During this recent period of covid-19, the world has been united by a common evil: the loss of balance of our emotions. Whatever feelings you felt during this period, and that you may still feel today, namely fear,anxiety, loneliness, anger, sadness, frustration, you are not alone. And above all, feeling such emotions is normal, that’s what makes the beauty and fragility of life: not everything is all rosy.
Over the past 20 years, we have seen the emergence and especially the importance that positive psychology has taken on our way of life. Being happy, being positive have become our mantra. We judge joy, positivity as the only emotions we must feel, and we are no longer comfortable with our’negative’ emotions.
Martin Seligman is a psychology researcher and the pioneer of positive psychology in the 1990s. However, this term was coined much earlier by Abraham Maslow, and his famous explanation of motivation by the hierarchy of needs represented by his Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Seligman, like other renowned psychologists such as Ed Diener and Mihaly Csiskzenmihalyi, have deepened the study of positive emotions from a scientific and rigorous perspective, checking which processes, dynamics and situations can have a greater impact on our health, performance and overall satisfaction in life.
While it is indeed important to cultivate optimism and that the conclusive results of decades of positive psychology research are no longer to be demonstrated, it is extremely important not to ignore, suppress or set aside our difficult or negative emotions. This is where emotional agility makes so much sense.
Emotional agility is the ability to go through the many difficulties life throws at us, without judgment and with acceptance, foresight, and open-mindedness. This process is not to ignore difficult emotions or thoughts, but to live and confront them with courage and compassion for oneself.
We owe the popularity of this term to psychologist Susan David, a professor at Harvard Medical School, who developed this concept after studying emotions, happiness and success for more than twenty years.
She found that regardless of people’s intelligence or creativity,regardless of their personality type, it is the way in which they manage their inner self – their thoughts, feelings, emotions and internal dialogue – that ultimately determines how successful they will be in their professional and private lives.
Research shows that by using our energy to try to suppress or even ignore negative emotions, such as fear, anxiety, doubt, anger, we remain stuck in the situation at the origin of these emotions, and negative thoughts loop in our heads.
By practicing emotional agility, by welcoming these negative thoughts with kindness, we can reap great benefits, such as: reducing stress,reducing the number of errors, increasing creativity, improving performance.
In a Harvard Business Review article, Susan David and Christina Congleton identified four practices that can help us become more emotionally agile:
Be aware of the emotion
First, it is important to be aware when these emotions and thoughts loop in our heads. For this, one of the best techniques is to practice mindfulness, to be or return to the present moment. Being mindful allow us to realize that it has been 5 minutes that we have the same thought that prevents us from moving forward. This thought – usually recurrent – may be: I am not legitimate in my role, or my manager is incompetent and I refuse to let him speak to me with such a disrespectful tone of voice.
Give this emotion a name
Once you are aware of this thought, label it, name it. For example, if your thought is that you do not feel legitimate in your role, name this thought as: I have the thought or belief that I am not legitimate in my role. By naming your thought in this way, it allows you to see this thought or emotion as what it is, namely a thought that is just passing through your brain, and that may or may not be useful.
Accept this emotion
Not easy to do I agree, but this step is essential to develop this emotional agility that is essential to your balance. Acceptance is the opposite of control, and often emotions take control of our lives. This means that instead of reacting angrily when your manager speaks to you with a tone of foice you don’t like, focus on the feeling that the emotion generates deep within you, with an open attitude of curiosity. This is not going to diminish your anger, but you may realize how much this emotion of anger shakes you, and especially why you feel it so strongly. This is the first step in finding a solution.
Reconnect to your values
Once this emotion is named and accepted, it is easier to part with it. When you are angry, you are not the anger. In other words, anger is not you, it does not define you. Once you’re free of this ‘negative’ emotion, you can focus on what’s important in your life, being your values. Emotions fluctuate, they change like the weather, unlike your values that remain stable and define you. While emotions are important in our lives, they must not influence our decisions, only our values must guide our decisions.
This encounter with our emotions, our thoughts whether negative or even positive, remains fundamental to help us be more emotionally agile. Katherine T. Peil, an affiliate of Northeastern University and Harvard Divinity School, goes even further in her article on ‘Emotion: The Self-Regulatory Sense’, in which she describes emotions as a sensory system on its own. For her, emotions are not an affliction or weakness, nor an embarrassing aspect of our psyche that makes us say or do things that we then regret, but rather as a sensory system, such as sight, touch, hearing, which provides us with a continuous flow of relevant information that helps us to orient our behaviour.
