Emotional Agility is one of the most valuable business skills you can possess.

With greater Emotional Agility, you can maximise your confidence, turn negative emotions into positive thoughts, and overpower stress!

This essential leadership skill is about knowing yourself and developing a greater level of control over your feelings and reactions. With a bit of practice, you are capable of improving this skill quite quickly.

I am drawing on the work of a couple of experts: Susan David and Christina Congleton. In their Harvard Business Review article called “Emotional Agility: How Leaders Manage Their Negative Thoughts and Feelings”, they describe 4 Steps for Building Emotional Agility. They say that people do not stumble because they have undesirable thoughts – because we all have them. That’s inevitable. They stumble because they get hooked by their thoughts like a fish caught on a line, and they buy into their thoughts, treating them like facts.

Here are the 4 Steps for Building your Emotional Agility:

1. Recognise your Patterns

It is very important to notice when you have been hooked by your thoughts and feelings. This can be a little bit hard to do initially, but there are certain tell-tale signs that you are hooked. One of them is that your thinking becomes a bit repetitive and rigid. Another sign is that you feel like you are telling the same story over and over – a bit like that movie, Groundhog Day. You have to be aware of the patterns that you are stuck in before you can make a change. Self-Awareness is critical.

2. Label your Thoughts and Emotions

Labelling allows you to see your thoughts and feelings for what they are. They are transient sources of data that may or may not prove to be helpful. We are all capable of taking this detached view of our experiences, AKA mindfulness. Bring your awareness to your present moment and ask, “What am I feeling?” and label it. Then you ask, “What am I thinking?” and label it. This not only improves behaviour and well-being, but it also promotes beneficial biological changes in the brain at the cellular level.

3. Accept Them

The opposite of controlling is accepting. You do not need to act on every thought or feeling, or resign yourself to negativity. Remember our thoughts and emotions are not facts – they are data. However, you can choose to respond to your experience with curiosity and openness. You can notice yourself feeling angry or upset, and you can accept that: “I’m feeling upset right now.” Then you can be curious about how that feeling came about and how you could think about the situation differently. Emotions are a signal that something important is at stake and that productive and skillful action is needed.

4. Act on your Values

When you unhook yourself from difficult thoughts and emotions, you expand your choices. You can activate your free will and decide to act in a way that aligns with your values. This is about making a choice about your response and reality-checking whether it will serve you or sabotage you in the long term, as well as the short term. Asking: “Are you being the person you want to be? The leader you want to be?” The mind’s thought-stream flows endlessly, and emotions change like the weather, but your values are consistent and can be called upon at any time and in any situation.

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