Susan David

'Essential reading.' - Susan Cain, author of Quiet Every day we speak around 16,000 words - but inside our minds we create tens of thousands more. Thoughts such as 'I'm not spending enough time with my children' or 'I'm not good enough to present my work' can seem to be unshakable facts. In reality, they're the judgemental opinions of our inner voice. Drawing on more than twenty years of academic research, consulting, and her own experiences overcoming adversity, Susan David PhD, a psychologist and faculty member at Harvard Medical School, has pioneered a new way to enable us to make peace with our inner self, achieve our most valued goals, make real change, and live life to the fullest. Susan David has found that emotionally agile people experience the same stresses and setbacks as anyone else. The difference is the emotionally agile know how to unhook themselves from unhelpful patterns, and how to create values-based success with better habits and behaviours. Emotional Agility describes a new way of living and relating to yourself and the world around you. Become aware of your true nature, learn to face your emotions with acceptance and generosity, act according to your deepest values, and flourish. 'An accessible, reader-friendly voyage. Emotional Agility can be helpful to anyone.' - Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence Susan David has a PhD in psychology and a post-doctorate in emotions research from Yale. She is a psychologist at the Harvard Medical School and a founder and director at the Harvard/McLean-affiliated Institute of Coaching. Susan is the CEO of Evidence Based Psychology, whose worldwide client list includes Ernst and Young Global, the UN Development Program, JP Morgan Chase and GlaxoSmithKline. She has edited a number of books including the Oxford Handbook of Happiness and her research has featured in theHarvard Business Review, TIME and the Wall Street Journal. Born in South Africa, Susan now lives in Boston with her family.

Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life

Emotional Agility

Susan A. David

"The counterintuitive approach to achieving your true potential, heralded by the Harvard Business Review as a groundbreaking idea of the year"--

Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

matej yangwao

** spoiler alert **
           It's not all about positivity but be in charge of incoming emotions to make them alignment with your values and intentions.

Okay book is pretty basic but great onboarding for observing one's emotional windows and step up empathy game of one own.

≥Emotional agility is all about calming down and living with more intention

≥emotions confuse our perception of what’s happening at the moment with painful, past experiences. These sensations can cloud our judgment completely and steer us right onto the rocks.

≥Emotional agility is not about forcing yourself into thinking more positively or controlling your thoughts.

≥According to Susan David, to flourish in life, you have to become more aware of your emotions — both positive and negative — and learn to accept them. And the only way to achieve this is by increasing your emotional agility.

≥You must learn to use your words to define your experiences and the emotions surrounding them.

≥Once you've properly labeled your emotions, you can then move on to learn from them.

≥Deep down, that anger could be a signal that you care a lot about teamwork or that you feel more insecure in your job than you’d like to admit.

≥When you learn to see things from different views, you become sensitive to context and see more possibilities.

≥Make too many mindless, autopilot decisions long enough and you’ll eventually find yourself living what feels like somebody else’s life.

≥We mindlessly choose things we’ve been told are universal keys to satisfaction, such as university education, homeownership, or having children. Other people’s actions and choices affect us on every level. This phenomenon is what scientists call “social contagion.”


≥If you want to accomplish the things you’d really like to accomplish in life, you have to learn to live by your own values.

≥Pinpointing what matters to you, whether that’s career success, creativity, relationships, honesty, or altruism, gives you an invaluable source of continuity.

≥When you're aware of what you do care about, you can be free from the things you don’t care about.

≥In the same vein, if you hope to be healthier, a good place to start is by changing what you eat or by going to the gym, or even taking the stairs instead of the elevator.

≥Making subtle changes to the little things can have a powerful impact when doing so allows us to align our behavior more closely with what really matters to us.

≥Series of studies have shown that small shifts over time can dramatically enhance our ability to thrive. However, when we take a grand approach to problems, we are only setting ourselves up for frustration.

≥When we aim for tiny tweaks, the cost of failure is pretty small.

≥According to Susan David, people with a fixed mindset follow an “entity” theory of self and believe important qualities like intelligence and personality are fixed traits that cannot be changed. People with a growth mindset, on the other hand, believe that these basic qualities are “malleable” and can be improved through learning and effort.

≥Make yourself the agent of your life and take responsibility for your development, work, creative spirit, career, and connections.


≥A flexible sense of self is essential for emotional agility. People who have a growth mindset are more persistent, more open to new experiences, more ready to take risks, and more resilient in recovering from failure.

≥Step out of your own emotions, adopt a flexible mindset, and see life from a broader perspective. When dealing with others, listen to them attentively and consider their opinions. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes; don’t let your emotions cloud your judgment.

Satya Nelms

In addition to offering scant details as to how a person should be becoming more emotionally agile, the author also does not do her due diligence to check her lens/bias and makes ignorant, at times offensive, statements that reveal an unchecked, privileged world view.

Ammar Alakkad

Nadine 

Started well and then managed to rehash all the same stuff that everyone is writing about everything to do with habits/mental health / wellbeing etc etc. no magic bullets just the same old same old.

Emotional Agility Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life

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