Emotional Agility

Emotional Agility provides a new, science-backed approach to navigating life’s many trials and detours on your path to fulfillment, with which you’ll face your emotions head on, observe them objectively, make choices based on your values and slowly tweak your mindset, motivation and habits.

If you’re an optimistic person like me, chances are you tend to swallow bad feelings, downplay them as minor issues, and smile through the pain. While that’s a better approach than being a total drama queen, it’s still not perfect. Forced optimism can’t be sustained, which means it’s only a temporary solution to a permanent problem.

Susan cites the Mills longitudinal study as an example. Researchers studied the class photographs of a women’s foundation, determining who smiled genuinely and who faked it by analyzing facial expressions. They then tracked the women’s lives for decades after graduation. The result? Real smilers had better relationships, more control over their emotions and a higher level of life satisfaction.

That’s because even negative emotions can have positive consequences, as long as you face them directly and draw the right conclusions. So don’t smile when you don’t feel like it. Just because you have a grim look on your face as you sort out a tough issue at work does not mean life’s not good in that moment.

Recognizing your emotions as they happen is a necessary precursor to consciously deciding how you’ll deal with them. However, it’s not easy. It’s a habit that takes practice. The practical part, the ability you’ll need to regularly exercise, is mindfulness. While being too mindful can be a problem, noticing your emotions allows you to step out and get some space.

Whether it’s an emotion, a physical sensation, a friend’s remark or an outside event, whatever you can attentively observe without judging it helps you act in a more refined way. When a Harvard study tracked 16 people before and after an eight-week meditation course in 2011, they saw positive, physical changes in the brain regions related to memory, stress management, empathy and identity. Other ways of developing mindfulness include journaling, exercise and personality tests.

If you want to see the power of identified emotions, select an object around your house the next time you’re angry and throw that anger at it. Yell at your pillow, TV remote or living room chair. Besides reducing the anger itself, it’ll show you a new, more playful perspective on your feelings.

Our brains are powerful distortion machines. Compelled to force our life’s story into a functioning narrative at all times, they tweak fact to fiction in order to make sense of the world and keep us from going insane. However, this comes at a cost: we only…