that space with a set of skills that allows us to be open hearted and.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  And intentional and calm and wise in how we move through life. And then if we think about the opposite of emotional agility, which is emotional rigidity. And emotional rigidity is when we treat our thoughts, our emotions and our stories as fact. Emotional rigidity is when we get so autopilot in the way we go through our lives. That we aren't living intentionally, we we get so sucked into. Our social media or our Netflix or whatever it is we're doing. That we we on autopilot and autopilot can even be in a relationship, you know.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  We can autopilot where we're in the same house with the same person twenty four seven. And yet our autopilot has led us to put up. Defenses and you can actually see the wall going up and feel the wall going up. And you with this person that you actually recognize that you lonely. You know, that is autopilot. And so what is the fish? The fish is an example of how we get hooked. How we get hooked into this rigid way of being. Um, it might be we get hooked in bad habits through this autopilot I've been speaking about. It might be we get hooked by our thoughts, our emotions, our stories. Um, we get get hooked often because.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  We in our lives have very often learnt ways to adapt. You know, we've learnt that maybe when we were angry as a child, we were punished and. Now we struggle to be authentic with our teams or with our spouse. And so we've got this way of being that actually might have been really functional. For us as our child when we were that child, but that we've now grown out of it. So the imagery of the fish is really to denote that often we get hooked. And emotional agility is the process of getting off the hook. So that we are able to bring ourselves to our lives.

• 40:58Jay Shetty?

  That is probably the most profound description of a book cover I'll probably ever hear in my life. I love it.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Way too detailed, way too detailed.

• 41:06Jay Shetty?

  No, it's great. It's so deep and rich. I love it. That's what I wanted to hear. And it's so hard. I unfortunately had to have my face on my cover, so I couldn't do anything else. And so to have that beautiful, deep, substance-filled decision, sounds like a great answer. There are two big things I wanted to speak to you about as this conversation's evolved. And we've really set the tone and the foundation of what emotional agility is, where courage fits into our life, how do we face our emotions? And the first one comes from something that, when I look in hindsight now, and I don't even think I put this in my book, but you've made me think of it. I don't think I spoke about it as explicitly as this.

• 41:50Jay Shetty?

  But when I lived as a monk, something really fascinating happened in how we lived our life. So we never slept in the same place every night. In the sense that even if we slept in the same room, there was no place that was yours. So you didn't even have the consistency of the space on the floor that you slept in. So that's one thing. When we got on a train to travel to another destination, we didn't know what our accommodation looked like. And so if you think about now, when you plan a holiday or a vacation, you always know what your apartment's gonna look like, or your hotel, or your Airbnb. You pick it out months in advance. We didn't know what it would look like. Sometimes it was an open hall.

• 42:35Jay Shetty?

  Sometimes it was a corridor. And sometimes it was the train itself. And sometimes it was, once it was an unfinished accommodation building, where I nearly stepped into an elevator that didn't exist. And so what I'm trying to get at here is... The way monk life is set up, it made me so okay with change and constant change and constant surprise and uncertainty, because we never had any of that. We just, and you never even knew what your next meal was. When food was always given to you, you never chose off a menu. And so when I look at your title of your book and I look at what's happening in the world right now, when you talk about embracing change,

• 43:20Jay Shetty?

  the common rhetoric right now is, "I wish things would go back to being the same." Or, "I guess this is our new normal." Or, "When will this end?" And it's funny, because when you ask the question, "When will this end?", that's a sign that you want change. But then we're also at the same time asking the question like, "Oh, I wish things would go back to being the same." And so where does emotional agility, why is it that we're so addicted to sameness? And where does emotional agility and stability come in? Like, what is stability? Is stability even real? And so, yeah, I hope that's not too many questions.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  No, no, no, that's really beautiful. So firstly, we know that cognitively, human beings are drawn to what is easy, what is coherent, and what is familiar. So what is easy, we will always default as human beings to what just feels easy. We will always default to what feels coherent. You know, there've been very interesting studies showing that when people in organizations are sometimes individuals with a very low self-concept, and then they get promoted, those individuals will often completely counter-intuitively

• 44:41Speaker 01

  leave the organization. And part of what's been explored is that there can be a disconnect between the story they have of themselves, which feels so coherent, versus this countervailing feedback that they're getting from the organization that actually makes them feel uncomfortable. So, human beings are drawn to what's easy, to what's coherent, the story that we tell ourselves, and to what is familiar. And again, this is really important because it is necessary when I wake up in the morning for me to go, oh, you know, this little child that is jumping on my head is my seven-year-old

• 45:22Speaker 01

  daughter Sophie, and I need to pay attention to Sophie and I need to, you know, not pay attention to the washing machine in the background, okay? So coherence is what allows us to make sense of all the different pieces of information that come at us every day so that we weave them into a story. And again, this is, from an evolutionary perspective, really, really important that we are able to do. As human beings, we, we are drawn to this. Now, the downside of this is that it can lead to this autopilot closing down from discomfort, um, the curse of comfort.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  The positive aspect of ease, the positive aspect of these ideas is, and I explore this in Emotional Agility, is if you've got something that feels really values-aligned to you, you can then use this idea of ease to build a habit that is values-aligned. So an example might be that I, um, feel really stressed at the end of the day when I'm done with, you know, if I work in a corporate environment, when I'm done with my meeting after meeting, and now I'm trying to generate a sense of, um, of work-life, uh, integration, but in a way that feels a bit healthier and more balanced to me.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  And I've been finding that I've been bringing my cellphone to the table and not spending time with my family, and that, that work-life and home-life have completely meshed.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  And so what I do is I know that I always, you know, put my computer in a particular place as I finish up the workday. And now what I do is I do what I, what is called piggybacking, which is I'm now adding my cellphone to the same place, so that I'm not bringing my cellphone to the dinner table. And so what we're doing is we're starting to shape our environment so that it's not easy to do the things that are intentional and values connected that we really wanna be doing. Um, another example of this that we see very often is the way we we create the choice architecture in our house

• 47:46Speaker 01

  where we might put fruit on the table instead of something that feels a little bit less healthy, so that it's easier for us to go to the fruit. So as human beings, we are drawn to these things. Here's the difficulty.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  When we sidestep tough emotions and tough emotions that come with the reality of life. When we sidestep those tough emotions, when we sidestep tough experiences and discomfort, we are not able to develop the skills that help us to adapt and change. Because Jay, in truth, life's beauty and its fragility are interwoven. We are young and then we are not. We are healthy.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  And then a diagnosis brings us to our knees. And so life's beauty and its fragility are interwoven. They are, they are inseparable. And when we sidestep tough emotions, when we, when we listen to the mantras of positive vibes only or just be positive. And so we think when we feel difficult emotions that we shouldn't be feeling them, that they're bad. And so we sidestep them. What we are actually doing is we are failing to develop skills to live in the world as it is, not as we wish it to be, but as it is.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Um, and so discomfort.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Circling back to our conversation earlier about courage, discomfort is extraordinarily important. We can, we can think about this at an individual level, you know, if I keep taking these small whispers, if I keep taking these small steps of courage, we build our own courage. But I actually think that at a, at a broader level, the, the culture that we are in, the world that we are in is begging us for courage. The world is begging us to be able to have difficult conversations, not to just say, oh, well, that person's saying something that I don't like,

• 50:12Speaker 01

  therefore they're toxic, therefore I'm going to cut them out of my life. If we can't have these difficult conversations, what we do is we shrink ourselves, we shrink, we shrink, and we are actually more fragile rather than more agile.

• 50:31Jay Shetty?

  That was brilliant. That, that was amazing. That, that specific point, there was something you said there that was, was so clear for me and, and I understand it, but I've, I've never heard it being experienced in that, explained in that way, is the idea that those discomfort, those uncomfortable emotions, when we ignore them, we're losing the ability to develop skills that we need. And so actually, when you're pushing away that opportunity to grow your skills and your lessons, and the idea that we shrink, like that word was so strong for me. I was like, wow, yeah, that's so true. I'm, I'm thinking about every time in my life

• 51:14Jay Shetty?

  where I've avoided a difficult conversation. And actually, it's so true. Like you just think, oh yeah, I need to cut that out of my life and move away from that. And, and actually you're so right that we're losing that skill because life's going to keep bringing us that same situation and similar people and similar examples, because that's just life.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And then what you've done is you've avoided and shrunk rather than, rather than develop the skill and grow.

• 51:42Jay Shetty?

  Yes, yeah, and I'm fascinated by thinking about what are some of those skills that we've missed out on? And I'm thinking about it for myself right now as you're saying that I'm reflecting on a couple of decisions I've made. And asking myself, what is, what skill did I miss out on? And I realized that I think it's very natural for us to shut down when we're not getting the response from someone that we want. And, and switch off and just say, oh, well, I'll just move on. And that is such a natural thing to, it feels natural. But what you're actually saying is that it may feel natural, but it's actually counterintuitive and useful to our development.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  Yes, so a hallmark of psychological health and wellbeing, a hallmark is integration rather than segmentation. When we segment, when we say these people are toxic, they're not allowed, and these people are okay. But soon they might be toxic if they say something that I don't like. You know, we are involved in segmentation. When we say things like, there's good emotions and bad emotions, we are involved in segmentation. Whereas, whereas life, the truth of life is one of fragility and beauty interwoven.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  And, and that is integration. And so if we think about like, what does integration mean? Integration might mean that I feel a difficult emotion, I feel angry with a spouse. And I know that I love that person, and so I can still reach out and, and give the person a hug. But what's, what's happening very often is when we push aside what's difficult, we then develop a story about why we've pushed that aside, and it makes sense, and that person's bad for me, and blah, blah, blah, blah. And, and, and we do it, and we create the story, but we are shrinking.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Like, we are shrinking, we're shrinking ourselves, we're shrinking our communities, we are shrinking our capacity, we are becoming fragile when we do this. Now, to be clear, that's not to say that every relationship is a relationship that is healthy. And it's not to say that, um...

• 54:12Speaker 01

  You know, that, that, that every person and every, every way we are with a person requires us just to keep going and going and going. But the difference is that when you have a rule that says something like, oh, that person's toxic, or that person's evoking something in me and I don't like, and therefore I'm, I'm not going there. What we are doing is we're being driven by our emotions.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  It is.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  And emotional agility, what it's suggesting is that our emotions are data, but they're not directives. And I'd love to come back to this a little bit later. Um, they're data, not directives. And so when we are cutting people off or not going there out of, out of our emotion, when we're acting on those emotions, we are reacting. But when we are, instead of acting out of our emotions, stepping into our values, then we are responding. And so you might, if you're in the heat of the moment, saying,

• 55:30Speaker 01

  I don't want to have anything to do with that person, that's reacting to your emotions. That's emotional inagility. Emotional agility might be saying, what are these difficult emotions signposting? Okay, my difficult emotions are data. So, uh, grief. Grief is often love looking for a home. Loneliness might be signposting that you value more intimacy and connection with your spouse and you need more of it. Um, disappointment might be signposting that you feel unsupported and that you need more support.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  Uh, stress might be signposting depletion and you need more self-care. So what I'm suggesting in my work on emotional agility is not just that we let difficult emotions live with our so-called positive emotions, but actually that difficult emotions are.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  Are are signposts, they are extraordinarily beautiful. Because they signpost our values. And if we just slow down and we say, what is this emotion telling me about what I care about? Then we are able to respond, to step into those emotions. So to go back to this example, an emotion that says, oh, this person, you know, is toxic and and therefore I'm not going to go there. What that's doing is it's allowing the emotions to call the shots.

• 57:07Speaker 05

  Um.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Um. When we say, what is this disquiet that I feel? It might be that the disquiet signals that there's something deeply values misaligned. In the relationship that you have with a person where it just actually doesn't feel right. Or um the difficulty emotion might be signposting that you need to have a difficult conversation. And that actually it's not about doing away with the person, it's actually about the conversation and it's about. So a very important part of this is this idea that our emotions signpost the things that we care about.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  And so Jay, to circle back, you might still be in a situation where you say. I choose not to continue investing in this relationship. But there's a difference when the choice is made as a react reaction out of your emotions. Versus a stepping into your values. The one is grounded and skills developing and agile. And that's the stepping into your values. The other, which is the reactive part, is life shrinking and fear based. And it's not wholehearted, it's not, it's not healthy, it's not whole.

• 58:35Jay Shetty?

  Okay, I've done that. I need to go solve some issue. I've definitely done that. Listening to you, I'm like, oh gosh. I can totally see where I've made that mistake. And it's actually really nice to be able to spot it and hear it through some, you know, well-articulated ideas where I can see that as a mirror. I can laugh at myself for it, which is wonderful.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  We all can. It's like, we've all done that. We've all done that.

• 59:07Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, which is wonderful. I want to dive into, you've mentioned the word a few times, and it's a big part of your work, fragility. And I want to start off by my limited understanding, but also my curiosity with fragility. And I was saying this to my team earlier when we were having this conversation about this question. And I was saying that I had a really interesting childhood where my mother was out and out, like, loved me and showered me with love. And my father was much more detached and aloof. And what that allowed me to do is, I feel like it gave me, at least how I see myself.

• 59:50Jay Shetty?

  I see myself as someone who's pretty resilient, emotionally agile, can roll with the punches and in touch with my emotions, though, at the same time. And I feel like knowing that I was loved, but knowing that I had to figure it out on my own, was like a really nice, unique combination. So I'm grateful to my parents for the different training I got from them in one sense, because I always knew my mom loved me and she'd always be there for me. And my dad, he kind of gave me the space to become my own human and become my own man and become my own person, because he never really was there to coddle me or, you know, to guide me. And so, I wonder, similarly with what we were talking about with the extremes,

• 1:00:34Jay Shetty?

  I see fragility as, sometimes I see as parents, and I'm trying to understand this, I'm not a parent yet, so I'm trying to understand it for my future. Sometimes I see that children today are so coddled and so like, almost like insulated. And it's almost like they're wrapped with bubble wrap, right? Like you've got bubble wrap all around them. And I wonder, is that just making them more fragile? Is the overcompensating actually creating fragility? Because now, if they've been wrapped in bubble wrap all their life, when they're dropped one day, does that make them fragile? And on the other side, what we've seen before, where the completely, you know, almost unparenting,

• 1:01:18Jay Shetty?

  where there was no thought of like a child's emotions and understanding them and getting to know them and seeing how they felt. That obviously led to a lot of trauma, which we see today in the world where people talk about their parents that way. So how do we, how do we train ourselves, friends, people in our life, children? How do we train people to be not fragile? And actually have emotional agility and steadiness? Where does that, where does that start?

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  So I've given you very long answers for a lot of the questions. I'm going to give you like a very short answer and then, and then I'll do longer. But when you're saying, you know, does coddling make children more fragile? The very short answer is yes. Yes, it does.

• 1:02:04Jay Shetty?

  What counts is, what counts, what counts as coddling? Because I, I want to know what counts as coddling and what's considered good? Like, because that's, you know, yeah.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  As you described your, your childhood, this, this very beautiful, this very beautiful, like almost kind of a mental model. And I want to walk you through this. And, and then I'll circle back to what I think this actually looks like when it comes to the way we parent and the way we connect in our relationships. So.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Bear with me. All of us have had this experience of going to a restaurant. And you see a little child in that restaurant and the the child may maybe is eighteen months old or two years old. And the child has a huge amount of glee and fun in running away from its parents or caregivers. And it's the most cute thing to watch because what the child does is the child's in a restaurant, it kind of runs a few steps, it looks behind, it makes sure that its parents or caregivers are there, and then it runs away even more. And then it looks again and runs even more. Now, what is happening there is so beautiful.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  Uh, one of the most beautiful psychologists, John Bowlby, described this idea that um, children need a secure base. You know, children need a secure base. And it's this really fascinating thing that you see in a restaurant where the very essence of knowing that the caregiver is there, that if something's gonna go wrong, that the caregiver's gonna be able to help. Okay, step in and help. It's that essence that allows the child to explore. So in a completely interesting paradoxical way, it's knowing that there is a secure base to come

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  back to, that then allows the child to be curious, to take risks, to grow, to extend themselves, etc. And as you were describing your childhood, it it seemed to me that like the combination of your parents almost allowed allowed for that in you. Now, what is going on here? It's it's the knowledge in the child that someone's got their back. Okay, that is the essence then of allowing the child to be resilient and to explore and to be curious. Okay, let's bring this to ourselves.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Compassion, I know it's something that you talk about in your work. And yet, there is still this idea that being compassionate, you know, whether it's in organizations or beyond, is somehow about being weak or lazy or letting yourself off the hook. But self compassion is as fundamental as that example that I just gave in the restaurant. When you have your own back, when you know that if a relationship doesn't work out, or that, you know, you didn't get the job, or that something else has gone wrong, and you know that you will love yourself, that you will be there for yourself,

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  that you will be kind to yourself in the way you speak and hold yourself. When you have your own back, what it actually does is it allows you to then take risks, be more honest, be more motivated, and to explore in the world. And so this idea that self compassion is about being, you know, the myth of it being weak or lazy or being dishonest, in actual fact, it is the opposite. People who are self compassionate are more able to be honest and motivated and so on. So now circling back to your question, because now I want to broaden this into relationship. What does this look like in relationship?

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  And I'll use the example of a child, but let's, we can extend this into couple or into the workplace even. So when a child, for instance, I'll be very practical here. Say you've got a child who comes home from school in, in non-COVID times. Right now, my kids aren't in school, but you've got a child that, that comes or, or not in normal, normal day school. Um, so you've got a child that comes home from school and the child is extremely upset. And the child says, mommy, Jack didn't invite me to his birthday party. Now I'm not going to invite him to mine.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  What you can see is the child is being rigid, okay? Inagile, the child is hooked. I'm upset, now I'm gonna react in this way.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Now, often what we wanna do as parents is with very good intentions. We wanna jump in. It's heartbreaking for us that the child has been rejected, that the child hasn't been invited. And so what we wanna do is we wanna step in and we wanna say to the child, don't worry. You know, I'll phone Jack's parents and I'll organise your invitation. Or, or don't worry, you know, I'm here for you, let's, let's go bake cupcakes. Now, we do this with really good intention, but what are we doing? We are signalling to the child that there are some emotions that are good. When they're happy, everything's fine, but there are some emotions to be feared.

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  And we should fear sadness, we should fear anger, we should fear fear. And what we are doing when we steal away our child's opportunity to feel the full range of emotions in the way that I am suggesting that as adults we need to feel. Then what we are doing is we are not allowing them to develop really important emotional skills. And these are, number one, emotions are not to be feared. There is nothing in anxiety or anger that is gonna kill you. Or sad, there's nothing in that.

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  Number two, a child that is supported in feeling their different emotions realises that emotions pass, that emotions are transient. And isn't that, that is just foundational to mental health and wellbeing. Often when we struggle with our difficult emotions, it's because we feel that the emotion is here to stay. The sadness is here to stay. So the child learns emotions are not to be feared. The child learns that emotions pass. The child also learns that things that they do can actually shape.

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  How they feel, okay? That they don't need someone to come and paper over emotions. But they're developing the skills. And this, you know, Jay, we teach our children mathematics. We teach them science. We, but it doesn't matter what they know in the world. If they are not able to deal with the fragility of life, of pandemics, of broken relationships. They do not have the skills to thrive. So what does the alternative look like? The alternative looks like firstly, you know, and I might use this beautiful word, which is sawabona.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  I started my TED Talk with this word, sawabona. Sawabona is a Zulu word for hello. You hear it every day on the streets of South Africa, which is where I grew up. But there is such a beautiful and powerful intention behind the word sawabona. Because sawabona literally translated means I see you. And by seeing you, I bring you into being. The first thing we want to do with people who are experiencing difficult emotions is not to tell them, just be positive. When we say to someone, just be positive, we are saying, basically, I don't see your humanity.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  Because humanity is woven with difficult emotions. So with our children, with our loved ones, we need to be able to show up to them in the same way as I'm inviting us to show up to ourselves. With acceptance, with compassion, and with a sawabona, to see, to see. So that's showing up. The second part, Jay, this is circling back, which is helping the child to label emotions effectively. You don't need to jump in and fix. Just helping the child to label emotions effectively. We've already explored how that is so important to their wellbeing. You know, it sounds like you're really angry with Jack.

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  Because he didn't invite you to the birthday party and that you are sad and that you're disappointed and that you feel rejected. And then Jay lost our emotions, signpost our values. So the child who says, I haven't been invited to this birthday party. What is the anger signposting? What is the sadness signposting? It's signposting that the person values friendship.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  And so you can have the most beautiful conversation that is literally developing your child's character, their values, their moral compass. Where you said to them, it sounds like friendship is important to you. How do you want to be a friend? What does being a good friend look like? How do you want to come to the conversation with Jack tomorrow? So what you're doing is you're not jumping in and coddling. Instead, you are providing space for emotion. And in that emotion, there's the seeing, there's the stepping out. And there's the data, not directives, the values.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  And Jay, you know, I again use this as an example with children. The same applies if we leaders. Instead of signaling to people, they're either on the bus or off the bus. We can show up to their difficult emotions and we can, we can try to understand what's going on. And we can help them to choose who they want to be in the moment of uncertainty. And we can do the same with our loved ones and with ourselves.

• 1:13:14Jay Shetty?

  Susan, I have learned so much today from you. I'm honestly so excited to go and put a lot of this into practice because.

• 1:13:23Jay Shetty?

  It's also speed, it's like trying to do things fast. And living a speedy, overproductive life is what stops us from being able to do this. Because everything you're saying requires patience and time and stillness and space. It requires that in our lives. It's so hard to do in a fast-paced, hectic environment where it's easier just to say, "Okay, I can't work with these people, I'm gonna work with..." whatever it may be. And it's needed, it's really needed. It's showing the need for us to... I don't mean slow down as in do nothing. I just mean being present and allowing ourselves to have the space to think in this way.

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  Well, Jay, firstly, thank you so much for the conversation. I think it's so... There's power in the pause, there's such power in the pause. And sometimes, you know, sometimes the pause is... We know people who spend even 10 minutes writing about what their values are. You know, if you're going into a difficult relationship or a difficult conversation or a new experience, like, who do you want to be in that? We know that even spending 10 minutes thinking about your values in this situation, actually, in studies, like, can change the course of whether people drop out of university or not. Like, literally changing the course of people's lives.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  But, Jay, you invited people earlier to do that example where they say, you know, "I am sad" versus "I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad." And that is such a quick, beautiful call to action. And there's another that I'd love to add to that, which is, if you imagine a piece of paper and you write down on the one side of the piece of paper what it is that you might have been feeling lately: grief, loneliness, anxiety, anger, joy, whatever that is. Now, our culture would ask you, would instruct you to turn over the piece of paper

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  and instead of lonely, to write what you should be grateful for. Instead of anxious, to write, you know, why you should be positive.

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna invite people to do something different, whether that is physically or emotionally, because this can literally take a second. You've got this word on the piece of paper on the one side. On the other side, turn the piece of paper over and ask yourself WTF? What the funk? What is the function of the emotion? What is this emotion telling me about what is important to me or what I need? Again, lonely, intimacy and connection.

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  Grief, it might be love that I've loved and that I need to reconnect with that love for the person. Sadness might again be looking for a way to connect differently. Joy might be signaling that you, you know, thrive when you're doing a particular kind of work and that you need more of that creativity. Boredom, if you're feeling bored, boredom might be signaling growth. So it's a very different way of being and it, when we step into the pause,

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  there is extraordinary power in that. And I believe that that power is what allows us to galvanize the courage, the whisper, not just for ourselves, but for our community and for our culture and for our countries and for our world that needs more of this right now.

• 1:17:37Jay Shetty?

  I couldn't agree with you more, Susan. Everyone who's been listening or watching today, if you wanna dive deeper, can grab a copy of Susan's book, Emotional Agility. Get unstuck, embrace change and thrive in work and life. It's right there, we'll put a link in the comments as well. Susan, like I meant, as I said a few moments ago, I've learned So much today and we end every On Purpose podcast episode with our final five segments. So these questions have to be answered in one word or one sentence maximum. So we'll see how it goes. Susan, this is your final five. The first question is, what is the hardest part about being courageous?

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  I think the hardest part is in a world that seems to draw us in other directions and compare ourselves constantly. It's about being grounded in what your version of success and effectiveness looks like.

• 1:18:41Jay Shetty?

  Awesome. What is the skill that you missed out on before you learned to be emotionally agile?

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  Well firstly, I think I'm still learning to be emotionally agile.

• 1:18:58Speaker 01

  I think for me, I have very big emotions. And so I think for me, it was like often getting hooked into these difficult emotions where, you know, the arguments that I would have with my husband are like, you know, you don't love me. And I know, you know, the drama queen. And I think, I think that for, for me, it was being able to almost recognize the capacity to helicopter above our emotions and to be able to be wise in the place of our emotions.

• 1:19:32Jay Shetty?

  Amazing. All right. Question number three. What's something that you know to be true, but others may disagree on?

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  Happiness is overrated as a goal. We get to happiness by pursuing things that are meaningful rather than by pursuing happiness in itself.

• 1:19:58Jay Shetty?

  Awesome. Question number four. What is one thing you wish you knew 10 years ago?

• 1:20:04Speaker 01

  One thing I wish I knew 10 years ago is how quickly it all goes. You know, how quickly children grow up, how quickly 10 years flies, how quickly it goes. I turned 50 this year and it just, it just goes, it just goes.

• 1:20:24Jay Shetty?

  Happy birthday in advance and congrats, it's amazing. And fifth and final question, what's the biggest lesson you've learned in the last 12 months?

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  The biggest lesson that I've learnt in the past 12 months is that often the things that you feel are going to be really difficult, and I'm talking in this context for me, I went from, you know, travelling constantly into being at home, are often an invitation to practise your own work and to reset. And I think for me very much, at first there was the idea of, oh my goodness, you know, all of my speaking, like all of the things that are typical in my life feels stripped away. And I think that I have learnt how resilient

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  we are as human beings if we can step into that. And for me certainly, I've re-threaded a sense of the way that I'm with my family, the way that I use my time. And it's just actually been, you know, notwithstanding the difficulties, it's been an extraordinary gift for me.

• 1:21:39Jay Shetty?

  That's a great answer, Susan, I couldn't agree more. Thank you so much. Please let us know, where are the best places that people can find you and your work if they'd love to learn more?

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  Excellent. Well, thank you for listening and thank you for inviting me here, Jay. So a couple of things. Firstly, Jay has mentioned my book Emotional Agility. Secondly, my TED Talk, The Gift and Power of Emotional Courage. And then last, if you're looking for again something that feels very practical, I've got a quiz that around 150,000 people have taken. You can find it at susandavid.com/learn. And it's a quiz that takes around five minutes but generates a 10-page free report. And it's on Emotional Agility and connects with a lot of these ideas.

• 1:22:24Jay Shetty?

  Amazing Susan, I hope that we get to meet in person when this is all over. I really look forward to it and this was so much fun. As I said, I've taken away so much from this and it's truly going to make me approach a lot of situations in my life very differently. So, thank you so much for sharing that insight with me and really grateful for your time. Thank you so much.

• 1:22:45Speaker 01

  Beautiful, thank you. Thanks Jay.

• 1:22:54Jay Shetty?

  Hey guys, this is Jay again. Just a few more quick things before you leave. I know we try to focus on the good every day and I want to make that easier for you. Would you like to get a short email from me every week that gives you an extra dose of positivity? Weekly Wisdom is my newsletter where I jot down whatever's on my mind that I think may uplift your week. Basically little bits of goodness that are going to improve your wellbeing. The short newsletter is all about growth and sending positivity straight to your inbox. Read it with a cup of tea, forward it to a friend and let these words brighten your day. To sign up, just go to jayshetty.me and drop your email in the pop-up. If you have trouble finding it, just scroll to the very bottom of the page and you'll see the sign-up. Thank you so much and I hope you enjoy my Weekly Wisdom newsletter.

• 1:23:43Jay Shetty?

  This podcast was produced by Dust Light Productions. Our executive producer from Dust Light is Misha Youssef. Our senior producer is Juliana Bradley. Our associate producer is Jacqueline Castillo. Valentino Rivera is our engineer. Our music is from Blue Dot Sessions. And special thanks to Rachel Garcia, the Dust Light Development and Operations Coordinator.

• 1:24:13Speaker 05

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid and risked 350,000 Virginians healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:24:42Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:24:46Speaker 05

  On October 2nd.

• 1:24:47Speaker 02

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:24:51Speaker 05

  Tom Cruise is.

• 1:24:53Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 1:24:56Speaker 05

  From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 1:24:59Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:25:03Speaker 05

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:25:06Speaker 04

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 1:25:07Speaker 05

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.