In this classic Harvard Business Review article, Susan David and Christina Congleton explain the concept of emotional agility and provide steps that we can all take to become more emotionally agile.
They describe how we can often get ‘hooked’ by undesirable thoughts and feelings. Like fish caught on a line, when we are hooked, we often buy into the thoughts, treating them like facts.
As ample research shows that attempting to minimize or ignore thoughts and emotions serves only to amplify them, they argue that effective leaders don’t buy into or try to suppress their inner experiences. Instead they develop the ability to manage their thoughts and feelings – known as emotional agility.
The article highlights four practices adapted from acceptance and commitment therapy which can enhance our ability to be emotionally agile:
Recognize our patterns.
The first step in developing emotional agility is to notice when we’ve been hooked by our thoughts and feelings. One sign of being hooked is that our thinking becomes rigid and repetitive.
Label our thoughts and emotions.
When we’re hooked, our thoughts and feelings crowd our mind and there’s no room to examine them. One strategy to help bring some objectivity is labelling. By calling a thought a thought and an emotion an emotion we are better able to see our thoughts and feelings for what they are: transient sources of data that may or may not prove helpful.
Accept them.
The opposite of control is acceptance – not acting on every thought or resigning ourselves to negativity, but responding with an open attitude, paying attention to them, and letting ourselves experience them. The important thing is to show ourselves (and others) compassion, examining the reality of the situation, and normalising the experience of these thoughts and feelings.
Act on your values.
When we unhook ourselves from difficult thoughts and emotions, we expand our choices. We can decide to act in a way that aligns with our values. For example, we can consider how our response will serves us, our team, and organization in the short and long term.
Developing emotional agility is no quick fix, it takes work and even when we improve our emotional agility, it will always require ongoing ‘maintenance’ to enable us to remain emotionally agile at different times and in different contexts.
Emotional agility is a core inclusive leadership behaviour as emotional agility is required to create collaborative workplaces with high intellectual friction and low social friction. When we have high levels of diversity and tolerance for different belief systems and values, we must also be emotionally agile to create supportive environments where everyone is able to feel that they belong because of what makes them unique.
Emotional agility is one of the behaviours we measure in our Inclusive Leader Assessment, supporting leaders through coaching to understand how emotionally agile others perceive them to be and how they can increase their emotional agility in service of their people and the organisation as a whole. To find out more, get in touch at enquiries@inclusiveleadershipcompany.com
You can access the original article here.
