Understanding Emotions with Susan David

have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they fee their good wolf. Thanks for joining us today. We are welcoming back. Susan David as a guest. She's a psychologist on faculty at Harvard

Medical School. She's the co founder and co creator of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital and the CEO of Evidence Based Psychology. Along with speaking and consulting, Susan is also the author of many books, including Emotional Agility, Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive and Work in Life. Hi, Susan, Welcome to the show. Hi. I'm delighted to be with you. It's a pleasure to have you on again. We don't have a whole lot of two time guests, we've got some,

but you've joined an esteemed club, so welcome back. Thank you. We'll get into the rest of our conversation in a moment, but let's start like we normally do, with the wolf parable. There's a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter and she says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed

and hatred and fear. And they ran out her stops and she thinks about it for a second, and she looks up at her grandmother and she said, Grandma, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in

the work that you do. So thank you. I love the parable, and I think what it signifies to me is the two core aspects of my work, which is firstly emotional in agility, really meaning how people get stuck in thoughts, emotions, stories, ways of being auto partit that then stops them from bringing the best of themselves forward, and how they love, how they live, how their parents,

and how they lead. And then on the other hand, there's emotional agility, and emotional agility is the ability to be with ourselves in a way that's curious and compassionate, where we notice those difficult thoughts, emotions and stories, but ultimately we are able to navigate them effectively the skills of emotional agility so that we can bring the best of ourselves forward and live in ways that feel values

congruent and values aligned wonderful. What I'd like to start is with something you just said there for a second, which is about autopilot. And as I've been reflecting on what it takes to live good life, well lived life, one of the things that's occurred to me is that it's the ability to actually know what's going on inside of us that is so important. It's always kind of amazing to me how much we can be struggling inside emotionally with our thoughts and not even be aware of

what's happening. And so I'd like to kind of talk about how can we go off autopilot? What are ways of remembering, you know, remembering the practice principles of emotional agility or of any other type. Yeah, I think that's a great way to start. So firstly, when I think about autopilot, I think about autopilot in our actions. So these might be habits that have become part of our day to day life, but that actually don't reflect who

we want to be. Um An example might be that value family, you value presence and connectedness, and yet you've got this habit and the habit is you always bring your cell phone to the table, And this is this precious opportunity with your family, but you squandering it through a habit that you might not even have reflected on. We can also get into autopilot in other ways. We can, for instance, have thoughts, emotions, stories, this internal world where

we auto pilot respond to difficulties. And so some examples of that might be you feel underminded work and so you just automatically shut down, or your husband starts in on the finances, and so you leave the room because

the conversation feels uncomfortable. Other ways that we can get stuck in our thoughts, emotions and our stories is you know, I feel sad, and I feel like I don't want to get out of bed, and so I don't or I really want to put my hand up for this job, or you know, even engage in a level of intimacy with someone that requires me to be vulnerable. But I've been hurt in the past, and so my auto pilot

is to put up the protection. And so I think, you know, one of the first ways to start thinking about how to get off the hook or get off the auto pilot is for us to think a little bit about what we value, you know, what it is that we value because of course, you know, our emotions and our thoughts and our stories are really helpful to us. We need them. We need stories because they help us to make sense of the world and understand what. You know, we should tune into our need to tune into my

daughter crying, but not tune into the washing machine. And so stories are really important ways that we make sense of the world around us. Emotions are really important, critical signaling functions and thoughts as well, But when we go onto autopilot, we're letting those drive us. And so really important way of getting off autopilot is recognizing that we

own our emotions. They don't own us. And so, of course, you know, to your question, which is how do we even start doing this, a really important aspect is simply about thinking, you know, about our values, Like, you know, are there ways that I am being right now today that take me away from the person, the partner, the loved one, the leader that I most want to be? Uh?

You know, do I value fairness and yet I'm avoiding that difficult conversation because It's a tough one to have, and therefore I'm being unfair to the person or to the rest of my team. Do I value presence and connection? And yet my autopilot is leading me away from that? And so I think one of the first ways we can you know, move off the hook, and there are others, of course, but is to just give a little bit

of space to thinking about our values. And this is away from this school momsh um, you know, almost scolding orientation that values often have. And it's more, you know, connecting with the heartbeat of who do I want to be in the world, and that can be profoundly important for us, right right, there are a few things I think that are as important as knowing what our values are and then being conscious about how we carry them into the world. You know, another phrase that people will

use with this as you know intentions. You know, what is my intention as I go into this conversation? What's my intention as I sit down to this meal with my family. I think the more often we can reflect on that, the much better chance we have of not being on autopilot. Definitely, And I think also, you know, it goes into this idea that values often feel very abstract,

but that values are actually qualities of action. So you know, in the same way as you riding a bike, and the only way you keep being able to say, in the same way as you're riding a bike, and you can only stay stable as you move forward as you move your feet. The same with values, which is that you know, every day we are invited by life two engage with what I call choice points. You know, a choice point might be do I pick the muff in order I pick the fruit cell phone at the table

or not? When my partner stands up to embrace me. At the end of a day, do I embrace back or do I shut down? You know, these are these choice points. And if we can think about the idea that values our intentions and they are also qualities of action that are invited of us hundreds of times every day,

we have more opportunity to live into those values. I love that idea because so often this idea of you know, value sounds very abstracted, you know, like, oh my, my values, as if they're these these things that sort of stand outside of our life. And that's not the way it's intended to be, and that values are very often practical.

Like I often say to people, sometimes your value is what you planned to be doing that moment, your daily plan that you sat down and you thought about, like what you were going to do today, and when like, that's a reflection ideally of your values. And so if you're asking yourself, well, what do I value here, you can look, you know, sometimes to that plan because it ideally is reflecting some value that you had when you thought about what was important with how you spend your time.

I think that's right. I recently started a podcast with Ted Cale checking in with Susan David and one of the people that I interviewed on the podcast does James Clear, who has written this beautiful book Atomic Habits. And James described it so beautifully, which is this idea that our actions are votes. When you act, you are casting a vote for the person that you most want to be.

You know, it's this idea that your actions are what you've got on your to do list, and the way you move of being yourself forward is actually a vote for your identity and for your values. I agree. I often when I'm talking with people about the coaching program is that you know, essentially, what we're trying to do is simply identify what's important to you, what really matters to you, and then find ways to pull that through

into all the aspects of your life. And if you can do that, if you can identify what's really important to you and then you can live by that, that's a successful life. You have to have both those components. You have to spend the time to think about what's important, and then you actually have to live according to it. If you have one versus the other, it's a lopsided equation.

That's exactly right, and you know. What you're saying here also just reminds me a little bit of your earlier question in the conversation, which is, you know, how do we get off autopilot and how do we stop? Then, you know, begs the question how do we start identifying what our values are? And I think this is really critical because you know, this idea that our emotions are either good or bad, positive or negative is pervasive in

our society. So society seems to really laud this idea that we've got to be positive, we've got to be happy, good vibes. Only you know, whatever positive thoughts you have, they manifest. And really a lot of my work challenges that. A lot of my work is really focused on this idea that all emotions, including and very often especially the difficulty emotions, actually signpost the things that we care about.

So if you're feeling guilty as a parent, and you imagine guilty written on a piece of paper, then if you turn that piece of paper over and you ask yourself what values is this difficulty emotion pointing to the values might be values of presence and connection. And if you're feeling grief, that grief is often a signpost of love, love looking for a home, you know, love inviting you to remember and to be able to think of that

person and special times together. And so our difficulty emotions, rather than being things that we should manage and control, are actually signposting often what we care about. And I think that when we then open up to our difficulty emotions with this level of curiosity, you know, what is the function of this emotion, What is its signaling to me? What is it trying to tell me about what's important? Often what will come out of that is greater clarity

about what our values are. And you know, often the dissonance that we feel in our life is because things are going against our values. But again, we in so day to day mode that we might not have even you thought about it. So I think this is really really important because what it really speaks to is this idea that you know, our emotions contain very important data about who we are and what we want to be doing. Um. The caveat to that, of course, is that our emotions

are data, they are not directives. Just because I feel guilty doesn't mean I'm a bad parent. Um. Just because I feel bored at work, and it might be signaling that I value growth doesn't mean that I need to our go and resign from my job here and now. So our emotions are data, not directives. We own our emotions that own us. We can learn from them, but

we don't need to be driven by them. I'd be curious to hear you talk a little bit more about how to suss out when our emotions are a valid indicator of a value, of a direction, or they are a habitual pattern of guilt is a great one, right, because there's lots of guilt that is really useful, right, Like, oh, I feel guilty because I let's use your example, because I'm I'm I'm spending more time with my cell phone than I am with my children, and I don't feel

good about that. I want to change that. That's a valid use of guilt, right. But we also all know people who carry around a per evasive sense of guilt that they inherited from who knows where. Right, you know, we talk about you know, um, Catholic guilt or Jewish guilt or the guilt trip that our mother put on us. And so you can have the same emotion in one hand that is really pointing towards something that's a value,

and then you can have the same emotion. On the other hand, that maybe an old way of viewing the world that's not really helpful for us. So how are we able to sort of tell the difference between those things? So this is a really important question. There are a couple of pointers that I will give. The first is that when we are experiencing a difficulty emotion. Of course, as you note, you know a lot of emotions have these functions, they're signaling something. But sometimes we can get

stuck in believing the emotional the story as fact. So, for instance, you know, you might have grown up in a family in which you know on your mental chalkboard in grade three was the story that you are not good enough and that in order to protect yourself you need to close into yourself and not give, because when you give, you are punished for giving. You know, when

you are vulnerable, you are punished for that vulnerability. And so that story and even those emotions and even that way of being might have been completely functional to the child that you once were. Um it protected you, and it helped you to be in a context that wasn't a context of your choosing, and you learned how to navigate that effectively. And then what happens is, as you become an adult, you start reflecting on the fact that

you feeling lonely. You know you're feeling lonely, and that part of your loneliness is about this being closed off. And so now this story that at one point was functional actually now is taking you away from the kinds of relationships that you might want to have. So I think there are a couple of really important aspects to this. The first is that you know, no single emotion in of itself is a signpost to the fact that you need to change your life. Of course, because emotions are transient,

you know, emotions again are data, not directives. But when we experience our emotions time and time again and they're signaling something to us, a really important question to ask of ourselves is is my believing is my believing the story? Is my believing this emotion? Is it actually leading me to shut down into my life and to be small or is it enabling me to thrive? And what we know is that the litmus of whether something's helpful or not is this idea that these emotions are there for

a purpose. But as soon as we become hooked into them as soon as we are responding, reacting, being living based on the dictates of that emotion as opposed to the dictates of our values. That's when we know that that emotion is you know, maybe a carryover that is not helpful to us anymore, you know, or that story is not helpful to us anymore, and we need to start shifting it. And so the ways that we can do that shifting, we can firstly bring compassion to ourselves.

We need to be able to be compassionate. We need to be able to when we feel the guilt or the sadness or the grief, we need to be able to show up to that emotion with compassion. You know, this is tough. This is tough. What you're going through is tough given the experience that you had when you were a little uh, this is a tough feeling or it's a tough story. So we need to be compassionate. We need to also be able to be curious with ourselves.

The only way we really begin to understand whether you know, the emotions are signaling values or whether they are too too strongly and and that's not helpful to us, is by being curious you know, I'm not stuck in the emotion, but I'm starting to say, what is this emotion trying to tell me? What is this emotion trying to shine a light on? And that's very different from being, Oh, I feel guilty, therefore I must be guilty, and I feel terrible about feeling guilty. It's like, huh, you know,

what is this guilt trying to signal to me? And so now you can see that orientation is very different. You're not stuck in the emotion. You are more observing the emotion and various strategies that I can share if they would be helpful about how we move from that place of showing up to our emotion to being able to learn from our emotion and understand our emotion better. Sure, I think that's a great place for us to head to. Okay, so I think the first thing is really hearing yourself

when you describe your emotions. So, for instance, very often people will use big descriptions to label what it is that they're feeling. So someone, for instance, might come home from work and say, you know, I'm stressed, and everything's about I'm stressed. I'm stressed. I'm stressed, and of course, there's a world of difference between stress and disappointment, or

stress and anxiety, or stress and I feel unseen. So what we know from psychology is there's this whole body of research and so I've found some lar in my work which is called emotion granularity. And it's essentially that when we move beyond this big umbrella term of something like stress, and we start trying to label the emotion more accurately. You know, what are one or other two or three ways that I could instead of calling this thing stress, what are other ways that I could describe

this emotion? This is incredibly simple, um you know, in that it's a simple strategy or simple idea, but it's actually profoundly powerful because what it helps us to do is to start understanding are the thing that I'm causing stress is actually that I feel unseen? And so when you say that, it's starting to help you to identify the cause of the emotion and also what you might

need to do in response to it. And I'll give you an example from a giant, which is that many years ago, I worked with a client who would often describe himself and his team, you know, everyone was angry. So he would say, you know, I'm so angry about what's going on at work, and my team's just angry with me. And I started to encourage him, like what else could you be feeling? And what else could your

team be feeling? And you know what he identified for himself was that he was feeling a bit of fear. It was a new role for him, and that actually what his team was feeling was maybe a lack of trust because again, this person was in a new role and that had a difficult experience with a previous manager. So you can see how this accurate labeling completely shifts the posture of the interaction. Now we're not I am

angry dealing with angry people. It's I am feeling a little bit of fear here, and I'm dealing with a team that needs to trust me. And so how then I go about having those conversations, or how have my

meetings or how I interact becomes very very different. And you know what was really interesting is I was very good friends with this client, and a couple of months later we went out for for lunch and his wife came as well, and she said to me that this had completely changed their marriage because he would come home from work and he would set to her it seems like you're just angry with me, and she would be I'm not angry, I'm tired, or I'm not angry. I

just need to be acknowledged. And so it's a very simple but extraordinarily powerful strategy to start pling our emotions more accurately. It starts to gain signpost our values and what's important and who we want to be. So that's one strategy. Another strategy, and of course what we're talking about here is how do you move beyond getting stuck in your experience to using your experience fruitfully and acting

in ways that are values aligned. So a second way that we can do this is by observing when you say something like I am stressed, I am angry, I'm frustrated, I am sad. You can see linguistically that what we're doing is we are identifying all of us with that emotion. I am one of me is stressed. You know all of me? Um, I am one hundred of me, all of me is angry. Now, you are not your emotion. You, as we've explored in the podcast already, are more than

your emotion. You are your values, your intentions, your choices, you, your wisdom, you your courage. You are so much more than your emotion. But when we say I am, it's a linguistic trap that then imprisons us. So you know, we can start using and it's it's almost like a mindfulness technique, but the strategy of just noticing your thoughts, your emotions, and your stories for what they are. They are thoughts, emotions, and stories. They are not fact. So

I'm noticing the feeling that I'm being undermined. I'm noticing that this is the thought that there's no point. I'm noticing that this is my I'm not good enough story. When we do this, we're still acknowledging the thoughts, emotions, and stories, but we are creating space in ourselves, recognizing

that these are data sources, not definitions of who we are. Yeah, and that I think is often one of the most fundamental shifts that we can make, is that is to get that little bit of space, and that little bit of space calls for some degree of like you said, some degree of awareness. We suddenly shift from being immersed in it or you know, drowning in what's happening, and we're in a different relation to those things. Those things

are still there, but our relation to them is so different. Correct, You know, we can't read the instructions while we in the jaw. We need to be able to get out of the jar and then observe the jar. And you know, when we stuck in our difficulty emotions, we are often

in the jaw. And you know, another aspect of this is, you know, really, what I'm talking about here when we get stuck in this way is I'm talking about the language that I use in my book Emotional Agility and in my TED talk is that we're brooding on our emotions. We're treating these emotions as fact, we are immersed in them. But of course, you know, people can do the opposite. People can instead of brooding on their emotional experience, people

can bottle them. And bottling is when you push them aside, you rationalize them. You say, you know, I shouldn't feel that I should be grateful for what I've got. You know, many people would give anything to have those jobs, even though I'm bored. I shouldn't, you know, focus on that we bottle our emotions when we judge ourselves for having them, because again, we live in a society that tells us that happiness is somehow the thing that we should all

be doing. And so what this can lead to is when we feel difficulty inside of us, when we feel that loneliness or grief, we can start saying, you know, I shouldn't, I shouldn't feel that at and so we create an internal hustle with ourselves. We struggle with ourselves. Really, what emotional agility is is it's neither about brooding on

our emotions, nor about bottling our emotions. Rather, it's about engaging with these inner experiences with compassion and curiosity, and very importantly also with courage, because sometimes we're facing into an emotion that actually tells us that things aren't going well, that this job or this thing that you've invested your life in doesn't actually have a good chance of success, or it's not something you want to be doing any longer,

or that a relationship isn't working out. And that's painful, you know, that's a painful realization. And so the courage is the part of us that notices these but then faces into ourselves with a sense of recognition that we need to make changes or that we need to shift things. Sometimes even small shifts so that they are more values congruent. Oftentimes people will describe a thought as a feeling. I feel that you don't appreciate me. Is that an emotion

or is that a thought? Because I think sometimes this gets a little confusing, And how do you tweez the two apart so that you're dealing with them in the right context. Yes, so that's a really important question, and it's one that psychologists don't even agree on, which is often think of this as being a fairly simplified way of describing it. You know, it definitely doesn't capture the nuance and certainly the conversations that happen in the emotional

literature about it. But you know, one way of thinking about this is that emotion is really a very often a physiological experience that we have. It might be those butterflies in your stomach, or the put or the tightness that we feel when we're anxious, and it's very often that physiological sensation. A thought is very often in our heads. I wish he didn't say this, and I'm planning on saying that, And it's that like monkey mind that we think about. A feeling is very often the combination of

the two. So a feeling often combines an emotion and a thought. You know, I have got a feeling here that you don't have my back, and that might both be the thought that I've had, which is that I've noticed that you don't stand up for me, and you know, it's a cognitive experience that I've had, um but I've

also had the emotion of disappointment or anxiety. And so very often a feeling is this experience of a combined emotion and a thought and an interpretation that come to play together in the way we then view the world. That makes a lot of sense to me, and I think it can be helpful to take the feeling, and sometimes it can be helpful to deconstruct those two parts, like, oh, I'm thinking this, and there's this emotion that's here, and you know, it's not quite as overwhelming when I separated

into its constituent parts. I often describe it as like it's a big ball of yarn. And when you can deconstruct it a little bit, you can look at it a little bit more clearly, it doesn't feel so heavy. Definitely, Definitely, it's very helpful because what you're starting to do is you starting to tease apart your experience and then your

assumptions and interpretations of that experience. Yes, exactly, So I'd like to change directions just for a moment here, and I would like to talk a little bit about dealing with difficult emotion in times of uncertainty. Obviously, we are in a time of uncertainty right now. When we release this show, we'll still be in a time of We're always in a time of uncertainty, but but sometimes feel more uncertain than others, and and uh, this is certainly

one of them. I don't know what the state of the world will be when this gets released as far as COVID nineteam, but I'm sure we'll still be feeling, you know, a fair degree of after effect of it, even if we're and if we're past the worst of it. In what ways does any of this advice change when we are in times of uncertainty? Or there are particular things we would like to emphasize more during times of uncertainty.

So I think that's a wonderful question. I think that there's nothing that we would change, but there are things we would emphasize more. The first thing that we would emphasize more is compassion because it's really interesting and sad.

It's a tragedy that in the shadow of so much illness, death and uncertainty, we are seeming to be faced with never ending demands or suggestions on social media saying things like, you know, if you didn't use quarantine to dust of your screenplay or write a new book or you know,

become a star baker. You know, it's not that you didn't have the time, bits that you lack discipline, and so you know, really there is so much focus, even in tragedy, on humans as doing rather than being, and on the invitation to compare and self criticize and self judge.

And now is not the time for self criticism. Now is the time for self compassion because every single person listening, you know, whether this is still quarantine, after quarantine or in six months time, every single person is doing the best they can with who they are, with what they've got, and with the resources that they have been given in life.

And it's really important to extend this compassion to ourselves and to others and to others because we don't know the narrative or the experience that someone who buys more toilet paper than they need. As an example, you know what it is that is driving that for that person. So I think just being compassionate is really important. Another thing that I would say there is acceptance. Acceptance. Gentle acceptance is foundational to our ability to get through complex times.

So what I mean by gentle acceptance, you know, gentle acceptance is not the same as passive resignation. Is what it is, There's no point, There's nothing I can do. Um, you know, there's just no point in even trying. Gentle acceptance is not a feeling of hopelessness. Gentle acceptance is really this idea. It is what it is. It is what it is. And so example of gentle acceptance might be you walk outside and it's raining, and gentle acceptance

is g it's reigning. Not gentle acceptance is it's raining, and I wish it weren't raining. What does it always rain? Just when I think that I'm starting to get things together, starts raining, like you know, And and so when we start doing this, we start engaging in a lack of gentle acceptance. We really are fighting with the world, you know, we are fighting with the world. And I really notice

in the work that I'm doing that. People's suffering is directly proportional to how much they try to fight the world. And so you know, there's a real power in recognizing that the city can only be rebuilt when you stop bombarding it. We as human beings can only start making change, whether that change is getting our resume together because we've lost our job or you know, self care because we

are completely burned out. That change can only come about when we face into the reality of our situation with gentle acceptance. Because here's the paradox that acceptance is the prerequisite to change. It's only when we face into the world as it is, not as we wish it to be, that we are then able to move forward. So that's

another thing I'd focus on. And then the third is I've already spoken to this, but I think now, even with the temptation to keep thinking about, you know, what's the silver lining and what's the good part of this and how can we be positive, everyone is going to

be experiencing different kinds of emotions. These emotions are going to be ongoing, probably for months, if not years beyond the experience, and those emotions will be both things like the experience of um relief, having reset, maybe even having reprioritized, a sense of growth that might come out for us, but it also will be aspects of feeling stressed and grieving traumatized, because by definition, very often our experience of trauma is that our view of what the world once

was has now been shattered, and so show up to those emotions. They are expected. Your emotions have evolved to protect you, and if there was ever a time when we are under existential threat, it's now. So if you're feeling tough emotions, don't judge them or push them aside. See if you can end the struggle with yourself by dropping the not telling yourself you can't have them or you shouldn't have them, but just noticing them, labeling them,

understanding them, and being kind with them. Wonderful. Well, I think that is a great place for us to wrap up this conversation. Thank you so much, Susan for coming on again. It's been such a pleasure talking with you. I've loved connecting and chatting. Thank you so much for having me. You are very welcome. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly

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