name some years ago. And throughout this talk, we'd love to sort of explore how emotional agility is a key leadership skill. What is that? How do we bring that about in ourselves? So maybe you could get the ball rolling with what is emotional agility? Well, put very simply, emotional agility is the skill set that helps us to be healthy human beings, healthy with ourselves and healthy with others in our organizations and beyond. If I'm going to break it down a little bit more, emotional agility is the recognition that everyday human beings have thousands of experiences with thoughts, emotions, and stories. And how we deal with those ultimately drives every aspect of how we love, how we live, how we parent, how we lead, and how we curate effective, healthy, and sustainable businesses. And so emotional agility is a skill set that says traditionally emotions have either been pushed aside, feminized, being called soft, or what organizations and leaders or what organizations and leaders have often done or what organizations and leaders have often done is they've said, oh, we'll do emotions, but only some emotions. Only if you come to work and you are positive and happy are those the emotions that we will do. And emotional agility is the skill set that essentially says that's actually not how it works. When you have that approach, you undermine your business's ability to be effective. And actually what we need is a skill set, a skill set of the modern age that helps us to deal with human beings in complex times and enables us to both be healthy with them, but also not get stuck in difficult emotions so we can move towards our goals and values effectively. And I know we'll unpack more, but the very headline definition that I give of emotional agility is that it's the ability to be with our thoughts, emotions, and stories in ways that are curious, in ways that are compassionate and courageous, and that still enable us to take values -connected steps as we build a future world. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. It's easy for many people, including myself, to think of situations where there are feelings and part of you, if not the whole of you, wants those feelings to go away because, hey, we're trying to get stuff done here. Yeah. It's not a therapy session. Could we please? So I don't have to search far to connect to this. Yes. Please. Yes. Yes. I think it's so powerful. When organizations say that they want to be more human, often they are saying it towards particular goals. So if we think about some of the goals that organizations have, they want to be innovative. And yet innovation holds hands with having a relationship with failure and the difficult emotions that come with failure. An organization says we want collaboration with our clients. And collaboration holds hands with the ability to have conflict and disagreement. Yeah. An organization says we want to be future of work ready. But what that holds hands with is the need for every single person in the organization to be able to be okay with the discomfort that comes with unknowing, with complexity, with learning, with relearning, with adaptability. These are emotional skills. These are emotional skills that are learnable. They are powerful. They are practical. Every aspect, every moment of our organizational experience is dependent on emotional skill. And yet emotions have historically been sidelined. And we can look at the history of this literally dating back to pre-Victorian times where the subjects that could easily be taught were the math and the sciences. And they were traditionally taught to males. Schooling was traditionally open to men. So what happened is there became an othering and a feminization of core parts of ourselves. Emotions, art, the humanities, poetry, like these things became othered. And then you see this historical journey being perpetuated in the Industrial Revolution, where in the Industrial Revolution, if it couldn't be put on a machine and counted, it didn't matter. And so you've got a whole history of management practice that has systematically sidelined emotions. And in sidelining emotions, they have also systematically undermined the well-being, success, and sustainability of their organizations. I think it's a super cool perspective. And correct me if I'm wrong here. So your point is that emotions hold data. So instead of neglecting them as a leader, I should, when I experience data feelings in me or in my coworkers, I should be sensitive to those data points because they allow me to make better choices. Absolutely. Absolutely. I'll give you a practical example from research in transformation. So if we think about an organization going through transformation, traditionally, the language that we use in transformation is this language. And this is what I mean by this historical sidelining of emotions. Okay. We say things like people are either on the bus or off the bus. They're either with me or they're against me. I know your job's changing, but you better be grateful. Okay. Don't come to me with problems. Come to me with solutions. So to come back to what you said, yes, emotions are data. The emotions are going to be there. Whenever a leader says something like, I don't do emotions, it's a little bit like someone saying, I don't do feet. I don't do noses. I don't do eyes. It's like they exist. They are there. So really powerful way of thinking about emotions in organizations is emotions are data. And what do I mean by this? Emotions are an evolutionary signal that help human beings to make sense of the world. So when someone is experiencing a tough emotion, we tend not to care about or feel strongly about stuff that doesn't matter to us. Very often, something that an individual is feeling, if you imagine that feeling having a flashing arrow above it saying, there's a value here. There's something that this person cares about. What that then helps you to do as a leader is to not get stuck in the difficult emotion, but to say, oh, this person who's complaining about the change cares about the customer experience. Or, oh, this person who's saying that they're bored actually really values growth and learning. And if instead of seeing the emotion as bad or negative, I can see it as data, it can actually help me to move forward in ways that are very powerful and profound. Yeah. We've been honing recently in complexity. What does it take to make change happen? What does transformation look like there? Where we've been exploring the link between that and kind of people's fear systems. Because when people talk about, OK, now there's a change coming, we're going to do that. One of the examples you also mentioned earlier made me think of resistance and how whenever you're doing a change management thing, everyone's like, well, you know, that group or that person's really resistant. And the way that they talk about it is that's bad. We need to get that covered. And, you know, we need to convince them that this side or maybe they're just never going to be on board. And, you know, but the way that they talk about it is so, you know, it's not curious. It's not saying, I wonder why they're so resistant. And what could I learn from that? What are they longing for? So I'm just trying to make the link here that when you are making a large scale transformation happen, it is to have at every level of curiosity on. If someone's resistant, if someone's having strong emotions, what can I learn? Yes, yes. It's such a powerful observation. So let's think about, again, from an evolutionary perspective, what happens in complexity. OK, so when my body, from an evolutionary perspective, is under threat and I'm walking around in the world, I'm not feeling the wind, looking at the sky, smelling flowers, feeling my feet on the grass. What we have in complexity, again, our evolutionary heritage is what psychologists call a cognitive narrowing. So cognitive narrowing is the world is complex. I'm under threat. And if you imagine being under threat, what do you do? You hone in. Instead of having a wide perspective, the perspective of curiosity, you hone in on the enemy. And the enemy in organizations or the way it manifests in organizations is black and white thinking, getting stuck in wrong versus right, labeling people as resistant. We see it in people who go to give a presentation and they're feeling really stressed. And so they come up with all of this data and they get stuck in what they're trying to present without even recognizing that it's not connecting with people because there's this cognitive narrowing. So one of the paradoxes is that we're in extraordinarily complex times. And these complex times are calling for agility. And yet our evolutionary heritage is one towards narrowing and rigidity. And so this is why, again, the skill set becomes so extraordinarily important. It's the skill set, for example, of recognizing that you are jumping to label. Just recognizing. Recognizing that a label, what is a category? A category of resistant to change, not resistant to change is a quick stereotyping that happens when we feel under threat. We know this from decades of research. So what this really calls for is a skill set in leaders, which is a skill set of, number one, being present with their own emotional experience. Because when you're a leader and you see people who are, quote unquote, resistant, where's that coming from? It's often coming from a fear in yourself that you aren't performing, implementing the change effectively. Like, you know, that's where it's coming from. So there's such beauty in being able to be present with that, to be present with the reality that it's hard to human in change. The reality that as a leader, you're trying to do your day job and cultivate change and do all of this at once. It's hard to human. And so what that asks then as an internal skill set is being kind to yourself, being compassionate with yourself, not judging yourself, being open, having your own back, taking care of basic needs like sleep and exercise and nutrition. Like these sound like basic things, but they're crucial and they often get left. So when as a leader, you are able to be kind to yourself and accepting of yourself, then you also open the door to being kind and compassionate and accepting of others. Accepting doesn't mean you don't have any expectations. Accepting doesn't mean passive resignation, but accepting is that you're seeing in front of you what is. You are seeing emotions as data. You are being open to this. And so back to what you described a little bit earlier, when you're now in this posture, if, you know, people are listening right now, not seeing. So if you imagine all of us can have a posture of being round-shouldered and defensive in the world. And all of us have gone into meetings, into conversations with a psychological posture, which is round-shouldered, defensive, focused on being right. All of us have also gone into meetings and conversations where we've been able to ground ourselves in our values. We've been able to connect with what is my objective in this meeting? What am I trying to get out of it? Who am I trying to serve here? And that is the posture, the psychological posture of emotional agility. And it comes through acceptance of difficult emotions. It comes through compassion. In the example that you gave earlier, it also comes through now recognizing that you're getting stuck in a category of resistance. And instead, just staying in the posture of curiosity for longer. What does this person need? What communication would be helpful here? What are they worried about? What are their values that are being usurped by this change? And that becomes a very powerful place to be. One of the skills that you mention is emotion granularity. And, you know, when, as you were talking this, and we've used the word resistance a lot here, and it made me think about how that skill set and how that can be useful. So maybe you could put a couple of words as to what that is. Yes. Yes. So thinking about, firstly, acceptance and compassion. We don't change the world through acceptance and compassion. We change a lot through acceptance and compassion. But there is also, again, other emotional capacities, emotional skill sets. So one of the ones that's crucial is I found in a lot of my work that people often use, again, coming back to categories, people often default to very quick labels to describe how they and other people are feeling. Stress and feeling unsupported. Stress and that knowing, knowing feeling of this transformation isn't going well. Stress and I'm in the wrong job or the wrong career. When you label an emotion in a granular way, it literally starts changing what psychologists call the readiness potential in your brain. It's the part of you that says, oh, the thing that I'm calling stress is actually feeling unsupported. How can I start getting the support that I need? So it literally moves us from being stuck in the difficult emotion into understanding the causes and how we can move forward towards the thing that we care about. So it makes me think of maybe a dilemma. Maybe you can shed light on that. I know we're running out of time, but I'll see. So this thing about it feels to me that you are making an invitation where you say we all have to do the work in getting a language and around feelings, but also being comfortable being in conversations that allows feelings to be there without, you know, panicking or just feeling they ought to go away. This is work. So I feel that's a big invitation for a lot of people to literally just allow for, oh, yeah, you're right. They're here. I can use them as data. So it also feels like I have to do some inner work. It's very difficult to have a language around that if I'm not even aware of my own, you could say, inner territory of feelings. I'm not really feeling what I feel. Yeah. And it's really difficult to connect with you guys. And it points to a dilemma, I think, this thing about there's a part of me that feels it's okay. I buy your feelings premise. Yeah. Really, I do. I'm not trying to sell it to you, by the way. I know you are. But I think it's very convincing and inspiring. At the same time, I have this feeling of at job, I have to hold my shit together. I might have this thing at the moment. It might be my dad is really sick or something. I've always seen it as a quality to allow that feeling to be in me and own it, but also having a sensitivity for where is that appropriate to leverage. So I feel it, but I might say, that's all good. I'll look at that at five o'clock again. Absolutely. So this is really important. Emotions are data. They are not directives. Emotions are data. They are not directives. You would not take a single number on a spreadsheet and use that number to determine your entire organizational strategy or budget. Okay. You are looking at that number in context. They are data. They are not directives. The same with emotions. I can show up to emotions and I can be curious and I can be compassionate. But ultimately, we find our wisdom in understanding what is the value that the emotion is pointing to and moving in the direction of that value. They are emotions, not directives. Example, I can show up to my son who is frustrated with his baby sister. I can love him. I can see him. I can be compassionate with him. I can be kind with him. It doesn't mean that I'm telling him he can give her away to a stranger in a shopping mall just because he's got that idea. So this is really important. And I think this is something that leaders very often, when we start using language like bring your whole self to work, a lot of times people confuse this with a lack of discernment, which is to your point, Steve. Oversharing. Oversharing. Okay. Bring your whole self to work. What does this mean? Bring your whole self to work doesn't mean what is your whole self? Your whole self is not 100% of your emotions. Your whole self is also your groundedness, your connection, your wisdom, the posture that we all have available to us of moving forward in a way that is not all about me, but is also connected with the other. So a really important part of this is around discernment. And thinking about, you know, again, there's another word that is very often used, which is authenticity. Authenticity doesn't mean I'm feeling this. Take me as I am. Like it or not. I'm just going to tell you how I feel. What is authenticity? Authenticity. Authenticity is literally about an integration between my thoughts, my emotions, my values, and my behavior. In other words, there's an alignment that is happening. And I think a lot of times where leaders get kind of hung up on welcoming emotions is they sometimes think that means anything goes. It doesn't. It means that all emotions are you can bring your emotional truth. But you don't get to act with impunity. You don't get to act in ways that harm other people. You don't get to act in ways that harm the client relationship. Rather, your emotions are serving a purpose. And the purpose is connected with the things that you care about. In other words, your values. So let me give you an example to make this tangible. If I need to have a difficult conversation, the idea that I'm just going to do my emotions means I go into the difficult conversation and I'm full of courage and I bulldoze the other person. Yeah. Okay. If you recognize that that is you, what you are needing to do is to elevate compassion. So you can be high courage. But if you do high courage, you're going to bulldoze. We need to have high courage that holds hands with compassion, with seeing the other person, with connecting with the other person. Now, imagine you are high compassion, but low in courage. If you're hyper compassionate, you'll feel, you'll connect, you'll people please, you won't set boundaries, you'll take on huge amounts of emotional labor, and you'll likely avoid that difficult conversation because you've got huge amounts of compassion, but you don't have the courage to have it. So what can be really helpful for leaders, and I'm just, again, giving an example to make this tangible, is where you've got a conversation that is really highlighting things for you. You feel anxious about it and you're tempted to avoid it, for example. It can be helpful thinking, what value is this emotion signposting? The emotion might be signposting that you value fairness and you're worried about the conversation because you really care about fairness. Now, instead of avoiding the conversation, you have the capacity to say to yourself, because you're now facing reality, you're facing what's in front of you, you now have the capacity to say, what does a fair conversation look like? How can I have this conversation fairly? How fair is it if I don't have the conversation? How fair to the organization? This is what I mean by emotions are data. This is what I mean by they signposting our needs and our values because it now allows you to not be hamstrung by your emotional experience, but rather to step into your values, to step into discomfort. Thank you for mentioning courage and it made me think of something that you mentioned somewhere else. I'd like you to just spend a moment on. You said something about that the power is actually in small conversations. And I'd like you to elaborate on this because for myself, I have this tendency to want to identify the big conversation that kind of unlocks everything. And I just love the invitation that the small conversations are, that's actually where the power is. Say something about that. Well, courage is often thought of as superhero. Okay, I'm coming in and I've got my sword. That is the way we culturally think of courage. The way that I think of courage is that courage is very often a whisper. Courage can be as small as voicing an opinion in a meeting. Courage can be as small as going a little bit to the edge of your ability instead of just staying in your comfort. Courage can be moving into the conversation that you're avoiding. And I think that this is really important because pretty much every organization has a sense of what their ideal organizational culture is. And it's fascinating to me that there's often the view that we can just mandate a culture. You know, there's often this view that we'll decide what we want our culture to be and we will write the five values. On the wall. On the wall. And there's a whole other conversation that I can have about this because this is so interesting. I sense that. Yeah, it's such a fascinating thing. But, well, firstly, values are completely empty unless people see a way of expressing their own values through their work in the organization. So telling people what to believe, distinct from what people actually do believe, is a fool's errand. You know, we actually are trying to surface values and surface ways people can express their values. But culture is not about something that is mandated by the organization. I think of culture as moments. Culture is moments that are replicated at scale. That's the way I think of culture. Yes. It's not the one conversation, but it is the one conversation because now you've got a thousand one conversations happening. So it's behaviors that are replicated at scale. And what that is asking is not to worry too much about courage with a capital C. But for every single person to keep on asking this question, the single question, which is probably the most important litmus question of emotional agility, is my action bringing me closer to the person, the leader, the loved one that I most want to be. It can be a step closer. It can be five steps closer. It can be a conversation closer. It's usually not a superhero closer. And that is okay because you are moving towards your values. So the way I think of culture is that moments make movements. Moments in organizations are what make movements. Thanks. Wow. Thank you. I think that leads us really well into this very last part of the conversation, which is how we end all of these podcasts by just sharing, you know, based on this talk that we've had now, what is it that we're each going to take into the next conversation we're going to walk into after this? And honestly, I think what you just said there is so powerful to me that both for me and also thinking about all the choices that I make, all the small choices that I maybe support other people in making is an opportunity to choose something that's aligned with who I want to become and who we collectively would like to become. I think that's a really beautiful invitation. So I will definitely take a little booster of that as I walk out the room. How about you, Steve? I have two that I can... Two? Am I allowed to? Of course. No, but the first thing is just a more abstract one. And that is just this, I think what you brought, your gift was you offered a different way to think about and a language around feelings that helped me. So I think there was a very profound invitation that did something to me even physically. The more specific one, the one that I'm really going to take into my next conversations and that is this thing about holding my courage as a whisper. I think that's, for me, that's super inspiring that it can actually have that flavor also. So thank you for that. How about you, Susan? I think something that I've been thinking about is just in this conversation is a word that I'll use, which is unbecoming. And it's this, which is that so much of organizational life is spent in our heads and spent in the fallacy of getting from A to B. And I think there's something so beautiful in the liminal space, in the space of not knowing, of not knowing the answer, of being with a team member and not jumping in with a solution, of not jumping in with, oh, the person's resistant. There's something so beautiful. And I trained as a clinical psychologist, even though I work mostly with, well, I work always with organizations, but I trained as a clinical psychologist. And one of the things that you learn as a clinical psychologist is the power of the pause. The power to, when there's discomfort in the conversation you're having with a client and you feel that discomfort in your body, in your soul. And there's a part of you that wants to race for the emotional exit, to say something, to make a joke, to, there's something so powerful in that liminal space, in that pause, in the unbecoming. And I think that I think about this because when you're talking about jumping, you know, how we jump, how we jump into categories, there's something really beautiful when you are with a leader who isn't jumping into judging and is just able to be. I use this word at the beginning of our, the talk that I gave earlier, which is suburbana. I see you and by seeing you, I bring you into being. It's a Zulu word. And I think that's the invitation for every one of us and for every leader. Thank you so much for your time, Susan. This has been wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. How did this conversation resonate with you? Get in touch via the link in the show notes to share your questions, challenges and opinions. And until next time, take care.