Robin Ducharme | Hi, everyone. Welcome, welcome.

Welcome to our fourth and final keynote of our online learning Summit. I'm Robin Ducharme, and I'm your host today and I'm so incredibly happy and grateful to have Susan David PhD. with us for the next hour. She is going to be educating us on all things emotional agility. And before we start, please, as Susan is speaking and we're going to the Q&A, please put your name in the chat where you're from and any questions that you have that you want to ask Susan David. I'm going to be watching the chat very closely and answering and hopefully she'll be able to answer your questions in the 30 minutes we have the end. 

So I wanted to start by honoring and thanking the Coast Salish people, the original caretakers of the land that I call home in Victoria, BC, and I appreciate those who have taken care of the beautiful land and waters that we call home. I invite all of you to take a moment to acknowledge those who have stewarded and continue to steward the land that you love and live on.

So Susan David, thank you so much for joining us today. Susan is one of the world's leading management thinkers and an award winning Harvard Medical School psychologist. Her number one Wall Street Journal, best-selling book, “Emotional Agility” describes the psychological skills critical to thriving in times of complexity and change. Susan's TED talk, on the topic of emotional agility, has been seen by more than 8 million people. Susan is a sought-after keynote speaker and advisor, with clients that include the United Nations, Google, and Microsoft. She's on the faculty at Harvard Medical School, and is the co-founder of the Institute of Coaching. And Susan, we are just so grateful to have you here with us today. I'll let you speak for the next 30 minutes, then we'll do our Q&A.

Susan David | Thank you, thank you, and what a beautiful welcome just thinking of the land and I think, thinking of these ideas of transcendence. Because in many ways, Robin and everyone who's with me today with us in this very special pod that we are in for the next hour, really, I think emotional agility is about transcendence. 

It's about how we experience difficult thoughts, emotions, stories, everyday experiences, and we are able to transcend them. We are able to either connect with what the child in us needs, or what we feel would make the adult or elderly version of us proud. And there's this ability to really move beyond the here and now, and recognize the continuity of who we are in time and space and who we are when we bring the wisdom of our capacity—this wisdom that is in every single one of us—to our relationships. 

And so perhaps a way that I want to start off this talk is using actually a greeting that I use in my TED Talk, which is this beautiful word, Sawubona. Sawubona is a Zulu word, you hear it every day on the streets of South Africa where I was born. And it's so every day that it takes a moment to stop and reconcile with the beauty and the intention of the word. Because Sawubona and literally translated means “I see you. And by seeing you, I bring you into being,” and I think that's extraordinary, and in many ways, captures the essence of the work that I'm doing. Which, beyond the nerdiness, and the data and the studies and the research, I think what my work is about is this notion of seeing—of seeing ourselves and of seeing those we love, our partners, our spouses, our children. Because in truth, the way we see ourselves, and the way we see others is everything. It drives our relationships, the way we come to our interactions and every aspect of how we love how we live, how we parent, and how we lead. 

So my journey to this calling this idea of seeing began not in the hallowed halls of Harvard, but in the messy, tender business of life. I grew up in the white suburbs of apartheid South Africa, in a country, in a community, that was committed to the opposite, that was committed to not seeing. And yet, I first learned of the power of this threat of seeing and not seeing when I was around 15 years old. And I recall one day, I'm this little child, and it's a Friday, and my mother tells me to put my backpack down as I'm about to head off for school. And she says to me to go and say goodbye to my father. My father's 42 years old and he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. And so, I’m this little girl and I put my backpack down and I start walking through to where the heart of my home, my father, lies dying, and his eyes are closed. But I know that he knows that I am there. Because in his presence I have always felt seen. And I kiss him goodbye, and I tell him, I love him, and I then go back, to get my backpack and to go to school because my mother recognizes that my world is about to be shaken and she wants us to keep the semblance of normality, whatever that is. And I think for so many of us as we’re going through difficulties in our relationships, whether that is in the context of a global pandemic, or otherwise—so often we feel like we've just got to, you know, keep going, we've got to keep a semblance of normality. And this feels so right and it feels so real. And yet in truth, what it can really lead to over time is a gradual unseeing, a gradual unseeing of ourselves, unseeing of our loved ones, and unseeing of the people that we truly want to be in the world.

And so what happens to us? We work through life, we worry about water bottles, and lunchboxes, and workplaces, and to-do lists and so over time, we become just as I did, that little 15 year old, we become the masters of being okay, the masters of keeping it together. When, often, in truth, we feel maybe a sense of disconnect, or we’re feeling lonely or unseen, we’re feeling challenged, we’re feeling that there are needs that we have that might not be seen by ourselves or by others, and we become the masters of being okay. 

And, over time, what this leads to is greater levels of distance between ourselves and who we want to be in our lives and relationships and who we want to be with the people that we care about. It often can lead to, as well, what I call emotional rigidity. Emotional rigidity is when we lock down into rigid ways of being rigid patterns that actually don't serve this wise, beautiful, transcendent self that exists in all of us. So for instance, our spouse starts in on the finances, and we've got a rigid pattern, which is “I now leave the room”. Or we have an argument that we've had time and time again over 25 years, and the texture of the argument might be different, but the argument in its essence is the same. And so we become hooked into ways of being that are rigid, that don't serve us, and where there's no capacity for us to elevate parts of ourselves that are so extraordinary as human beings. These parts include our wisdom, our values, who we want to be in the world. One of the ways for instance, that we become rigid is we become hooked on being right. So we all know that feeling where we've had a fight with a spouse, a loved one, a partner and finally the waters calm and we decide we're going to go to sleep and so we turn out the lights, and then something compels us one last time to turn on the lights and tell the person why we are right and they are wrong and all chaos breaks loose again. 

This again, is a form of rigidity, because it's getting stuck in a particular thought: “I am right and the person is wrong”. Getting stuck in an emotion in an emotion like sadness or anger, or even getting stuck in a story. Sometimes our stories were written on our mental chalkboards when we were five years old—stories about who we are in relationships, whether we are worthy or not worthy, whether we deserve or don't deserve. 

And one of the most important parts of emotional agility is recognizing that despite this overwhelming narrative that exists in our society—this narrative that tells us that when you’re sad it's bad, when you’re angry, it's bad—this narrative that says “oh, there are good and bad emotions”. Good emotions are emotions like joy, and happiness, and experiences of positivity. Bad emotions are things like when you feel sad, when you feel angry, because then you’re not keeping up this being “okay”, this master of being okay. There's something wrong with you. And these normative pieces of language around our emotions are what we call display rules. 

Display rules are these normative rules that we have often in our society. Things like, some emotions are good, and some emotions are bad. We experience these normative display rules, even in our families. This idea that when I'm growing up, and I was angry, you know, someone might have had the experience that when they're angry a parent says, “Go to your room and come up when you've got a smile on your face”. You know, they signal that we don't do anger here. Or sometimes even with really good intentions, a parent might signal that there's no place for sadness.  You come home from school, you've been rejected, you’re feeling sad, and your parent’s heart breaks, because they never wanted you to be rejected at school. And so the parent with really good intentions might jump in, and might say something like, you know, “I’ll phone the mean girl’s parents” or “let's bake cupcakes” and “everything's gonna be fine”. And we do this with good intentions, we message about emotions and thoughts and stories in this good or bad way, we're often experiences that are difficult, experiences that are uncomfortable, are now seen as being bad. 

And what this can lead to is, unseeing, and it leads to unseening because what we start to do is—we start to push aside these difficult emotions. We might say, “I should be grateful for the relationship that I've got, I should be happy here. Everything should be okay”. And so we start either bottling our emotions (pushing them aside) or sometimes we get stuck in them because we haven't developed, over our lifetimes, the capacity to deal with these normative human beautiful experiences, these normative emotions, these emotions, like grief and sadness, that Charles Darwin described as having evolved for an evolutionary purpose. Which is that, when you feel a difficult emotion, it's not bad, rather, that difficult emotion is a signpost, a signpost, that something you care about, something that you value, is needing to be attended to. And this is a really crucial aspect of emotional agility. Because even in human psychology, the normative way of seeing emotions is that there are good or bad, positive or negative. This view is rigid, and rigidity in the face of complexity—complexity that is life fragility, that is life, relationships that will have conflict and disagreement—what that normative way of being, this rigidity, does is it stops us from developing the skills to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. 

So what I mean by emotional rigidity and emotional agility. I know, in the work, the pre-work that you did, you explored some of the conversation that I had with Brene Brown. And this is one example where Brene and I spoke about this idea of forced or toxic positivity, you know, again, this is a normative way of being, which sounds good on the surface, “I've just got to be grateful, I've just got to be fine, I've just got to pretend that everything's happy”. But what this does is it again, connects with an unseeing and when we unsee ourselves and unsee the experiences of others it reduces our capacity. It reduces our ability. And it sounds good on the surface, but actually, it reduces our resilience and ultimately, our emotional strength. 

So the first component of emotional agility is this really important idea that sometimes when people hear about it they say, “Oh, are you telling me that I need to gratuitously seek out discomfort?” And the answer is no, you know, we're not just trying to see out discomfort. But we know that discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life. We grow when we are in the space of discomfort. We grow when we have an uncomfortable conversation with our spouse, with our partner, with people that we love. We grow when we experience difficult emotions, and instead of pushing them aside, we say, “what is this emotion kind of tell me about my needs, about my values, about the things that I care about”. So a really important component of emotional agility is this idea, not that there are good or bad emotions, but rather, that all emotions, all thoughts and stories have evolved to help us to survive and to adapt and that there is profound learning towards discomfort. And again, this is not gratuitous discomfort, but rather it is discomfort that is values-aligned. So what I mean by this is that when we feel an uncomfortable emotion, for instance, loneliness: I can be lonely in a crowd, I can be lonely in a relationship, I can be lonely with a person, that I'm stuck in a house with 24/7, so when I connect with that difficult emotion of loneliness it can start signaling to me that I have a need. That need might be a need of intimacy and connection, that I don't have enough of it. When I feel bored, and I can be bored again, in a relationship that is otherwise loving even, that boredom might be signaling that I need more growth and learning and that I don't have enough of it in my relationship right now. When I feel anger, that anger might be signposting that I value more equity and fairness in this relationship and that I need to move towards that value because equity and fairness are important values. And doing that can be uncomfortable. But what it ultimately does is it starts connecting us with who we are, and what our values are in this profound way that is a nod to Sowubona. It's a nod to the self and nod to this difficulty, motion and knowledge to the value that this difficult emotion is signposting and nodding to this thing that we care about, that speaks to something that is important to us in the way we come to the interactions with others. That is beautiful, and that is special, even if it is uncomfortable.

So this is a really important part of emotional agility. And one of the reasons that it becomes crucial is because every single day, we have thousands of thoughts, emotions, and stories. A thought might be, as I've mentioned already, something like “I'm not good enough, or I'm not worthy, or I'm upset with this person,” and that might be a thought. An emotion might be, “I feel sad or disappointed or unseen, or stressed”. And a story might be “I’m unworthy” or “This relationship isn't going well” or “this person is never there for me” and the very important part of emotional agility is this recognition that there is nothing, there is nothing wrong with any thought, with any emotion with any story. 

In other words, these thoughts, these emotions, these stories, while they may be rooted in things that are wrong, actually having a thought, like, “I'm not good enough”, or “I'm feeling sad”, or “This person doesn't care about me”. There is nothing wrong with these thoughts, emotions, and stories, and I know that sounds so counter cultural, because we are literally raised on social media, that tells us that if we feed bad thoughts to ourselves, then there's something wrong with us, that if we have bad emotions, that there's something wrong with us. 

But in truth, these are part of our human psychology that have evolved to help us to adapt, to help us to make sense of the world, and to help us ultimately to thrive. So whilst this may feel so, again, countercultural, we have around, for instance, 16,000, spoken thoughts, emotions and stories every single day, and many more cross through our minds, and there's nothing wrong with any of it.

And that is so liberating, because what it does is it allows you to move out of a space of struggle with yourself where you say, “I shouldn't have that”, “I shouldn't think that I shouldn't feel that, I should instead feel grateful and happy and okay, I should be the master of being okay”. Instead, when you allow yourself to drop the struggle with how you should feel and instead, you face into how you do feel, there is such an enormity of liberation, and an enormity of humanity, and an enormity of transcendence that happens, because you've literally ended the struggle inside of yourself, by dropping the rope by saying,” I'm not going to have the struggle of whether this is a good or bad emotion and this is just what I feel.”

So what is really important is that, while there's no good or bad thought, emotion, or story. What does happen is, we often get stuck in situations where we have these normal experiences and instead of saying, “this is a thought, this is an emotion, this is a story”, what we start to do is we start to treat our thoughts, our emotions, and our stories, as fact. So what I mean by this is, we start to say things like, “my partner doesn't care about me, therefore, that is a fact. I am right and the person is wrong, therefore, that is a fact. I am unworthy, therefore, that is fact”. And so what we literally start to do is we start to build a prison around ourselves with these thoughts, these emotions, these stories that we treat as fact. And when we do this, we stop our ability to step into other parts of ourselves—the parts that I mentioned earlier that are wise, perspective-taking, compassionate, kind—the parts of ourselves that enable us to say something like, “I may be right in the situation, but is my response serving me? You know, I may be right that this person that I love didn't speak to me nicely, I may be right, but is my response of, now, stone-walling them for three days serving me? Or is there a way that I can recognize that I am upset with the way the person spoke to me because I felt that it was disrespectful. And that respect is a huge value of mine”. 

And so instead of getting stuck in that, ‘am I right? And is this person wrong? And now I'm stonewalling’. What I'm able to do is I'm able to say “I feel uncomfortable that this person spoke to me in this way and the value that is being signposted by the discomfort is that I value respect. I value respect. That is really important to me. 

So now what this does, is it enables us to set ourselves okay, respect is really important. How can I have a conversation with my partner that helps my partner to recognize and see that respect is really important. And for me if respect is really important, what does having a respectful conversation look like? How can I be respectful in this conversation? How can I bring the value of risk Back to this interaction, you can see what you're doing here is you're not denying the difficulty motion, you're not becoming obsequious and pretending that anything that your partner does is you're okay. But rather what you're doing is you're using your emotions, as signposts that allow you to step into a different way of being. Many, many of you will have come across what I think is one of the most beautiful ideas in human history, the idea of Viktor Frankl, the idea that describes that between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space is our power to choose. And in their choice lies, our growth, and our freedom. When we get stuck in a story, or fight, or emotion as fact, there's no space between stimulus and response. “I feel undermined, I'm going to shut down”.

When we step into the capacities of emotional agility, that you've already started to explore in this daily work that you've been doing, what you enable is other parts of yourself to come to the fore. 

And I know you've already explored some of these ideas, but I want to speak to, for the remaining time, just a couple of really important strategies that enable us to be informed by our emotions, but not driven by them, or emotions or data. They're not directives so we can be informed by our emotions, that we can step into our values and our wisdom. 

So the first core aspects, the first core part of emotional agility in terms of strategy, or take home tools, is what I call acceptance. 

When I was little, and my father died, an English teacher handed out these blank notebook and she said: “Write. Tell the truth, and write like no one is reading”. And really, my invitation to all of you, when you feel difficult emotions and thoughts and stories, is to not push them aside, not get stuck in them, but to write. And I don't mean that literally, I mean, to develop a correspondence with your own heart, where instead of saying “I shouldn't feel this thing”, we start saying, “I do feel it. This is how I feel. This is what's going on for me.”

There is a large body of research that shows that the radical acceptance of all of our emotions, even the difficult ones, is the cornerstone to resilience, thriving, and to healthy, healthy relationships. 

And of course, we want to accept with compassion because it's hard to human. It's hard to human.

It's hard to be experiencing a relationship that feels unrequited at some level, or a partner that is feeling distan,t or someone that's feeling overly in our space. It's hard to human, and so without acceptance needs to be compassion. What compassion, in its essence, is the recognition that you are human and that it's difficult, and you're doing the best you can with who you are with the resources that you currently have available to you. So acceptance is profoundly important. 

Another aspect of emotional agility that is crucial is that we want to show up to our difficult experience with acceptance, but we don't want to get stuck in it. It's very difficult to read the instructions. When you are stuck inside the job. It's very difficult to know what you should be doing in a relationship when something is struggling, when something feels difficult, when you are stuck inside the difficult experience. 

And so as humans, what we need to do is develop skills that allow us to step out. And what I mean by this is: all of us, all of us, have had that experience when we've been struggling and we've been having a fight with a partner, a fight with someone that we love and we said to them, like “you don't care about me and you don't love me”. And we might be saying all these things, and then even as we’re saying them, there's that little voice that goes off inside of your mind—and I've experienced it often—that says, “Susan, of course, he loves you. You know, of course, he loves you”. It's like, there's this getting stuck in the emotion. But there's almost this ability that we have as human beings, to matter above our experience, to rise above the experience to almost helicopter above it. And that's what I mean when I talk about stepping out. 

And I'm going to give you some strategies now that help you to step out effectively. The most important strategy, there are many of them, if you, you know, look at my social media, or if you've done the pre-work, there are many strategies that are talking about what but one of the most profoundly helpful is accuracy—is accuracy. This is what is called emotion granularity. 

Emotion granularity is when you move beyond saying, “I'm stressed”, or “I’m unloved”, or “I feel overwhelmed”. So emotional granularity is when you move beyond having this big umbrella term to describe what you're feeling, because when you have a big umbrella term, like stress, it actually just keeps you stuck in your body, your psychology doesn't know what to do with it. What do I do with stress? It's murky. It's amorphous. It's challenging. 

But when you pull off the label, this big, broad brushstroke label, and you say, “what is it that I'm truthfully feeling here?” What we recognize is that there’s a world, there's a world of difference between stress and overwhelmed or stress and disappointed, or stress and depleted, or stress, and that knowing feeling that I'm in the wrong job or the wrong career and I'm venting it out on my partner, that actually, that's what's going on for me. 

So when we do this, when we label our emotions more accurately, what it literally helps us to do is to start saying, “What is the cause of the feeling? And what do I need to do in response to it? What is the value? What is the need here that I need to be stepping into?”

This is so crucial that I call it an emotional superpower. This moving beyond the umbrella of like, “Oh, my goodness, the sudden feeling” into “What is it that's really going on?” And if that feels overwhelming or difficult, one way you can start doing this is just start connecting more with your body? You know, is it an anxiety that’s showing up in your stomach? Is it a tightness that's being felt in your chest? So we can start accessing these more granular emotions by connecting more with how it's feeling in our body. 

Another way we can do it is by starting to say to ourselves, “I'm calling this thing angry. But what else might it be, what else might be going on for me?”

I once had a conversation with a couple where they described this skill, this accuracy. as being a skill that literally saved their relationship. Because in this particular relationship, the spouse would often come home from work and he would use language like, “Oh, you’re angry,” he would say to his wife, “It looks like you’re angry, you’re angry, you’re angry? And I started to say to them, “what are two other options?”

And she would say, “Well, what he's seeing is angry, is actually I'm just exhausted, or I feel unsupported”. And what he would be saying is, “I feel depleted”. Now you can see if both of you are coming with anger, then you're much more likely to be hooked on right versus wrong. Whereas if you step into granularity, then you're more able to say “This person needs a hug. This person needs to be seen. I need to be seen.” 

So accuracy matters. Another crucial way we can do this—and I'll start closing off and we'll move to some questions—is the strategy that starts to help you to notice your emotions, your thoughts, your stories, for what they are: they are emotions. They are thoughts, they are stories, they are not fact. They may be born of real circumstance, but they are not fact. 

So, we often will say things like, “I am sad, I am angry.” And if you just listen to that language, what the language is basically saying is, “I am, all of me, 100% of me, is the emotion”. There's no space for wisdom or values or intention. There's no space between stimulus and response, “I am defined by the emotion”. Instead, what we can start doing is we can start labeling again, the thought, the emotion, story for what it is: it's a thought, it's a feeling, it's a story, “I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad, I'm noticing that I'm feeling angry, I'm noticing that this is my he's never there for me story, or she's never there for my story”. And when you start doing this, you start creating space between you and the emotion.

And, the reason that this is so important is because when we start saying something like I am, it's almost like there's a cloud in the sky and you have become the cloud, you are literally defined by the experience. But you are not the cloud. You are more than the cloud, you are capacious, and beautiful enough to have all of these different emotions, and still choose who you want to be in the moment. You aren't the cloud, you are the sky. 

When you label your thoughts and your emotions and your stories for what they are, you literally create space that allows you to start saying, “Okay, who do I want to be in this moment? Who do I want to be in this conversation? Who do I want to be right now?” In other words, you are positioned to be able to walk your why.

So, I'm going to start ending by really just highlighting some of these key ideas of emotional agility. Because what emotional agility is, in its essence, is emotional agility is the ability to be with all of your thoughts, your emotions, your stories, and even your loved ones’ thoughts, emotions, and stories, or future loved ones, thoughts, emotions, and stories in ways that are curious in ways that say, “this is how I'm feeling or this is how this person's feeling, what's going on for them?”, instead of getting stuck in right versus wrong. In ways that are compassionate. In ways that recognize that your partner, that you, that we are trying to human here, and that humaning doesn't always have the answers, and that it can be a struggle. And that struggle is actually normal. That it's normal, that it's part of who we are as a species. 

And emotional agility is the ability to come to ourselves with courage, the courage that allows us to have the difficult conversation, the courage that allows us to see that a relationship might even not be working out so that we can take values connected steps. 

So what are the strategies? The strategies are ones of showing up, of saying, “What is my emotion that I'm feeling? What is the emotion of the other?”

There are strategies that allow us to step out. So we aren't being defined by the emotion, but rather being curious. And as I mentioned, accuracy, and labeling your thoughts, emotions and stories for what they are, are the superpowers within that. 

Emotional agility is the skill that allows you to connect with your values. “Who do I want to be in this conversation? What will bring me closer to being the person, the loved one, that I most want to be?” 

I started talking about my dad, and I'll end with a story, because I think this is the story, again, of relationship. And, you know, so often our most powerful learning about how we come to relationship is the learning that we had when we were children. 

And I remember when I was little around five years old, I started to develop a fear of death. So many young children at that age start to become aware of their own mortality. And so I used to find my way into my parents bed, and I would say to my father, “Daddy, promise me you'll never die. Promise me you'll never die.” AndMy father would comfort me with soft pets and kisses. But he never lied. He said to me, “Susie, we all die. It's normal to be scared.”

And what I understood by the way, that he was comforting me through those long, dark nights—this was 10 years before he was diagnosed with cancer—What I understood is he was saying to me, that courage is not the absence of fear. 

Courage is not about not having difficulty, emotions. Courage is fear walking. Courage is about saying, “I feel sad, and this is important to me, so I will move forward with both. I feel that this relationship is important to me, and I'm scared of this conversation, but I also know that I need to have it if I'm going to move in the direction of my values and of what I want from this relationship. Courage is at its core about bothness. It is about the knowledge that we can be feeling something and move in the direction of our values simultaneously. Courage is not the absence of fear, courage is fear walking. 

So life is about asking all of us in our relationships, “are you agile? You know, are you agile” and in its essence, I believe that agility is born of a lifelong correspondence with your own heart. Because if you aren't willing to see yourself, it's very difficult to see others. 

So thank you for being with me. Sowubona, and I'm ready for any questions.

Q&A

Robin Ducharme | My goodness, Susan. That was just so beautiful from the start, and we're not done yet.

Susan David | We're not done yet. But yeah, thank you. I feel it so much, It's raining outside. I'm here in Boston, and I feel like even though we are all distant that there's this, like, little part of beauty.

Robin Ducharme | I feel like I feel the same way. What a powerful 45 minutes and we have some time for questions now. I'm looking at the chat. So please type your questions in if you'd like me to ask those. 

I'm going to start with those that were submitted through the summit. The first question is: “My partner and I, together, want to create a relationship agreement. Parts of it are silly, but parts are serious. How do we integrate emotional agility into it?”

Susan David | Oh, my goodness, I like abso—I just love—I love, I love that question. Because I think that every relationship needs a sense of “Who do we want to be? Like, really. What is—what is an agreement with one another?” It's an agreement that ultimately says: “What are our values? What's—what's shared here, about the way we want to come to our relationship?” And I think this is really crucial. 

I mean, I think the two layers of this, the first layer you can start off with is the layer of how we want to see one another. So I think the kinds of questions or the kinds of things that I, you know, would think about as informed by emotional agility would be things like “How do we, how do we agree to deal with each other's sadness or loss or grief or loneliness? Like when we come to each other with difficult experiences? How do we want to be there for one another?” So I think that is a kind of really crucial question. 

I think another thing that you could use to guide you is: for you to come to a sense of what is the value that you hold to be really important as a guiding principle in your relationship? And I'll give you an example, which is probably, you know, letting you know, more than, more than I would normally about me. So I've been married for 26 years, and my husband and I have this like guiding principle in our relationship, actually two. The one is we want a clean relationship. Now, you might say, like, What do you mean by clean?

But what I mean by clean is, we never want to be in a situation where we feel there's a conversation that needs to be heard, or something difficult. Another person that one of us is going through, where there's like a layer of complexity about it, like, I don't want to be in a situation where I'll give you a true example where I call my husband at work, I'm upset about something, he puts down the phone, because he can't speak to me. And I'm like, “Oh, you see, he's like, never there for me, blah”. And so I stopped doing this talk. A clean relationship is basically a relationship that is unencumbered by all of these stories, where you are able to say, “I see you, this is what you need, this is what I need”, let's so a clean relationship for us is a relationship in which we're not playing games, where we're not stonewalling, where we actually have the conversation that needs to be had. So that's like one of our guiding principles. 

And another that we have in our relationship, which is a core value, is generosity. You know, when, when you, when you, want to jump to the conclusion about what you think a person intended, which is, you know, you're intended not to see me or you're intended not to be with me, that we want to give the person the benefit of the doubt. So generosity. 

So I think questions that I would think about are like, how do you want to deal with difficult emotions? What are some guiding values that are really important? And then another one that I know relates to one of the other questions is a principle that I call “the principle of being at the edge of our ability”. So what I mean by this, in relationships, we all get over-competent, over-competent is where you got your partner, you know exactly what their opinion of the movie is going to be, what they're going to order for dinner, you know, becomes very routine, we don't want to be over-competent in our relationships, because it's actually a sign that the relationship is at risk. 

We also don't want to be over-challenged, where this is, again, an unclean relationship, where I'm always walking on eggshells, and I don't know what to expect. And I just feel like I'm always in the deep end. So the most helpful relationships are relationships where we’re always working at the edge of our ability, where we’re always kind of trying to learn about, more about our relationship and our partner and who we are. 

And we do this by incorporating greater levels of breadth. In other words, “what are some different experiences that I can have with this person that we haven't had?” You know, what, uh, “can we go to the theater? Can we have hobbies that we haven't done before?” Like, what are ways that we can expand the breadth of our relationship? Because that moves us from over competence, and also, “how can we expand the depth of our relationship?”

You know, when you've been in a relationship for a particular period of time, you stopped connecting with each other about what are your dreams? What are your hopes? What are the things that make you sad? Who do you want to be when you grow up? We stop connecting about those things and exploring depth is really important. 

So that's a very long answer. But I think I think it actually connects with a number of the questions that came up, and I think these crucial aspects of emotional agility have bound into the way we might think about agreement.

Robin Ducharme | I agree with you, I think it's, in a long term partnership, it's like when you're dating somebody, you just want to get to know everything about them, right? Like, and why it's almost like we need to continue that, the curiosity and getting to know the depth of our partner as time goes on. Right?

Susan David | It's so, it's so important.

Robin Ducharme | Yeah, just as we want that from our partner, right? We're learning and growing. It's a lifelong process. And if you're doing it together with that curiosity, and wanting to...

Susan David | Yes, and again, it connects with this idea of Sowubona, because it's not. It's not like I don't have an inner life now, because I've been married for X number of years or because I've been with my partner for 18 months or whatever it is. It's not like I don't have that inner life. And it's not that that person doesn't have an inner life either. We just, we just, stopped Sowubona-ing each other. We stopped seeing it.

Robin Ducharme | Stopped Sowubona-ing each other, I like—I like that. There was a question that came into the chat, Susan: “What advice do you have for encouraging my spouse to learn and talk about emotional agility? I've read your book, and I'm working on the practice. But I've been facing resistance on his part. The idea that discussing feelings makes him less of a man. And it's so ingrained in his upbringing, and he's struggling, I'd like to convince him that it's courageous feat to face his feelings rather than bottling them.”

Susan David | Well, give them my TED Talk. There's, um, well, I think I think—

Firstly, we know that this is a display rule, that is so part of our culture, isn't it? It's this idea that “When I show difficult emotions, that there's something wrong with me,” that those emotions are bad. And what's so fascinating about it is there's this belief that somehow these difficult emotions, when we show them that that makes us weaker, but actually, it's the failure to connect with difficult emotions that makes us weak. 

Like, we know that when people don't connect with their difficult emotions, and then they suddenly lose their job or something's not going on well, at work, that people are far more likely to be derailed because these emotions then kind of come. We know that when people push aside difficult emotions in this way, they're more prone to actually have depression and burnout. So, you know, it's difficult to, of course, rewrite someone's display rules from childhood. But I think that one of the ways that we can start doing this, or the way we can start connecting with people around emotional agility, is when your partner says something that is a more comfortable emotion, so when the person is saying something like, that “I'm angry”, or the person is showing any emotion that they do feel is more okay, emotion, often, the one of the ways we can start connecting with importance is by using that emotion that they feel comfortable with to highlight their value. 

So “it sounds like you're really angry here, because this is something you care about”. Okay, and “I'm feeling sad, and my sadness is because this is something I care about”. So what you're doing is, you are not getting stuck in the difficult emotion, because I think that often ends up being a great fear that we're going to get stuck in this difficult emotion. Instead, what you're doing is you're saying, “this is an emotion that I'm seeing”. And it looks like it's actually signposting something that you care about, “can we discuss the thing that you care about, so that we can explore more how I can or how we can meet that need?” So I think that's a really important way we can start elevating these kinds of conversations.

Robin Ducharme | It’s this whole, it really is, it takes a lot—you have to create space, to think, to think through this, right? This is almost like it's a re-education, in my mind, on how—because you're not your emotions, just like you said, they're signposts and then attaching your values, it's such an important piece.

Susan David | It's so crucial, and often one of the questions that people will put is they'll say something like, “but you know, I'm having a fight with my loved one, that I'm caught off guard by it, you know, the the emotion just comes, I'm caught off guard by it”. 

In truth, when you actually look at it, what you will find is that 97% of the fights that we have, I just made that statistic up, but it's probably around there. 

A huge proportion of the difficulties that we have are actually predictable. We'll have the same fight in different ways. And so it can be really helpful for us to think about “when next this happens, when next I'm triggered by my partner doing X that I know upsets me, The usual way that I have that argument is by you know, being very patterned, stonewalling”, whatever our particular ways of being, “What is a way that I'm going to show up to the sadness? What is the value that I'm going to try bring to the conversation? How am I going to do that?”

And there's actually a fair amount of research that shows that when we are trying to make change in our lives, that one of the most important ways we can make change is by actually imagining obstacles, you know, imagining “when things go wrong, this is what I want to do”. Not in a way that's like, driven by, you know, kind of monkey-mind, like, “I'm gonna say this and she's gonna, you know, where we get stuck”. But in a way that's driven by wisdom, you know, “this is who I want to be, this is how I can do it”. It is a re-education, and we also just know that small changes matter, you know, small changes matter, we can be in a situation where we brush past our loved one in the kitchen, we are on their phone, they on their phone, we grunt Hello at each other, and that's the movie of the relationship. Now, if you take that frame, and you add another frame and another frame and another frame, that's the exact same, and then you project that future, what does the relationship look like? It probably looks like a relationship in which you're completely cohabiting. 

Now, if you instead break the frame, and you just say, “what is a tiny tweak, what is a small values aligned choice that I'm going to be making so that I can frame shift this experience? It might be that when my partner comes into the kitchen, I put my phone down, I put my phone down, when the person comes home from work, I give them a real hug, and I'm going to do that, and I'm going to do it consistently. And I'm going to day in, and I’m going to do it day out.” And that's my tiny tweak. What you can start seeing is a very different movie. And so I suppose on the one hand, there's this, there's these like big skills. But on the other hand, they're these superpower skills that we can bring into our daily experience. And that literally changed the tenor of our relationship over time. A very different movie, a very different experience.

Robin Ducharme | I completely agree with you, you talk about that as part of our curriculum this week, it's about how much of our life is routine based. Yeah, tiny tweaks in your routine and in your relationships can over time, of course, like I said, change the movie, change the relationship.

Susan David | It's huge. It's huge. The tiny tweak of instead of saying, “I'm angry, I'm going to shut down” into, “I'm angry, I'm going to reach out”. Again, it doesn't mean that doesn't mean you just accept anything. But that sense of feeling something and doing something else is very powerful. It's a tiny tweak, but it's so powerful.

Robin Ducharme | And having those important conversations, that takes courage, but it is what this life demands of us. If we want to be the best they can be.

Susan David | Yeah, for ourselves and for the communities that we create and for the families that we raise our children in. And there's such beauty in what we have to offer within our microcosm, as people that change the tenor of our communities.

Robin Ducharme | Wow, well, I can't believe it's already time's up. I can't believe it's gone. It's just been so this has been a very uplifting, beautiful conversation. I'm so happy that you were able to be with us, Susan, can you tell us what you're working on recently? And how can we continue to learn and follow you?

Susan David | Yes, yes, absolutely. Well, what I'm working on at the moment is a whole list of what I call micro-skills. Really, what I've done in my work is I've broken down all of my work into these like core emotional superpowers, if you like, and I've started to explore and we filmed them, and we've got these, all these amazing digital micro-skills and if people want to connect with me, there's so many free resources. There's my “Checking-In” podcasts, there's my TED Talk, there's the quiz. So many things that I post on social media and I just love for anyone who's listened today to reach out and just say hello in whatever form feels comfortable.

Robin Ducharme | Definitely, and you have if you haven't signed up for Susan's newsletter, you'll have to do that and watch her TED Talk. And before we go, I always close every summit speaking opportunity with a closing blessing. And it's really based on everything we've learned through you this week, and so: 

May we bring the heartbeat of who we want to be in the world into our interactions and conversations. 

May we own our emotions but not over identify with them by creating space between ourselves and the felt emotion, we can shift into a different state of being more easily. 

May we no longer feel the need to suppress our feelings through toxic positivity, and recognize that tough emotions are part of our contract with life. 

And may we learn to become emotionally agile.

May we act in alignment with and make decisions based on our values, as our values orient us towards the life we want to live for.

Thank you so much, Susan.

Susan David | That's so beautiful. Thank you. Thank you, everyone for being with me today. I am so appreciative.

Robin Ducharme | Goodnight! Good afternoon!

Susan David | Good afternoon, wherever everyone is. We love you. Thank you! Goodbye!

Robin Ducharme | Bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai and edited by Anna Lafreniere.