Emotional Agility summary

Are you ever annoyed by the relentlessly cheerful people who see the world through rose-tinted glasses? Surely it can’t be healthy for them to keep smiling through breakups and bereavements, can it?

The simple truth is that it’s not. Forced optimism avails nothing, and avoiding negative emotions by forcing a smile and thinking positive – though a common strategy – tends to do more harm than good.

Many of us imagine our emotions, especially painful ones, as some sort of many-headed monster out to get us. When faced with such a beast, you’d instinctively want to get away as fast as possible. But, in fact, it’s much better to stand your ground and face the monster. This is the first stage in dealing with your emotions: Showing Up. But how do you do it?

Well, experience shows that self-compassion is the best way to deal with painful emotions. The path to self-compassion isn’t always easy to follow, but it’s worth walking – and it begins with recognizing and listening to your emotions.

Is there something that’s niggling at you? You know, something that’s really getting your goat? Classically, people tend to find professional or relationship problems the most troublesome. So, to deal with such situations, choose an object, such as a chair or a pillow, and let it act as a stand-in for your problem. Now yell at it – just scream out everything you feel.

It’s a fun exercise. But it’s also helpful, since it allows you to Step Out of your problem by externalizing your feelings, which, in turn, will enable you to see it from a fresh, external perspective. Once you’ve done this, you’ll have an easier time thinking calmly about the destructive emotions that may have given rise to the problem in the first place.

In 2000, Tom Shadyac, the director of Hollywood blockbusters like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, seemed to be on top of the world. He was successful; he was rich; he was still relatively young.

But he wasn’t happy. He’d spent years working toward an ideal life, and yet, when he got there, he longed for something different, something simpler.

Consider this normal relationship quarrel. Cynthia's been scrimping and saving for years. And now David, Cynthia’s partner, wants to splurge the money on a family trip to the Grand Canyon.

Well, this is actually a real-life example from a 2004 study. Cynthia and David were actually being filmed as they argued, as psychologists Driver and Gottmann attempted to work out what made couples tick by looking at various emotional factors.

Do you remember what it took to learn to ride a bike? The excitement, the crashes, the elation when you finally managed to keep it going straight?

Does cycling still bring you the same feelings? Of course not. It’s now just run-of-the-mill.

It's easy to get the wrong impression of someone. The person might seem picture perfect, with a good job and a close family, but then, after you’ve exchanged a few words, you might get the sense that a nervous breakdown is brewing, and that he or she is in fact stuck in emotional distress.

When we’re not emotionally agile, we get stuck.