Why Forced Positivity Is Making You Miserable | Susan David

Psychologist and emotions researcher Susan David, author of Emotional Agility and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Happiness, joins Lewis Howes to explain forced positivity, emotion granularity, self bias, and why the World Economic Forum names emotional agility a core future skill, drawing on two decades of research into grief, resilience, values, and psychological safety.

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

• 0:02Lewis Howes?

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• 0:46Lewis Howes?

  Can we have peace under chaos? And can we have perspective when something really, really bad happens and still be grateful for the silver lining or for the situation that we're not in? How bad it could be, even though it might be a bad situation? Or is that toxic to have peace and gratitude and perspective under challenges? Or should we allow ourselves to scream and be emotional and be, you know, exhausted emotionally?

• 1:19Susan David?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20Lewis Howes?

  When there is some type of chaotic moment in our life?

• 1:22Susan David?

  So there's a lot of questions, there's a lot of questions to that. So let's start, let's start a little bit with, with the experience of difficult emotions. And then when we experiencing them, how do we, how do we find peace? To use your language, which I think is such a beautiful word, peace and calm even in the midst of chaos. And then there's this like extraordinary conversation to be had around positivity. The narrative that exists in our world, and you speak to this a little bit, which is this narrative that like emotions and emotion regulation, this is the skill.

• 2:01Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 2:02Susan David?

  It's, it's always been a skill, but it is now the skill of the current world. A world in which complexity and fragmentation and chaos seem to be the contract that we have with life. You know, that is the contract we have. And so the, the question then becomes of, well, if these emotional skills are so crucial, why is it that we aren't taught it? Why is it that you've got a child who is suffering during a pandemic? Who is able to go online and find any number of math courses through Khan Academy or its equivalent?

• 2:41Susan David?

  And yet that same child cannot access the kinds of emotional skills teaching that is foundational. And so before we even like talk about the inner work and the suppression and all of these things that we speak about, I think it's really important for us to recognize that we live as human beings in a context. And the context around emotion is sending particular messages. And the messages are these, number one, there are good emotions and bad emotions. Okay, there's positive, positive emotions are experiences like joy and happiness and, you know, grateful experiences.

• 3:23Susan David?

  And the bad emotions are things like grief, sadness, anxiety, shame, distress, anger, et cetera. So the first thing that I think is really important, if we're even thinking about finding calm in ourselves, is to recognize that these narratives that basically put us at odds in ourselves are a narrative. This is not a narrative that supports calm. It's not a narrative that supports clarity. And the reason I say this, Louis, is because when we walk through life, we walk in a way whereby beauty holds hands with fragility.

• 4:05Susan David?

  Okay, you know this in your own life, you know this with your dad, where you can experience a relationship with a person and that person is no longer, that person dies you in grief. We are in a situation where we feel we are in control of ourselves, our strategies, our goals, our business plans, whatever it is. And then COVID comes and like taps us on the shoulder, laughs in our face and says, you know, the illusion of control that you had was just that, it was an illusion. And so why am I talking about this? Like, why am I suggesting that there's this beauty and there's this fragility and they hold hands with each other? Because it's the truth.

• 4:49Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 4:49Susan David?

  Okay, because it is the truth. And so when we think about a narrative that says, oh, you've got to be happy all the time, or you've got to be positive all the time, what that narrative does is it actually isn't real to the world that we live in, the world in which your heart will be broken, the world in which you will one day lose your jobs, in which our children will be facing not just one pandemic, but likely more. And so what we have is a context in which the world almost feels in its narrative about emotions to be conspiring to have us not see ourselves. And really what I mean here is-

• 5:33Lewis Howes?

  By suppressing the emotions or by what?

• 5:35Susan David?

  Yeah, so the feeling that there's even good and bad emotions is, is like, no, there's your emotions. You are human, you are walking through the world, you are feeling what you are feeling. There is nothing wrong with sadness. Like even the narrative that there are good and bad emotions is a narrative that is, sets us up in an inner war with ourselves. And the reason this happens, or the way you see this happening, is someone might experience unhappiness. They're unhappy about something that's happened in their jobs or in their relationship. And in psychology, we call that a type A emotion or type one emotion. I'm unhappy, okay?

• 6:18Lewis Howes?

  I'm unhappy.

• 6:19Susan David?

  I'm unhappy, I'm sad, I'm sad about this thing that's happened. Then what we start to do is we start having this idea of, but the world's telling me I've just got to be positive. The world's telling me I've got to be grateful, good vibes only. So now not only-

• 6:34Lewis Howes?

  I'm seeing everyone's highlight reel and I'm comparing myself.

• 6:37Susan David?

  So now not only am I unhappy in my type one emotion, but now I've got a type two emotion, which is I'm unhappy about my unhappiness. Okay?

• 6:49Lewis Howes?

  Man, that's layered, yeah.

• 6:51Susan David?

  So we start and we do this, like we see this with stress. People say things like, stress is bad, now I'm stressed about the fact that I'm stressed. Or I'm in grief and I'm being told that my grief is not a good kind of grief. And now I'm like grieving about the grief that I'm having.

• 7:10Lewis Howes?

  It's kind of like we're beating ourselves up for the emotion that we have.

• 7:13Susan David?

  It's, it is correct. It's what we're starting to do is we're starting to layer our experience of emotion, which is, which is authentic and truth to the world that we're living in. And what we're starting to do is we're starting to layer our experience of the emotion in with judgment, fighting, avoiding, that's where your suppression comes in. I don't want to feel it, let me feel something else, hustling a war inside yourself.

• 7:45Lewis Howes?

  What happens when we do that?

• 7:47Susan David?

  What happens when we do that is firstly, we aren't developing the skills to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. Okay?

• 7:57Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 7:58Susan David?

  The world as it is, is an imperfect world. The world as it is, is this handholding of fragility and beauty. And so when we push aside difficulty emotions, when we, when we bottle them, when we set ourselves, and when we're doing this in a kind of characteristic way, where it becomes our default mechanism, what we start to do is we start to have a couple of consequences. The first is you're not living in the world as it is. You, you're living in the world as you wish it would be. For example, someone who's unhappy in their job might say, well, at least I've got a job. Okay, there's a recession coming, at least I've got a job. And so what they do is instead of facing into that unhappiness

• 8:43Susan David?

  and learning from that unhappiness and using that unhappiness as a source that helps them to move forward, instead what they do is they unsee themselves. They turn their backs on themselves and they say, you know, I should at least be grateful that I've got a job, so I'm just going to ignore this experience. That's suppression. And what happens is five years later, you're still in the same job.

• 9:06Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 9:07Susan David?

  I'm happy, you haven't actually used the information to solve the problem. So that's the first thing. Forced positivity and suppression, these things, like especially forced positivity, it sounds innocuous on the surface, like what could be wrong with being grateful?

• 9:24Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, right.

• 9:24Susan David?

  What could be wrong with it? But when it is forced and when it is false, these are the key criteria, forced false positivity. Then what we're doing is we are failing to develop the skills to deal with the world as it is. We're failing to adapt to a world that is changing and which we are changing. The job that I was happy in five years ago, I'm no longer because I've changed. And the other thing that we know is that this kind of forced false positivity and suppression, the forced false positivity, what is it? It's basically emotional avoidance. It's a denial strategy. Yes, it's like wrapped in rainbows and sparkles and social media memes, but it is forced false positivity and it's an avoidant coping strategy.

• 10:10Susan David?

  So avoidant coping strategies are associated very clearly with lower rates of well-being, high rates of depression, high rates of anxiety, high levels of burnout. There is a real cost. And the last thing that I would say is that when we, when we walk through life- When we walk through the world and we are with others who are also walking through life and potentially in pain or worried or grieving or concerned. And we do forced false, everything's okay, because I don't want to go to my difficult emotions.

• 10:49Susan David?

  What we are also doing is we are presenting in a way that is not integrated, not authentic, not true, not wise to ourselves and to our values. And there is no surprise then that this orientation is connected with poor equality of relationships. Because we aren't connecting with people in a way that feels real.

• 11:19Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I'm curious, on a scale of one to 10.

• 11:21Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 11:22Lewis Howes?

  Of self-love, happiness and joy scale, let's call it that scale. For you, where are you currently in your life on a pretty consistent basis? A scale of one to 10 being like you're a very joyful, happy, peaceful human being, one being you're miserable.

• 11:39Susan David?

  I am a 10. I am a 10 and I am fairly consistently a 10. And I know that sounds, I know when I say things like false positivity, I probably sound like I'm anti-happiness. Or that I'm like, you know, like, oh, I'm talking about like getting stuck in our difficult emotions and, you know, if I'm not going to force positivity, then I've got to go to these difficult emotions and I'm going to get stuck there. And I think that's worth us exploring. And, and the reason that I say that, that this, that I'm not anti-happiness is, you know, what I'm interested in is authentic happiness. I'm interested in genuine happiness.

• 12:18Susan David?

  We, we, you know, years ago, I edited just to kind of prove what a nerd I am and, and that I've got a genuine interest in authentic happiness is, years ago, I edited a 90-chapter handbook called The Oxford Handbook of Happiness. And really what this handbook was about is like, what do we know about happiness research? What do we know supports versus hinders people's wellbeing? And, you know, what we know is that the narrative that we have about just be grateful, just

• 12:57Susan David?

  be positive, that narrative, even though it sounds, as I say, innocuous, when we start getting so bound with it, what we start doing is we chase happiness rather than connecting with meaning. We start denying our difficult emotions rather than seeing them and being compassionate with them and understanding them. We start to move further and further away from ourselves and our centre. And in doing so, we lose our capacity in the world. And so just to, you know, when I say I'm a 10.

• 13:37Lewis Howes?

  Were you always a 10?

• 13:38Susan David?

  I wasn't always a 10. I mean, you, you, if you listen to my TED Talk, which I know you've done, you'll know that when I was, so I was born in South Africa. I was born as a child, as a white child in the white suburbs of apartheid South Africa. And it was very much a country and a community that was committed to not seeing, you know, to, to denial. And I described.

• 14:09Lewis Howes?

  To not seeing.

• 14:10Susan David?

  To not seeing, to not seeing the self, to not seeing others, you know, because it's denial that makes 50 years of racist legislation possible while people manage to convince themselves that they are doing nothing wrong. You know, that, you know, that's a kind of different level of suppression, a different level of denial. But I describe in this TED Talk, my father, my father dying and the experience that I had of being this little 15-year-old and putting my backpack down and going into his room on the day that he died and, and his eyes being closed, but I just knew that he

• 14:54Susan David?

  knew that I was there because I had always felt seen in his presence.

• 15:00Lewis Howes?

  That's beautiful.

• 15:01Susan David?

  And I, I described this, this like experience of, you know, he dies on the Friday, I go back to school on the Monday because my mom wants to keep things going. You know, she's raising three children and, and she's grieving the love of her life.

• 15:19Lewis Howes?

  Trying to keep it together but grieving.

• 15:20Susan David?

  She's trying to keep it together. And so I go to school on the Monday and the, the days drift into months and the months, you know, continue and from the May, now we find ourselves in November. And I described this experience that I had, which really connects, I think, with the, the essence of my work, which is, I described this experience of going to school and people saying to me, how are you doing? And I'm like, I'm okay, you know, I'm okay, because isn't it true, we all become the masters of being okay? You know, we all, I'm fine, we become the masters of being okay, we, we get praised for being strong.

• 16:01Susan David?

  The world seems to value relentless positivity. And so for me, I'm this 15-year-old and I'm grieving the love of my life, my kind of warm-handed father who was such a profound guide in my life. And so on the one hand, I'm suffering and grieving and, and drowning. And on the other, I'm moving through the world in which I'm being praised for being strong and I'm telling everyone that things are okay. And so now we've got what I call segmentation.

• 16:41Susan David?

  And segmentation is this experience where you've got these things that you're feeling and then there's a disconnect between the relationships and how you're presenting. And so, Liz, I started to spiral. I mean, I was 15 years old, I was unable to bear the weight of my grief. Things just dissolved in my family, my, my mom was struggling, the creditors were knocking because we were struggling financially and I started to, as so many 15-year-olds do, I was binging and purging, like unable to bear the weight of my grief.

• 17:25Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 17:26Susan David?

  And so the reason I raise this is because you asked me like, what did I used to be? And what am I now? And like, I don't want to kind of use me as the litmus because everyone's journey is their journey. But I had this extraordinary experience of just feeling like more and more separated from myself and, and just less and less centered. And I remember going to school one day and there was this English teacher and she handed out these blank notebooks to the class. And she looked at me, and I still remember literally to this day, she looked at me as

• 18:11Susan David?

  she handed out these blank notebooks and it was this invitation to the class, but I felt like it was directed at me. And she said this, she said, write, tell the truth, write like no one is reading. Okay? And I know you've done a lot of journaling and, and so Liz, I started to journal, I started to like move away from this denial and pushing away from into really stepping into and owning my experience. So every day I would write in this journal, I'd write about the grief, I'd write about the pain and, and these, just this like loss and regret and, and all of these things.

• 18:55Susan David?

  And I started to realize over a period of time that, and this actually became the revolution of my work. This is, this experience with this teacher is literally what set me on the course of 20 years of being an emotions researcher. Because what I started to realize is the narrative of happiness is your right, just be happy, just pretend to be happy, just get on with it. If we think about how we speak to people who've got cancer, like just be positive, like this, this narrative that exists, what I started to realize is that narrative and the way I was interacting with that narrative was actually making me more fragile.

• 19:38Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 19:39Susan David?

  You know, not less fragile, but, but more fragile, less resilient, less well, less healthy. And in contrast, when I started to do this journaling and I was writing down like all these experiences and my regret and my grief and my pain, what was remarkable to me is I started to recognize the healing that was coming through that journey. And so I started to become, become interested in like, why is it that we are served up this platter of gratitude and happiness as the end point?

• 20:16Susan David?

  Whereas actually the way we get to anything that even vaguely connects with integrity and wellbeing is by integrity with ourselves. And so for me, it was this journaling experience. And it was interesting, years later.

• 20:32Lewis Howes?

  Of the processing the emotions.

• 20:34Susan David?

  The process, when we look at what is called expressive writing, you know, when we, when a lot of people talk about journaling and, and like why journaling is so powerful. And when you look at the very important questions of like, well, what is it that happens in journaling? What is the mechanism that, that allows journaling to be powerful? It is the sense-making that comes through journaling.

• 21:00Lewis Howes?

  The meaning.

• 21:00Susan David?

  It's the meaning-making. It's the meaning-making that comes through journaling. It's the, it's the experience of holding, holding ultimately over the period of journaling, holding your beautiful memories, in my case, of that person. So not denying them, holding them and, and, and bringing them to the surface so that there's this beauty and there's this joy and there's this connection. And holding the grief and the loss and the pain and bringing those two things together is the litmus of psychological health.

• 21:36Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 21:37Susan David?

  And wellbeing. And it's this, this learning that comes through our difficult emotions.

• 21:44Lewis Howes?

  What happens when we bring the two together? Grief and sadness and gratitude, appreciation.

• 21:49Susan David?

  Yeah, so, so what the research shows in this expressive journaling is that when people journal on it, you can even journal, you know, twenty minutes a day for three days. And you, you start finding these kind of effects, which is, which is, it starts moving you from just being focused on the past into a presence with yourself, into a seeing with yourself. And in starting to, you know, what, what you start to recognize when you start to analyze people's writing, when they've gone through this expressive writing is, and you start to say, well, like, what is it that predicts people who do better versus not? It's what predicts people who do better is that they, they aren't being a Pollyanna.

• 22:34Susan David?

  They aren't just being, oh, everything's great, everything's fine, I should just be grateful because at least I got to spend fifteen years with my father.

• 22:41Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 22:42Susan David?

  They're not doing that. What they're doing is they are holding their beautiful, positive experiences alongside their tough, difficult experiences, the pain, the regret. And they're starting to generate a sense of insight and meaning. So for me, as an example, and I want to come back to this teacher because it was such a remarkable thing that she said to me. The example was, I, I kind of found, not to force it or not to contrive it, but when I was doing this writing, that over a period of time, I started to connect with like a sense of resilience in myself. So it was like, I would write about these difficult experiences and then I would, and then I would like,

• 23:28Susan David?

  over time, start recognizing that I just had this like inner sense of resilience and connection. And so circling back to your word calm, I came out of the writing with a sense of having seen the self, a sense of calm. Does that make, does that?

• 23:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, of course. It's interesting because when my father passed, thanks for reaching out and sending me the text, it was really thoughtful. When he passed, I remember everyone was asking me like, how are you doing? And I was like, to be honest, I'm sad and grateful.

• 23:59Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 23:59Lewis Howes?

  I kept saying like, I'm really sad that it happened this way and that he was in an accident for, you know, seventeen years and I didn't get to have the relationship that I had with him. And I'm trying to find sense of that and make, find the meaning in that process. But I'm also really grateful because there were some beautiful times we had together.

• 24:19Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 24:19Lewis Howes?

  So I'm sad and I'm grateful. And I was just, I kept saying that. I'm like, I'm sad and I'm grateful.

• 24:24Susan David?

  Yeah, and it's, there's bothness, isn't there? And I think that's the beauty. It's like this, this circling back to what we were saying earlier about this narrative that they're good and bad emotions. What this does is it sets these emotions up against each other. But, but we are, we are, you know, that beautiful, we contain multitudes. Like we experience more than a single emotion.

• 24:49Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 24:49Susan David?

  Um, we can simultaneously hold these things. And so the way that we move into a space of holding them is not by making one of them good and one of them bad, but rather recognizing that what you feel is what you feel. There's, there's such power in the acceptance. I don't mean passive resignation, I just mean acceptance. Like this is what I feel and there's such power.

• 25:20Susan David?

  I just wanted to quickly circle back to something that this teacher said.

• 25:23Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 25:24Susan David?

  Years later, so this is this teacher, I'm fifteen, uh, years, years, years later. I go to a conference and there's someone at this conference who gives a talk and she, and says, you know, there are going to be people in your life who've really shaped who you are, shaped your experience. And if that person doesn't know that they've shaped your life and shaped your experience, reach out and let them know.

• 25:46Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 25:47Susan David?

  So I tracked down this teacher.

• 25:48Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 25:49Susan David?

  And, and I find her and I send her, you know, a bunch of flowers and I like, in this card say like, you saw me, you know, you saw me. And in seeing me, you allowed me to see myself. And I said to her, but one thing I always wanted to ask you is, Lewis, I would write this journal and I would write it in pen. I would like scroll and poetry and, you know, all this kind of like teenage, fifteen year old and I would scroll it.

• 26:22Susan David?

  Every day, we had this like secret silent correspondence because every day I would hand this journal in and the teacher would then send it back with notes like saying, you, you, you, you sound really sad or you, you, you know, she would have these notes. But she always had her notes in this like almost imperceptible pencil. It was like you could barely make out what she was writing. It was this really light pencil.

• 26:46Susan David?

  So I said to her, I said to like, when we reconnected, I was like, why did you write in pencil?

• 26:54Susan David?

  And she said to me, which I thought was so beautiful. She said to me, Susan, it was your story. It was your story. And I was simply being witness to your story, but you were crafting your story.

• 27:13Susan David?

  And it reminded me a little bit of, um, because I know you want to dig into emotional agility. And often people say to me, you know, what is emotional agility? And I say, well, you know, I can, I can give the nerd definition, but ultimately what my work is about is my work is about seeing. It's about seeing and unseeing.

• 27:34Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 27:35Susan David?

  Seeing the self.

• 27:36Lewis Howes?

  What do you mean by that? Yeah.

• 27:36Susan David?

  Well, it's about seeing yourself in ways that are healthy and whole and seeing all of you and loving all of you. And in seeing ourselves, we are then more able to see others too. And it reminds me a little bit of

• 28:00Susan David?

  Primo Levi, who was a survivor of the Nazi death camps. Just in case you thought you were going to have a light conversation.

• 28:10Susan David?

  So Levi describes, Levi was in a death camp and when the camps were liberated, he, you know, literally on the verge of death was, was released. And so he and his fellow death camp survivors boarded trains back to their hometowns. And Levi described how as the train pulled up into his hometown in Italy, there were a whole lot of people waiting on the platforms for them to arrive.

• 28:49Susan David?

  And the people on the platforms were so horrified by how emaciated and skinny and bow and like haggard and deathly the people on the trains were, the, the people who'd been released were, that they were so horrified by it that they, they turned away. They turned away and they turned away because they were, they were unable, they were unable to metabolize. They were unable to process. They were unable to see.

• 29:29Susan David?

  And Levi described how in many ways that experience that he had was in many ways even more, wow, more devastating, more heartbreaking than the experience itself.

• 29:44Lewis Howes?

  No way, wow.

• 29:45Susan David?

  And, and I think that like for me, when I talk about seeing versus unseeing.

• 29:53Susan David?

  It is really about this, this, the, the thread, which is, what does it take for us to see ourselves? What does it take to see others? Because here's the thing, we, we live in a world that, that really gives primacy to goals and objectives and success and all of these things, but the way we deal with our inner worlds,

• 30:15Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:16Susan David?

  the way we see ourselves, the way we deal with our difficult thoughts, like a thought might be, I'm not good enough. An emotion might be, I'm sad, I'm depressed, I'm grieving. A story might be a story of, do I even deserve love? Am I worthy? The way we deal with our inner worlds drives everything. It drives how we love, it drives how we live, how we parent, how we lead, our health behaviors, our ability to achieve those goals, it drives everything. And that is the centrality of my work, which is about healthy seeing. And, and just to kind of, so healthy seeing is about firstly, holding

• 30:57Susan David?

  both the joy and the discomfort together.

• 31:04Susan David?

  And recognizing that we don't need to be owned by any of it, because we are more than those things as well. And we are able to move forward towards our values.

• 31:13Lewis Howes?

  I'm curious, I think a lot of people would probably admit, maybe not publicly, but they probably admit to like someone close to them, if they were truly honest with themselves, that for a period of their, their life, they didn't believe they were worthy of love.

• 31:29Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 31:30Lewis Howes?

  There's probably a good amount of people in the world that don't, that aren't as adults, good at receiving love. They don't believe they deserve it. And maybe there's a whole nother spectrum of people, you know, that's all they do is they love themselves too much. You know, it's like very narcissistic or something like that, but I think there's a lot of people that doubt themselves.

• 31:47Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 31:48Lewis Howes?

  They doubt themselves by certain stories that told themselves, certain things that have happened in their lives that confirm they're not deserving of love. They picked on, bullied, parents, whatever it might be. Broken up with boyfriend, girlfriend, all that stuff. How do we believe we are worthy of love? How do we learn to believe that we as an individual are deserving of love?

• 32:10Susan David?

  Yeah, that's such a powerful question. And I just want to kind of circle back. You gave narcissism as an example of, of self-love.

• 32:18Lewis Howes?

  They're actually hate themselves the most.

• 32:20Susan David?

  Actually narcissism is a manifestation of very often low self-esteem. I think one of the most important aspects of this, this fight for worthiness, really, because that is, that is what it is. And I think that, that all of us as humans at some level fight for worthiness. And I think the really important part of, you know, when I talk about agility versus rigidity, you know, my work is on emotional agility in contrast to emotional rigidity. And so I think what becomes really important in that is if we think about the kinds of thoughts that people have, I've given some examples of like,

• 33:05Susan David?

  I'm not good enough, or there's no point in trying, okay? Emotions, emotions like grief and anger, or stories, stories about whether I'm worthy of love, whether I'm not. So, a really important part of actually being able to move forward in the world with integrity is recognizing that these are normal, okay? And, and this is really, really important.

• 33:35Lewis Howes?

  This thought or this feeling that I'm not enough?

• 33:36Susan David?

  Any of it, any of it and all of it is actually normal. There is nothing good or bad, right or wrong about saying to yourself, or the, the automatic thought that says like, gee, I'm gonna stuff this up. Okay, there is, that is literally your body and your psychology doing the job that it was meant to do, which is to help you to make sense of the world, to adapt and respond. If you were never concerned about how you sounded,

• 34:15Susan David?

  you would have no friends.

• 34:15Lewis Howes?

  You wouldn't get anywhere.

• 34:17Susan David?

  You wouldn't get anywhere. If you were never concerned about whether you should be fearful about something or not.

• 34:25Lewis Howes?

  You'd be dead.

• 34:25Susan David?

  You'd be dead.

• 34:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 34:26Susan David?

  Okay, so this whole narrative, which is that there's some thoughts that are good and some thoughts that are bad and some emotions, is actually like a, a, um, it's a completely false narrative.

• 34:38Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 34:38Susan David?

  And so one of the core ways we start to dismantle the narrative is by recognizing that these thoughts, emotions and stories are normal.

• 34:48Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 34:49Susan David?

  They are normal sense-making machines. You know, you are absolutely, your brain is doing its job when it's helping you to kind of judge, be curious, assess, understand, but what happened, like that's your brain doing its job. So when do we become hooked? When, when do we become rigid? When are we now being unhealthy?

• 35:09Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, when it's holding, when it's holding us back.

• 35:11Susan David?

  When it's holding us back and when we start being imprisoned by them.

• 35:15Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 35:16Susan David?

  Okay, so in psychological terms, the language for this is fusion. Or in my book on emotional agility, I call this hooked. So, so.

• 35:24Lewis Howes?

  Hooked meaning like trapped in your feelings, thoughts, you can't progress in life.

• 35:28Susan David?

  So, so let's, so, so.

• 35:31Lewis Howes?

  You're suffering in it.

• 35:31Susan David?

  The thought of, I'm not good enough.

• 35:37Susan David?

  Or am I gonna succeed at this? Or maybe I'll think, these are normal, okay, normal. Fusion or being hooked is when you say, I'm not good enough. Therefore, there's no point in me trying.

• 35:51Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:51Susan David?

  Okay?

• 35:52Lewis Howes?

  When you believe it a hundred percent.

• 35:53Susan David?

  So, yeah, so what you're starting to do is you're starting to take this normal thought, emotional story, and you are starting to let it define you, hence the word fusion. You know, you are now fused.

• 36:05Lewis Howes?

  Becomes your identity.

• 36:06Susan David?

  It becomes, becomes, it's literally like the, the emotion owns you rather than you owning it. And this is really important. We own our emotions, they don't own us. So when you talk about how do we move into a space of generating a sense of, of connection with self and self-worth, firstly, recognizing that the way you've often responded doesn't need judgment. It just needs compassion, because it's hard to human. It's, do you know what I mean? It's hard to human.

• 36:43Lewis Howes?

  It is.

• 36:44Susan David?

  So, so there's firstly that. The second thing that becomes important is, is, and this again connects with this idea of rigidity, which is recognizing that when you were that five-year-old child

• 37:01Susan David?

  and you were learning how to survive,

• 37:06Susan David?

  that

• 37:08Susan David?

  those strategies that you used at that age were actually functional.

• 37:14Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 37:14Susan David?

  In other words, those strategies probably protected you. You know, if you were bullied and therefore you stopped being vulnerable, as an example, that strategy actually was protective. So it was actually a functional strategy. What happens is we start

• 37:32Susan David?

  moving into a point where we, the strategy is no longer helpful to us. So now imagine you've developed these strategies of defensiveness, of um, always wanting to be right, of like all of these things that we develop. Competing, like whatever it is for us. So we start developing these strategies and then we move into a different part of our lives. Now we, now we've got someone who really loves us and who wants to be with us and where our once functional strategy of shutting down and of being protective is now not, not functional.

• 38:12Susan David?

  In other words, we've outgrown, just like we outgrow our shoes, just like we outgrow our clothes when we move into different phases of our lives, we outgrow strategies. And so it becomes really important, this is where these emotional agility skills come in, to recognize that

• 38:34Susan David?

  when, when we are hooked, we are often not sensitive to the context. We're often on seeing the person in front of us.

• 38:41Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 38:42Susan David?

  We're seeing the five-year-old who is fighting for survival.

• 38:48Susan David?

  And so what does that mean? That means we, uh, really owe ourselves huge amounts of compassion, compassion for that child. And we, we also, there's this beautiful, uh,

• 39:05Susan David?

  There's this beautiful quote by Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, who he describes this idea, he says, you know, as a human being, you can never step into the same river twice. And what is that saying? It's saying the world is always changing. Technology, the economy, politics, like the world is always changing. And we as human beings are changing. If we didn't, there would be something wrong with us. And so with change comes confusion, comes difficult emotions. Comes, um,

• 39:48Susan David?

  the

• 39:48Lewis Howes?

  It's uncomfortable to change, you know?

• 39:50Susan David?

  It's uncomfortable. And it's because it's uncomfortable that it's so important to be gentle with it. Because, because it's like you being gentle with you holding hands with yourself in your walk through life.

• 40:06Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 40:06Susan David?

  And, and as opposed to staying stuck where you once were. And so when you're walking through life and you're walking to a new place, whether that new place is a new job or a new career or a new idea or new relationship, there's, there's such beauty in holding hands with yourself.

• 40:23Lewis Howes?

  It's going back to what you're just talking about. It sounds like the memories of our past that are connected to a painful emotion hold us back or could potentially hold us back in the future to not feel those pain, those painful emotions again, right?

• 40:40Susan David?

  Yes.

• 40:41Lewis Howes?

  It's these stories that we have attached a memory with an emotion, I guess.

• 40:46Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 40:46Lewis Howes?

  From these events.

• 40:47Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 40:47Lewis Howes?

  Right? Whether it's on some people's point of view, extremely traumatic or something smaller, but it could still be very traumatic.

• 40:56Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 40:56Lewis Howes?

  Right?

• 40:56Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 40:57Lewis Howes?

  Those memories seem to hold us back. It's almost like if we could, you know, erase all the memories of our past and enter in the world as this human being without those memories, would we be able to be more unapologetic in taking action on things we want to take action on? Will we have more confidence?

• 41:16Susan David?

  Yeah, I think that's such a powerful question. I mean, I think that like the memories hold us back and certainly, but that also, that also move us forward. I mean, there's, there's, there's the memory of

• 41:27Lewis Howes?

  That protects us too.

• 41:27Susan David?

  That protects us, that they're all of these things. But I also, um, but we, we can be hooked by a past, but we can also be hooked by today. You know, we know that when people are experiencing a lot of stress, when the world is changing quickly, when your job's changing and there's like yet another, you know, yet another transformation, yet another, whatever it is. When human beings experience huge amounts of stress, or, or even normal amounts of stress, normal amounts of confusion, there actually tends to be a cognitive narrowing. And so what I mean by this is we tend to, as we experience more ambiguity and more stress or more technology,

• 42:13Susan David?

  it's almost like the technology has outpaced our human capacity to deal with it. Because human beings, when human beings, if we think about the evolutionary survival mechanism, when we are experiencing stress and threat, our, there is a perceptual narrowing, literally a cognitive narrowing. So there's a focus. And that focus might be, I'm hooked on being right in my Twitter feed. I'm, you know, I'm stuck in my emotion today because there's a, there's a, there's a narrowing. So we can be in agile and rigid because of past experiences, but we can also be in agile and rigid because there's just a lot of stuff coming at us.

• 42:55Susan David?

  And like the, the World Economic Forum talks about these emotional agility skills as being the skills of the future for exactly this reason.

• 43:08Lewis Howes?

  My friend, I hope you're enjoying this episode. And the School of Greatness drops new conversations every Monday, Wednesday and Friday around money, mindset, healing, manifestation and relationships. And if you're not yet following the show, then you're missing all of them. Please tap the follow button right now and you'll get notified the moment every new episode drops because the next one might be exactly what you need. Now let's get back to the conversation. I mean, you can tell also from like the greatest leaders, you know, the ones that are, are flexible in their ability to relate and connect to different people, the ones that can handle the pressure without going right into fear mode or attack mode, but the ones can see it

• 43:53Lewis Howes?

  and not narrow their focus, but widen their focus and see everything and maneuver with flexibility are the ones that typically are able to last in business, in relationships, as coaching teams, you know, in sports, they're the ones that succeed over time.

• 44:08Susan David?

  Yeah, they, they end up being able to have

• 44:13Susan David?

  contextual awareness. So what you're starting to do is you're starting to move away from a rigid story defining your action into being able to zoom out and getting a greater sense of like, what is the full scope of what I'm experiencing in front of me? And, and what you described there is so important because, so firstly, I just wanted to, I just wanted to say you'd asked the question about how do we start developing greater levels of self-worth? I think one of the most powerful ways we do this is through action. Through, through, through action, through, you know, making choices, even if those choices are difficult, that feel connected with our values. Keeping promises to ourselves.

• 44:58Susan David?

  It's through action, we, we're starting to develop the sense. But you mentioned leaders. And it really connects me with,

• 45:08Susan David?

  you know, I know it's like an obvious thing to draw on, but, but it connects me with Nelson Mandela. Partly because of my history, but, but one of the cause, one of the foundational ideas of my work is firstly that these emotions aren't good or bad. And secondly, that emotions are data. Okay, that emotions are data, that emotions signpost our needs. And this is very different from the, oh, I'm feeling sad, just push it aside. What this is actually saying is we, we aren't just trying to manage our difficult emotions as in a like clinical I C, you know, manage them. Manage is the wrong word, regulate even, we aren't even trying to regulate them.

• 45:50Susan David?

  Actually, we can take it way beyond there into the extraordinary recognition that our emotions are data. That our emotions are shining a light on our needs and our values. And so for the person who's feeling bored,

• 46:18Susan David?

  and you can be busy and bored at the same time, as, as we know.

• 46:21Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure.

• 46:22Susan David?

  Boredom is saying, hey, you care about learning. You care about growth and you don't have enough of that. So if you're feeling bored at work, what that's actually signposting is a value. And it's actually saying you can move towards that value. You can put your hand up for a new project, you can extend yourself, you can have different conversations with your team. If you're bored in a relationship or what I call over competent, you know, you go out for dinner, you know exactly what you're

• 46:51Lewis Howes?

  It's too comfortable.

• 46:52Susan David?

  Yeah, you know exactly what the person's opinion of the movie is going to be and what they're going to order and what you're going to talk about. That boredom, which is a key risk factor for disengagement, that boredom is actually saying you care about growth and learning.

• 47:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 47:06Susan David?

  How can you bring more growth and learning to this relationship?

• 47:08Lewis Howes?

  You're not living in your values right now.

• 47:10Susan David?

  Yeah, and, and we can do this by expanding the breadth, the types of things we talk about, the depth. You know, when you went on the first date and you ask someone about their hopes and dreams, but when you've been married for 10 years, you might not ask it anymore, but ask it.

• 47:24Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 47:24Susan David?

  Ask it because that is bringing you towards your values. You know, Nelson Mandela spoke about something very powerful. He didn't push anger aside. He spoke about getting into a relationship with his anger. He spoke about his anger signaling

• 47:46Susan David?

  his values. And that a value that was really important to him was under threat. Okay, which is, which is equality and the fall of apartheid, you know, the dismantling of apartheid. So it wasn't about pushing emotion aside. So, so here's this idea, it's emotions are data, but they're not directives. So I'm going to play this out for you. Emotions are data, they're not directives.

• 48:16Susan David?

  Emotions are data because they signpost our needs and our values, but they're not directives. Just because I feel angry doesn't mean I get to have it out with everyone in front of me.

• 48:25Lewis Howes?

  I scream at people.

• 48:27Susan David?

  Just because I feel sad and I don't want to get out of bed doesn't mean now I give in to my sadness because that's like, we spoke about bottling earlier. That's just now brooding, then you, you're imprisoned by your difficulty motions. So Nelson Mandela said something extraordinary. He described how

• 48:43Susan David?

  in order to effectively navigate his anger, he needed to learn how to sit down with his oppressor.

• 48:53Susan David?

  And, and this is very powerful. Well, no, he, he, the emotion was signposting his values, his values around equity. In order to actually move towards his values, he couldn't be held by his rage. He actually needed to step into the wisdom that his emotions were pointing to, which is, if you want conversation, if you want collaboration, if you want to be seen, then you need to put yourself in a situation in which you are collaborating, in which you are seen, in which you are conversing.

• 49:34Susan David?

  And so Nelson Mandela, one of the most powerful things that he did was sitting down to talk.

• 49:42Lewis Howes?

  But you can't sit down with your emotions in anger and rage, because someone's not going to be able to receive that in collaboration.

• 49:48Susan David?

  Emotions are data, not directives. It's like, it's, it's the, it's the.

• 49:53Lewis Howes?

  It's not credible.

• 49:54Susan David?

  Correct.

• 49:54Lewis Howes?

  It's not credible. If you're screaming at me because you're upset that I did something I wasn't even aware of, I'm going to be like, what are you talking about?

• 50:00Susan David?

  Like. It's the understanding of what the emotion is signposting.

• 50:07Lewis Howes?

  Yes, to communicate.

• 50:08Susan David?

  In order to step into the wisdom of your values. So it's not the emotions that are driving you. It's not the emotions that are the directives. It is the values and the wisdom. And I think this is so important because when you live in a polarized society,

• 50:28Susan David?

  we become so hooked on being right,

• 50:32Susan David?

  that actually the focus on being right is very often taking us away from the values that we are professing.

• 50:42Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, the wanting the equality or whatever it might be or, or something, yeah.

• 50:45Susan David?

  We want to be inclusive, but we've been so exclusive in our opinion or in there's only this one way to be in our opinion.

• 50:54Lewis Howes?

  Or we want to be seen, but we won't see someone else, unless they see it their point of view, whatever it might be, right?

• 51:00Susan David?

  So it's like so interesting because it's this, it's this like

• 51:05Susan David?

  holding of the healthy emotion. And the only way we can move away from the, the immersion in rage is when we actually have a, when we have a healthy relationship with that, where we see that rage is being helpful from a data perspective. But, but also we, we try to glean the value, the values that are being pointed to from the difficulty motion.

• 51:30Lewis Howes?

  So like Nelson Mandela, he sat with his anger or whatever emotion he had. He sat with it, he was developing a relationship with it. And then he would use his information to communicate what he wanted.

• 51:43Susan David?

  Yeah, to move towards what you care about. And, and it's like, we can play this out in so many ways. If we think about loneliness, loneliness is, loneliness is on the increase. And, and we can be lonely in a crowd. We can literally, when people are lonely, very often what they do then is they put up even more of a barrier because they feel so almost enveloped in that loneliness. But loneliness is signposting that you, you need more intimacy and connection.

• 52:13Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 52:13Susan David?

  And so if we can step into those values more purposefully and more fully, that is, you know, that's why, uh, uh, when you, when, when we say like, well, what is emotional agility? Well, it's, it's about seeing and unseeing. What is the, what is the, the like true definition of it?

• 52:32Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 52:33Susan David?

  Uh, emotional agility is about the ability to be with all of our thoughts, our emotions and our experiences in ways that are curious. You know, what is this emotion trying to tell me? In ways that are compassionate, because it's hard to human, and in ways that are courageous. Uh, having that difficult conversation doesn't always feel good. Uh, we, we, we don't get to have a meaningful career or leave the world a better place or raise a family without stress and discomfort.

• 53:04Lewis Howes?

  It's interesting, uh, you know, as I've been in my relationship with my girlfriend Martha, I said in the very beginning, I said, listen, we can have all the uncomfortable conversations you want to have.

• 53:15Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 53:16Lewis Howes?

  There's stuff from my past I'm not proud of that I'm going to share with you. There's probably stuff that you may want to talk about, but maybe it doesn't feel good for me, the way you're saying things, whatever. I can't predict it, but there should be no reason we ever scream or react with anger towards each other, in my opinion. But we can have all the uncomfortable conversations you want. Like, we can communicate it as healthy, conscious, courageous, compassionate adults.

• 53:40Susan David?

  Yes.

• 53:41Lewis Howes?

  It doesn't mean you have to lean into the emo, I can feel the emotion. I'd be like, that, that's sad, that hurts me. That's, that makes me feel a little angry, but it doesn't mean I need to direct, they're not my directions, like you said.

• 53:52Susan David?

  Yeah, yeah, because again, we own our emotions, they don't, own us. And, and this is where some of these agility skills, like some actual kind of practical skills come in.

• 54:03Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 54:03Susan David?

  That can be helpful to people.

• 54:05Lewis Howes?

  You have this post I saw on your Instagram, which I love. The best question to ask yourself in a moment of stress or conflict. And what you have in this post is asking yourself these questions. What action could I take in this, uh, that in, that is most aligned with my values? And I, and the reason I like this post is because you keep talking about values in this conversation. Most people don't know what their values are.

• 54:29Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 54:29Lewis Howes?

  And so what happens when we aren't clear on our values in general?

• 54:35Susan David?

  Well, a couple of things.

• 54:38Susan David?

  A couple of things, of course, like you're talking to like the nerd of the stuff. So I'll say like, well, there are 23 things, there's like 27 things.

• 54:43Lewis Howes?

  If we don't have values or we're not clear on our values, what happens?

• 54:47Susan David?

  Couple of things that happen. The first thing that happens is we are more likely to be subject to what is called social contagion. And social contagion is, uh, where we basically pick up on other people's values or other people's emotions. And so, you know, there's some very beautiful epidemiological studies that for instance, show that if someone in your social network gets divorced, as an example, even if you do not know the person, you are more likely to get divorced. Okay, because this, this like divorce is almost like behaviorally normalized for you.

• 55:30Susan David?

  And you start to adopt it as something that's your own. It's like, okay to do. Some other examples, imagine you get on an airplane and you are, you know, kind of vaguely trying to be healthy, but it's not really connected at a deep level with you. And your seat partner buys candy. You are 70% more likely to buy candy.

• 55:54Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 55:55Susan David?

  Okay, and this might sound like, oh, well, you know, who cares? It's just like a one off thing. But if you think about it, what starts to happen is

• 56:03Susan David?

  we, we can start to absorb the way other people live. Uh, our next door neighbor drives a particular car, we want that car, we want that promotion. Like social media, like there's all of this thing that starts to create a context in which our behaviors aren't actually our behaviors. They are actually the behaviors of others. You know, oh, that person on social media has got that beautiful pair of jeans. I never considered that I might want that pair of jeans, but now I, you know, now I've got to have them. So we start to absorb other people's behaviors. And you, you saw this very clearly in the pandemic. It's like one person is loading their shopping cart

• 56:46Susan David?

  with like more toilet paper than they would ever use in their lives. And now everyone's doing it. So this is social contagion.

• 56:54Lewis Howes?

  So is this like, so is this like our, and would our values become our identity then?

• 56:58Susan David?

  No, so this is, this is because there's emotions in the world and there's behaviors in the world. And we start, we are humans and we are social species and we start picking them up. So, and I'll, I'll get to the kind of values piece because it's really important. So let me plow out a, a kind of example here, which is, imagine you, and, and this is based on some research on this. So imagine you are someone who has grown up in an environment, in a community in which every message that you've ever gotten is, we don't go to college. Okay, we're not college material. We don't go to college, like this is not who we are. But you fight and you, you like, you do everything you can and you go to college. And then because life's beauty holds hands with its fragility,

• 57:43Susan David?

  one day you're in college and you failed your first test or things don't go so well. Or, you know, something happens, like things feel stressful. So at that point, there is a significant likelihood that that person will actually drop out of college.

• 58:00Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 58:01Susan David?

  So what's fascinating here is we always think, we, we, people talk about bias a lot. You know, oh, this person's biased and that person's biased.

• 58:11Susan David?

  You know, they, they, they like biased against my gender or whatever it is. But what we don't talk about is self bias. So, so what is self bias? Self bias is when you've grown up in an environment in which there is some kind of narrative. We don't do college here as one example.

• 58:30Susan David?

  And then stress happens because stress happens or change happens because change happens.

• 58:34Lewis Howes?

  And you fall back into that self bias.

• 58:36Susan David?

  You, yeah, you actually start to use that bias against yourself. So you start to say things like, maybe they were right. Okay. Maybe they were right. Maybe I'm just never gonna have a, a healthy relationship. Maybe they were right. Maybe I'm not cut out for this. So that's why we see at this point, many of these college students will drop out. But now this getting back to values, if you take these college students and you engage them in a brief writing exercise. And you ask them literally for 10 minutes to write down why they are studying this particular degree. Why it's important to them, what their purpose is, what their values are.

• 59:18Susan David?

  What the core is of what they're doing here, why they're doing it. In other words, you're asking them what their why is. What we know is that that 10 minute exercise actually protects those students.

• 59:32Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 59:32Susan David?

  Years down the track.

• 59:34Lewis Howes?

  Cause they'll always go back to, ah, it's really hard this week or this semester, but the reason I'm doing this.

• 59:39Susan David?

  Why I'm doing this. This is why I'm doing this. And so when you ask the question, which is, why is it, what happens when we don't know our values? What happens when we don't know our values is, number one, we start living someone else's life. Okay? Through social contagion. Number two, when things get

• 1:00:02Susan David?

  stressful, we, we don't have the, the inner core to actually help us to respond effectively. And, and I often think about this, this kind of analogy, which is, which is,

• 1:00:18Susan David?

  well, like if we think metaphorically, like a gymnast, you know, what's going on with a gymnast, like a gymnast is, or in any kind of sports, a gymnast is, there's everything going on in the environment. There's, there's, there's the crowd, there's the music, there's the, how everyone else is doing in the competition. There's the, there's the individual who, you know, is doing, she's doing her routine and falls slightly differently every time. And yet, there is this core that helps the person to write themselves, to connect with themselves. And that's what your values do.

• 1:00:53Lewis Howes?

  So good.

• 1:00:53Susan David?

  That's what your values do.

• 1:00:54Lewis Howes?

  That's so good. In this post that you have about that, which is, is this aligned with my values? Which I think is the first thing we should be asking ourselves. Is it aligned with my values? Another one you have here is, I may be right in this, in this moment, but is my response serving me? And is it serving my values, really? Is it serving my values and my vision? Is it serving me from where my values are and where I wanna go?

• 1:01:18Susan David?

  Yeah, like I may be right, but is it serving, like,

• 1:01:21Lewis Howes?

  Exactly.

• 1:01:21Susan David?

  I, I had this, I had this experience with this individual executive a couple of years ago. He worked for the United Nations. And he was, um,

• 1:01:34Susan David?

  he was really involved in food security. Like he was bringing food to people who would otherwise not get it. And I had this conversation with this individual and he said to me that in order to do his job effectively, he needed to work with a particular government official in this country. And he could not stand this guy. Okay. He was like, I cannot stand him. I, he's awful. He's like, I can't stand him. Okay.

• 1:02:06Susan David?

  And so what was he doing? He's like, and I'm just avoiding his calls because I just can't deal. And so I was like, we had this conversation and, and the reason that that is rigid is because firstly, the person may have been right. Okay. The guy might have been a complete idiot, whatever, who knows? But the reason it's rigid is because he would say to me, this man talks to me like my father used to talk to me. And there is no ways I'm putting up with it. And the reason that it's rigid is because it either asks for a new childhood. Or for a new government official.

• 1:02:44Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 1:02:45Susan David?

  Okay. Neither of which are likely, neither of which are likely.

• 1:02:49Lewis Howes?

  Years or something. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:51Susan David?

  So it's like this, this example again of dead and not directors.

• 1:02:54Lewis Howes?

  To get what you want.

• 1:02:55Susan David?

  Is it like, I may be right. But is my response serving me? Is it bringing me closer to being the person, the loved one, to having the relationship, the life that I most want to have?

• 1:03:10Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely. I love this stuff. I feel like I could go for another hour with you, but I wanna, I've got a few more questions. I'm curious, with all your, you've been doing this study, studying for how many decades now? I mean, two decades?

• 1:03:21Susan David?

  Don't even ask.

• 1:03:21Lewis Howes?

  Two decades?

• 1:03:22Susan David?

  I'm such a nerd. I'm like, it's, it's like a, an awful party thing. Like when you do, oh, uh, you know, how many more, uh, emotions researcher, wow, working about, yeah.

• 1:03:30Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:31Susan David?

  More than two decades.

• 1:03:31Lewis Howes?

  You've been doing this for a while.

• 1:03:32Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:33Lewis Howes?

  What has more control over us if we allow it? And what has the most power if we step into it? Our thoughts, our emotions, or our feelings? What consumes us and holds us back?

• 1:03:49Lewis Howes?

  Of the three the most? And which one, if we step into it, propels us forward in a positive way the most?

• 1:03:55Susan David?

  So can I reframe that a little bit?

• 1:03:57Lewis Howes?

  Give it to me.

• 1:03:57Susan David?

  Because I wanna, okay. So this, sometimes people say things like, which comes first? You know, do your thoughts come first? Do your emotions come first? Which is stronger? In truth, uh, there are multi-directional effects. So let me give you an example. Um, sometimes people can experience an emotion. And then they, that emotion turns into a feeling. In other words, we ascribe some kind of interpretation to it. And we know that, say, someone is feeling, um,

• 1:04:29Susan David?

  a little bit negative, not super negative, but a little bit negative. We know that that emotion actually impacts on their thinking and their decision-making. So.

• 1:04:40Lewis Howes?

  The emotion impacts.

• 1:04:41Susan David?

  The emotion impacts the thinking. So when you are trying to do very creative work,

• 1:04:49Susan David?

  if you're feeling more joyous, you are more likely to think big picture, creative, have lots of amazing ideas. Okay. Because again, when you're feeling more joyous, you have a perceptual widening. Therefore you are able to kind of bring things into being that maybe didn't previously exist. And when you're in a more neutral to negative mood, you've got a perceptual narrowing. So imagine you're trying to write a book. This is why we say, when you're trying to write a book, do the creative work when you're in one frame of mind and do the more editorial work when you're in another frame of mind. Because when you're in a neutral to negative mood, you are actually more likely to find errors.

• 1:05:34Susan David?

  You are more likely to do better editing work. And so this is this example, you know, this is this example in the workplace where people say, oh, you know, you've just gotta, people have got to be positive all the time. Which is ridiculous and which creates a lack of psychological safety. But more than that, when you're pitching something to a client, being connected and generative is gonna create more of an expansive receptiveness. But when you and your team are trying to figure out what could go wrong here, actually a neutral to negative mood actually supports you.

• 1:06:08Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. Well, okay, let me ask you a question about.

• 1:06:11Susan David?

  But I wanna like step into the power. So let's, let's go there because.

• 1:06:14Lewis Howes?

  Let me, yeah, yeah, yeah. Stay there. Let me ask you a question about sports though, because when I was on lots of different sports teams, if there was ever negative people, negative attitudes, it would pull down the entire team. You know, whether it be during a practice, during a game, it would kind of throw the rest of the team off. If someone was negative. Now, if you're in, watching a game film and you're saying, how could this have been better? And you're more critical in your thinking and you're assessing, oh, I could have made this shot better or this route, whatever it might be. But it's, but in sports, it was never about like having a negative attitude about it. Because then that would kind of pull the energy down. So how does that work with sports, I guess?

• 1:06:54Susan David?

  Yeah. Well, I, I think there's a difference between, again, someone being stuck in the being negative relative to creating psychological safety, where someone says, you know, the way we're doing this tackle might not work because of such and such.

• 1:07:13Lewis Howes?

  Got it. As opposed to just being like, yeah, I agree with everything.

• 1:07:16Susan David?

  Yeah. So, so it's really, it's, it's really fascinating. When you look at how this plays out in organizations, a lot of leaders will say things like, you're on the bus or you're off the bus. You know, you with me or you against me?

• 1:07:27Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:07:27Susan David?

  Um, and so what's bound up in that idea is that if you say something that is difficult, or if you highlight that something might not be working out, there's something wrong with you. You know, there's something wrong with you. And so what happens? People see a potential error that might happen and they push it aside. They don't say anything because they don't wanna be seen as negative. So actually, when you think about organizations and you think about like innovation, innovation holds hands with failure. You know, collaboration holds hands with conflict. And so you don't actually get to have an organization that is agile without emotional agility, without an openness to all of these difficult emotions. So when you recognize that someone is saying, hey, I'm concerned about the strategy.

• 1:08:13Susan David?

  I'm really concerned about it. What is that emotion signposting? The emotion might be signposting, not that the person's negative, but that the person actually cares about the outcome.

• 1:08:25Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm. That's cool.

• 1:08:26Susan David?

  You know, that they care about the client, they care about the customer. And so when you're a leader and you create the space for the lack of judgment about good or bad emotions, you move into a different way of being.

• 1:08:41Lewis Howes?

  That's cool. Okay. Thoughts, emotions.

• 1:08:43Susan David?

  So thoughts, emotions. So the, the, the truth is that these things are completely, you know, multi-directional and neither one comes first. So for all of these things, however, we can be stuck in a thought, we can be stuck in an emotion, we can be stuck in a story. And so this is where these critical strategies come into, to play. So I'll give you two examples. You were talking about stepping into your power.

• 1:09:04Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:09:04Susan David?

  Okay. So.

• 1:09:07Susan David?

  You're showing up to a difficult emotion, you're showing up with curiosity, but the truth is you feel grieving, you feel sad, you feel stressed, and that's, that's the truth for you. So it is really difficult to read the instructions when you are stuck inside the jar, okay? When you are stuck inside the difficult emotion, it's difficult to be able to create the space for values because you're so immersed in it. And I remember, actually, it was, it was a couple of months ago, I had the fortune of speaking with NASA, and it was one of those beautiful examples where you're like giving

• 1:09:49Susan David?

  the example and it, it completely is like their world, which is this, this thing that astronauts describe, which is that when they go into space, the further and further they get from the earth, the more, it's called the overview effect, the more they see the earth as being just this like tiny pinprick.

• 1:10:12Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:13Susan David?

  And that there is something so beautiful that happens in that moment because the astronauts are both reminded of simultaneously of their insignificance, okay, I mean insignificant, and of their significance, because there's something that feels so powerful in being able to observe the earth. And we can do the same with our emotions. We can move away from the immersion in our difficult emotions into being able to observe them.

• 1:10:49Lewis Howes?

  Seeing it from the side.

• 1:10:50Susan David?

  Seeing them. So we're now outside, outside the jar. And so there are a couple of ways that we, we do this. It's beautiful. It's like this significance and insignificance. So there's some ways that we do this. The first is something that I speak about a fair bit in, in my work, it's this area called emotion granularity. And it's this idea that very often when we're stuck in a difficult emotion, we use big labels to describe what we're feeling. We say, no, I'm stressed. Okay, I'm stressed is the most common one.

• 1:11:20Lewis Howes?

  I'm overwhelmed, I'm stressed.

• 1:11:22Susan David?

  I'm overwhelmed, I'm stressed, I'm depressed. We use these like big, broad brushstrokes. But there is a world of difference between stressed and disappointed.

• 1:11:33Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:11:34Susan David?

  Or stressed and feeling unsupported, stressed and that knowing, knowing feeling of I'm in the wrong job, the wrong career, this relationship isn't working out. When you label something just as stress, your body and your psychology doesn't actually know what to do with it because it feels immobilizing. There's like such an enveloping that happens. So you ask the question of how do you start stepping into your power? And one of the ways you start stepping into your power is in, you want to start creating space between you and the emotion. You know, Viktor Frankl, between stimulus and response, there is a space. How do you start creating the space? So you're not fused, you're stepping into.

• 1:12:13Susan David?

  So one of the most profound ways we can do this is by developing skills of emotion granularity. So emotion granularity is basically that instead of having this broad brushstroke, I feel stressed, starting to ask yourself, what are two other options? Like, I'm calling this thing stress, but what else is it? And when we start saying, oh, it's not stress, actually, it's unsupported, what that already literally just in, in naming this thing, it starts to activate our understanding of

• 1:12:52Susan David?

  the cause of the emotion, what we need to do in response to the emotion, and what scientists call the readiness potential in our brains, the, the part of our brains that starts to mobilize us for action, starts to, to get activated. And so emotion granularity is really powerful. And I remember a, a couple of years ago, I was working with an executive and he would always say, his, his, his big word was anger. He would say, I'm angry, I'm angry, I'm angry, I'm angry. And I started to say, I'm like, what are two other things? Like, what else could you be experiencing? And he started to say, actually, maybe I'm not angry, maybe I'm fearful, okay? I'm in a new role, things are changing, I think I'm fearful.

• 1:13:37Susan David?

  And what about your team? You know, is your team angry? He started to connect with, I think they're mistrusting, okay? I think they're mistrusting. So you can see, Lewis, if you feel anger, if you are, I'm angry and my team's angry, the conversation is a very different one than I'm scared and my team is looking for opportunities to build trust.

• 1:14:02Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:14:03Susan David?

  You can see that, that, the tone, the, the experience of it is different. A couple of months later, I was having a dinner with him and a group of his, his colleagues and his wife was there. And she said, this particular strategy completely changed their relationship because he would come home from work and he would say to her, are you angry? And she would be, I'm not angry, you know, I feel unsupported.

• 1:14:32Lewis Howes?

  Unseen.

• 1:14:33Susan David?

  Oh, I'm not angry, I'm just tired.

• 1:14:35Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:36Susan David?

  Okay? So emotion granularity is a superpower and I know that word is overused, but children as young as two and three years old, who are more able to accurately label their emotions, have higher levels of well-being, literally longitudinal studies, ability to delay gratification, high levels of, you know, mental health and so on. And if, if you think about what's happening here, if you've got a child, where the child's now sixteen, and someone says like, hey, I've got a great idea, let's take drugs or whatever it is.

• 1:15:17Susan David?

  On the one hand, the child wants to feel part of the group, there's a sense of excitement and, and, and connection. And then on the other, the child who has mastered at some level emotion granularity is able to connect with the disquiet and gee, this doesn't connect with my values. So it doesn't take a lot of work to, to see how emotion granularity is, is actually profoundly useful to us in our lives.

• 1:15:51Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:15:52Susan David?

  So the other thing that I think is, is helpful in terms of getting out the bottle, getting out the jar. Is being capable not to fuse with your emotions. So what is a way that we defuse? So if I play this out to you and I say to you, well, Lewis, you are a brother.

• 1:16:14Lewis Howes?

  Uh-huh.

• 1:16:15Susan David?

  And you're an entrepreneur, and you are a son, and you're a friend, and you're, okay, of course, like you're like, yes, of course, I'm all of those things. I can, we, we know that we can hold all of those identities. What often happens when we get hooked, imprisoned by our thoughts, emotions, stories is we, we over-identify with it. And so we start saying things like, I am sad. Again, if we just think about the language, it's so normal, of course we say that, I am sad, I am angry. But I am sad, what are we doing? We are saying, I am, all of me, one hundred percent of me.

• 1:16:54Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:16:55Susan David?

  Is sad, there's no space for wisdom, values, intention, calm, like there's so much inside all of us that is beyond that difficult emotion. But when we say I am, we are literally defining ourselves with it.

• 1:17:09Lewis Howes?

  So it's not, it's not using the words I am, it's maybe something else.

• 1:17:13Susan David?

  You could say, well, well, if we say I am sad, or even I am being undermined, I am being undermined, again, you are creating a prison. I am, this is fact, I am being undermined, all of me is being undermined, so I've got no choice but to shut down in the conversation. So one of the ways that we can start defusing is recognizing that when we label our thoughts, emotions, and stories with an I am, and then the word.

• 1:17:41Lewis Howes?

  It's a big statement, yeah.

• 1:17:43Susan David?

  It's like, it's almost like there is a cloud and you have become the cloud, and the cloud is the sad cloud.

• 1:17:50Lewis Howes?

  As opposed to I feel sadness.

• 1:17:52Susan David?

  Correct, correct. So, so, so the, the power here is exactly that.

• 1:17:57Lewis Howes?

  The language, how you use.

• 1:17:59Susan David?

  How we language, how we language matters, words matter.

• 1:18:03Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely.

• 1:18:04Susan David?

  So what we can start doing is, it's so simple, you can do it in a meeting, you can do it in a conversation with someone else, you can just start noticing your thoughts and stories for what they are, their thoughts and stories. So instead of I am sad, I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad, I'm being undermined, I'm noticing the thought that I'm being undermined, I'm not good enough.

• 1:18:28Susan David?

  I'm noticing that this is my I'm not good enough story.

• 1:18:32Lewis Howes?

  This is coming up for me, yeah.

• 1:18:33Susan David?

  This is coming up for me. So when you start noticing your thoughts, emotions, stories for what they are, what you're actually doing in effect is you're moving from being the cloud, I am the sad cloud, into recognizing, and for everyone listening right now, you are not the cloud. You, you are the sky.

• 1:18:51Lewis Howes?

  Ooh.

• 1:18:52Susan David?

  You know, you are not the cloud, you are the sky.

• 1:18:55Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:18:56Susan David?

  And, and, and.

• 1:18:58Lewis Howes?

  And there is a cloud.

• 1:18:59Susan David?

  There is a cloud.

• 1:19:00Lewis Howes?

  In the sky.

• 1:19:01Susan David?

  You are the sky.

• 1:19:01Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:19:02Susan David?

  You are human and messy and capacious and beautiful and, and real and, and authentic and you enough to have all of your difficult thoughts, emotions and stories, and to still be the sky.

• 1:19:21Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:19:22Susan David?

  To still be the you.

• 1:19:24Lewis Howes?

  That's powerful. Susan, I want to acknowledge you for your, your decades of research and work on what I think is the thing that either holds us back or propels us forward in a big way. And a lot of people are prisoners of their emotion. I feel like there's so many free people in the world who aren't in prison, but we put ourselves in an emotional prison.

• 1:19:45Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:45Lewis Howes?

  That holds us back from peace, joy, love, intimacy.

• 1:19:50Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:50Lewis Howes?

  Uh, creating the life we want.

• 1:19:53Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:53Lewis Howes?

  You know, and we are sickened internally, which manifests physically or in relational or in whatever, by these emotions sometimes. And so I'm so grateful for you for creating tools, strategies, for people to upgrade their tools and strategies that weren't working for them. And so they can have a more harmonious life while not blocking emotions, feeling the range of them, but not being a captive and a prisoner to them. So I really acknowledge you for your consistent dedication to this.

• 1:20:25Susan David?

  Thank you, and thank you for helping us to get these words out.

• 1:20:29Lewis Howes?

  Of course, of course. Um, I, I asked you this last time, I think it was like four years ago when you were on last time. So when I ask you this question, it's um, called the three truths. So imagine a hypothetical scenario. You live as long as you want to live, but it's your last day.

• 1:20:44Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:45Lewis Howes?

  Hypothetically, you accomplish everything you want to accomplish. You live your life the way you want to do it. But for whatever reason, you have to take all of your work with you. So all of your messages, this conversation, your book, it's for whatever, it's gone.

• 1:20:58Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:59Lewis Howes?

  It's not available anymore.

• 1:20:59Susan David?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:00Lewis Howes?

  But you get to leave behind three lessons to the world, three things you know to be true. From your life, your experiences, your wisdom, what would you say are those three truths for you?

• 1:21:10Susan David?

  I would love to capture the three truths in, in things that feel practical for people. I think one of the truths is that for every person listening, doesn't matter if you're thirty or forty or fifty, for every person listening, there is a child inside of you. There is a five-year-old, and that five-year-old is tugging at your sleeve. And that five-year-old is saying, see me, love me, hear me, connect with me. So I think one of the truths is going to be to turn and face your five-year-old child and ask your five-year-old what it needs. Does it need spontaneity? Does it need creativity?

• 1:21:52Lewis Howes?

  Um. Healing.

• 1:21:54Susan David?

  Yeah, one of, one of the truths, I think, is that when we hold our child inside of us with gentleness, and we also recognize that there is, however old you are now, whether it's thirty or forty or fifty, there's someone twenty years, so there's, I'm fifty, so there's a seventy-year-old me. There's also a seventy-year-old looking back and saying, see me, love me, do what's important.

• 1:22:22Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:23Susan David?

  And so I think one of the truths is that we are not alone in the world. Even if we feel alone, we've got a child inside of us, and we've got an older version inside of us.

• 1:22:35Lewis Howes?

  That's so true.

• 1:22:36Susan David?

  And that if we walk the journey with both of those people holding our hands, we have an infinite source of grounding and wisdom. So I think that for me is.

• 1:22:49Lewis Howes?

  That's so beautiful.

• 1:22:50Susan David?

  Is one of the truths.

• 1:22:51Lewis Howes?

  That's beautiful.

• 1:22:52Susan David?

  I think another truth is um, that there is a mythology that being compassionate towards yourself is about being weak and lazy. It's like letting yourself off the hook, it's about lying to yourself. And when we think about a little child in a restaurant running away from its parents and looking back to make sure that the parents are there, it's the knowledge that the child has, that his parents are there, that if something goes wrong, that they'll step in. It's that knowledge that actually allows the child to explore the restaurant and to learn and grow. And so I think a second truth is that self-compassion is

• 1:23:35Susan David?

  doing for ourselves what we see with that child and the parents. And what I mean by that is

• 1:23:41Susan David?

  it's when you are kind to yourself, that you actually, it's when you have your own back, that you're actually more likely to take risks, to learn, to grow and be vulnerable. And so I think a truth is the truth that self-compassion is the cornerstone to thriving and resilience. And then I think that the third truth is um, a difficult truth, which is before my father died, it was, I was five years old, and my father died ten years later, when, when I was fifteen.

• 1:24:22Susan David?

  And when I was little, I would go into my father and my mom's bedroom. And at five years, years old, a lot of kids become aware of their own mortality. So they start to recognize that one day their parents won't be there. And I would find my way into my parents' bed, night after night after night after night after night, much to their like dismay.

• 1:24:47Susan David?

  And I would cry and I would say to my dad, daddy, promise me you'll never die.

• 1:24:51Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 1:24:52Susan David?

  And this was ten years before my dad was diagnosed with cancer, ten years. And I used to say, daddy, promise me you'll never die, daddy, promise me you'll never die. And my father could have done the forced false positivity, just be grateful for the time we've got together, he could have done that. But he chose not to. He could have buffered me from the truth, but he chose not to. And what he said to me is, Suzie, we all die. It's normal to be scared.

• 1:25:21Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:25:22Susan David?

  And there's what I understood as a truth of the way that he was guiding me through those long dark nights, is he was saying to me that courage is not an absence of fear.

• 1:25:34Susan David?

  Courage is fear-walking. Courage is about being able to hold your fear,

• 1:25:44Susan David?

  your change, your concern, your sadness, your whatever it is in one hand, and to move forward with your values in the other. Courage is not the absence of fear. And I think for me, it was very powerful because in a world that tells us to do away with fear, in a world that says, oh, you know, even in a pandemic, look for the silver lining,

• 1:26:11Susan David?

  never mind we're in the shadow of illness and death, there is actually profound resilience by being able to walk into the future, holding both, holding both your fear and holding your courage because that is what life is asking of us. Every day, life is saying, are you agile? And it's, and it's born of a correspondence with your own heart.

• 1:26:38Lewis Howes?

  Yes. Oh, Susan, I'm so grateful for you. Um, I want people to follow you, susandavid.com, susandavid underscore PhD on Instagram. Some of the best content. I love watching your stuff and seeing all your information there. It's really helpful to understand emotions. So all your content on Instagram, I really appreciate. Also Emotional Agility, it's incredible book. I want people to get the book. How else can we be of service to you?

• 1:27:05Susan David?

  Uh, you, you, you don't need to be of service to me, be of service to yourself and to the world that we were trying to create. Um, but if you want to connect a little bit more with my work beyond um, social media and uh, the book Emotional Agility, my TED Talk is called The Gift and Power of Emotional Courage.

• 1:27:26Lewis Howes?

  We'll link that too, yeah.

• 1:27:27Susan David?

  And then last, something that a lot of people find really helpful because it's just really practical, is I've got a quiz that a few hundred thousand people have taken. And it's susandavid.com forward slash learn, and there's a free ten-page report.

• 1:27:42Lewis Howes?

  Okay, cool.

• 1:27:43Susan David?

  That comes from it. And a lot of people just, because it really connects with emotional agility and values and, and is very helpful.

• 1:27:50Lewis Howes?

  Perfect. susandavid.com slash learn.

• 1:27:53Susan David?

  Learn.

• 1:27:54Lewis Howes?

  Take the quiz, get the book, follow you on social media, watch the TED Talk, we'll link it all up. Final question, what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:28:02Susan David?

  My definition of greatness is being gentle. Being gentle, being gentle with yourself, being gentle with others.

• 1:28:13Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:28:14Susan David?

  Um,

• 1:28:17Susan David?

  moving away from tightness into like just softening into the world. I think such beautiful things and great things happen from gentleness.

• 1:28:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's beautiful. Susan, thank you.

• 1:28:27Susan David?

  Thank you.

• 1:28:27Lewis Howes?

  Appreciate it. My friend, I hope you're enjoying this episode right now because we are on a mission to impact a hundred million lives every single week. And every follow here on this podcast helps us reach more people. Make sure to hit the follow at the top of this show's page right now. It's the single biggest thing that you can do to support the show and the impact of us reaching you every single time we have new episodes. I appreciate you. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. And it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description. And I want to remind you, no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.

• 1:29:10Lewis Howes?

  And now it's time to go out there and do something great.