Emotional Agility

When we’re in monkey-mind mode, it’s easy to start ‘awfulizing’ – imagining worst-case scenarios or making too much of a minor problem. It’s a huge sap of our energy and a complete waste of time. Even more than that, when you’re spinning these imaginary dramas in your head, you aren’t living in the moment. You’re not noticing the flowers in the park or the interesting faces on the train. And you’re not giving your brain the neutral space it needs for creative solutions – maybe even the solution to whatever it was you were fighting about in the first place.

‘Between stimulus and response there is a space,’ he wrote. ‘In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.’

flexibility to override this state. This is why specialists are often the last ones to notice common sense solutions to simple problems, a limitation economist Thorstein Veblen called the ‘trained incapacity’ of experts. Inflated confidence leads ‘old hands’ to ignore contextual information, and the more familiar an expert is with a particular kind of problem, the more likely he is to pull a prefabricated solution out of his memory bank rather than respond to the specific case at hand.

People who are hooked into a particular way of thinking or behaving are not really paying attention to the world as it is. They are insensitive to context – what is really taking place, as opposed to what they think is taking place. Rather, they’re seeing the world as they expect to see it or because they’ve organized it into categories that may or may not have any bearing on the situation at hand.

her father would ask, ‘So tell me how you failed today.’ The question wasn’t designed to demoralize her. Instead, her father meant to encourage his children to push the limits, and feel it was okay – even admirable – to stumble when trying something new and difficult.

But when we become too comfortable with – and habituated to – rigid, pre-existing categories, we’re using what psychologists term ‘premature cognitive commitment’, which is a habitual, inflexible response to ideas, things and people, even ourselves.

For example, we’re much more likely to ask boys about tasks (‘What did you do at school today?’, ‘How was the game?’, ‘Did you win?’) whereas we tend to ask girls about emotions (‘How did you feel?’, ‘Did you have fun?’). Children quickly internalize these rules, which, as we’ll see in

Unfortunately, the postmodern consumption-driven environment in which we live is much more interested in selling us smartphones and junk food than it is in advancing our physical or emotional health. One of advertising’s basic jobs is to make us feel discontented so we crave stuff whether we need it or not, and whether or not it’s good for us. Self-acceptance and self-compassion do not move the merchandise. So what we’re confronted with instead are relentless invitations to compare ourselves with others – and, inevitably, to come out lacking.

I had just stepped out – created the gap between stimulus and response. In the process I’d even recovered a bit of my humanity. This is the place from which you can choose behaviours based on your values rather than indulging in what your thoughts, emotions and stories are insisting that you do. This newly created space allows you to be sensitive to the context, to shift your actions to what will work in the here and now, rather than being driven by mindless impulses

Emotional agility means having any number of troubling thoughts or emotions and still managing to act in a way that serves how you most want to live. That’s what it means to step out and off the hook.

Just saying the words ‘let go’ is enough to bring a sense of hope and relief. But those same words can bring up the anxiety that we will be left with nothing – that we have resigned ourselves to a hopeless situation. In truth though, when we let go of that one thing, we are left with everything else. Clinging to that one small piece of emotional driftwood prevents us from feeling part of the dynamic system that is the universe itself.

‘Walking your why’ is the art of living by your own personal set of values – the beliefs and behaviours you hold dear and give you a sense of meaning and satisfaction. Identifying and acting on the values that are truly your own – not those imposed on you by others, not what you think you ‘should’ care about, but what you genuinely do care about – is the crucial next step of achieving emotional agility.

Other people’s actions and choices affect us more than we realize, on every level, through a fascinating phenomenon called social contagion. If the term brings to mind a virus, spreading through a population via seemingly random casual contact, that’s exactly the idea. Studies show that certain behaviours really are like colds and flus – you can catch them from other people. Your risk of becoming obese increases with each obese person you come into contact with. Your chances of getting divorced, a decision you’d think would be deeply personal and individual, are higher if other couples in your peer group are also splitting up. And then things get really weird. Unlike infectious diseases, which tend to be transmitted from person to person, you can ‘catch’ some behaviours from people you’ve never even come into contact with. One study found that couples are more likely to divorce not just when their friends do, but also when friends of their friends do. That’s right: your personal life can be affected by people you don’t even know.

‘Look at your A, son! You’re a genius!’ promotes a fixed mindset. If a child comes to believe that success depends on innate intelligence, and that intelligence is a fixed commodity, then he’s more likely to think there’s nothing he can do when the going inevitably gets tougher and he finds himself struggling in Spanish or pre-calculus.

We all fall into these subtle traps of language and thinking: ‘I “have to” be on dad duty today’ or ‘I “have to” attend another boring meeting.’ When we do this, we forget that our current circumstances are often the result of earlier choices we made in service of our values:

You ease the creation of a new behaviour by piggybacking it on an existing habit, meaning you don’t have to make a major adjustment to your routines.

But after a while – in fact, very quickly – competence leads to complacency. Once you’ve got the hang of tying your shoes, there’s not much to celebrate each morning as you lace ’em up.

We get to that zone of optimal development in a very specific way: when we live at the edge of our ability, a place in which we’re not over-competent or complacent, but also not in so far over our heads that we’re overwhelmed.

Whatever we choose to take on, the trick is to remain whelmed, to get the balance right between challenge and competence.

In the past few decades, researchers have popularized the idea of ‘neuroplasticity’, which holds that the brain isn’t fixed at some point in early childhood but instead continues to produce new cells. The more subtle discovery, however, is that most of those replenished cells die off. What prevents cell death – and in fact connects the neo-neurons into synapses and integrates them into the brain’s architecture and potential – are effortful learning experiences.

that fulfilment and flourishing in your personal life do not come from doing what other people say is right for you, but from aligning more of what you do, minute to minute, with your deepest values. The same is true at work. While it’s customary to accept certain constraints in exchange for a pay cheque, employment is not slavery, and employees are not chattel. With practice, you can use the techniques of emotional agility to shape your professional life, rather than having it shape you.

‘No, it’s not okay. But it will be okay.’