If you had to quantify the number of thoughts you had in one day, what would your best guess be?
It will likely be in the thousands.
Some of these thoughts are will be practical: ‘I must remember to put the bins out’
But many will be evaluations and judgments entwined with emotions, some positive and helpful: ‘I’m pleased with what I’ve done here’; ‘I need to speak up about this’ whereas others will be negative and less helpful: ‘they don’t value our contribution’; ‘I’m going to mess this up’.
How we manage these thoughts and emotions is known as emotional agility and this is the subject of this Harvard Business Review article by Susan David and Christina Congleton.
Despite the fact that us humans experience a vast range of emotions and as we have seen, thousands of thoughts each day, somehow, the accepted practice is that difficult throughts and feelings have no place at work.
The article emphasises that leaders stumble, not because they have undesirable thoughts and feelings, that’s inevitable, but because they get hooked by them, like fish caught on a line. In doing so, they pay too much attention to their internal chatter and allow it to use up important cognitive resources that could be put to better use.
Critically, ample research shows that attempting to minimise or ignore thoughts and emotions serves only to amplify them – yet minimising or ignoring difficult thoughts and emotions is often our default response!
So what should we do instead?
The article recommends that effective leaders don’t buy into or try to suppress their inner experiences. Instead they approach them in a mindful, values driven, and productive way, in the process, they develop emotional agility through four key practices:
- Recognise your patterns
Notice when you’ve been hooked by your thoughts and feelings. This is hard to do but there will be tell-tale signs, for example, you might notice that your thinking becomes rigid and repetitive or you might automatically discount new ideas.
2. Label your thoughts and emotions.
When you’re hooked, the attention you give your thoughts and feelings crowds your mind; there’s no room to examine them. One strategy that may help you consider your situation more objectively is the simple act of labelling. Labelling allows you to see your thoughts and feelings for what they are: transient sources of data that may or may not prove helpful.
3. Accept them.
The opposite of control is acceptance, not acting on every thought or resigning yourself to negativity but responding to your ideas and emotions with an open attitude, paying attention to them and letting yourself experience them. The important thing is to show yourself (and others) some compassion and examine the reality of the situation.
4. Act on your values.
When you unhook yourself from your difficult thoughts and emotions, you expand your choices. You can decide to act in a way that aligns with your values.
The key to emotional agility is not to deny or ignore our emotional responses, they are an important source of data! Instead, effective leaders are mindful of their inner experiences but not caught in them, following the steps above to use this data to learn more about themselves and act in accordance with their values.
At Inclusive Leadership Company, we recognise the importance of emotional agility in inclusive leadership which is why ‘being emotionally agile’ is one of the behaviours we assess in our inclusive leader assessment. To find out more, get in touch at enquiries@inclusiveleadershipcompany.com
You can read the full article here.
