We All Need More Emotional Agility
“Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.” — Susan David
Many of us, reflecting on the downs and ups of lives and careers, will recognise the truth in that.
Modern professional life is emotionally demanding and for those working in highly creative, technical and fast paced careers, those demands can seem especially, personal and never ending. The pace is relentless. The feedback is constant. The work is public, iterative and often ambiguous. Creative and technical professionals are always expected to constantly produce original thinking while remaining responsive, resilient and collaborative, and part of the attraction of those roles, is that praise and reward when it goes so well, and others appreciate it. And, you have your best ideas and suggestions reviewed and commented on, as part of the normal working day. At best, this is positive feedback, at worst, it is the road to negative self talk and fear.
Much of the advice offered in response is well-intentioned but simplistic: stay positive, be resilient, don’t overthink it. What is often missing is a more realistic understanding of how our emotions work — and how they shape attention, judgement and performance. This is where the idea of emotional agility becomes both useful and necessary.
What Is Emotional Agility?
The term is most strongly associated with Susan David, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of Emotional Agility (2016). David’s work sits at the intersection of psychology, leadership, and behavioural science, and challenges a long-standing cultural habit: the belief that difficult emotions should be avoided, suppressed or replaced as quickly as possible.
Emotional agility offers a different proposition than just ‘get focused and deliver’ – rather promotes us to develop the capacity to experience thoughts and emotions — including uncomfortable ones — without being dominated by them, and to respond in ways that are aligned with our values rather than our fix quick impulses.
A range of other ideas from the fields of psychology and self management fit usefully alongside Emotional Agility. For example, and perhaps with most relevance, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), often referred to as the third wave of cognitive therapy, which was developed by Steven Hayes, within his foundational works: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (1999) and Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life (2005). Susan David openly acknowledges ACT as a major influence on her thinking on emotional agility.
For example, ACT places an emphasis on the idea of psychological flexibility, staying present, accepting inner experience, and acting in line with values and this is almost a direct conceptual cousin of emotional agility. ACT also promotes aiming to reframe our difficult thoughts and emotions as experiences and emotions to be noticed – rather than problems to be solved every time. This too, also aligns precisely with David’s emphasis on “stepping out” from unhelpful narratives.
Part of the process of applying ACT, is ‘accepting’ that we cannot always fix all our problems, but we can respond to them with intention and actions, based on our values.
“The problem is not that we have difficult thoughts and feelings; the problem is that we try to get rid of them.” — Steven Hayes.
The work of Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence, 1995) and Carole Dweck (Mindset, 2006) is also useful to consider, in context with David’s ideas in Emotional Agility. Goleman famously identified Emotional Intelligence as the ability to understand emotions as useful, and that we can all benefit by being more tuned in to the emotions of ourselves, and those of people around us. Dweck’s work noted our fixed vs growth mindsets and points out that much success and happiness extends from having the courage to try new things, to learn, to make mistakes and grow. Not everything can be perfect every time we try it. Our mindset is how we treat these things and manage that discomfort. This idea intersects strongly with David’s focus on internal narratives. Both address how people can interpret difficulty as threat and therefore steer away from new challenges. Rather than an opportunity to grow, try something new, or learn a new skill, — and those interpretations, that mindset – can shape behaviour.
Emotional Agility And Work
In David’s words, emotional agility is about “being present, showing up, and moving forward with intention.” This matters because emotions are not peripheral to work. They shape what we notice, what we avoid, and how deeply we engage. They influence whether we retreat into distraction, remain stuck in shallow busyness, or sustain the focus required for meaningful work.
For creative and knowledge workers, some emotional friction is not an exception — it is the norm. For some, it is part of the excitement of a career that sits in that arena. Uncertainty about whether an idea is good enough is a common but natural thought to have. Frustration with slow progress. Anxiety before presenting work. Irritation at interruptions. Self-doubt when comparing oneself to others. These are not signs of weakness; they are predictable responses to complex, cognitively demanding work.
Research consistently shows that attempts to suppress or ignore emotions often backfire. Studies in psychology suggest that emotional suppression increases cognitive load, impairs memory, and reduces problem-solving capacity. In other words, the more energy we spend pushing emotions away, the less we have available for thinking clearly.
Emotional agility also does not mean indulging every feeling we have, and confiding everything in everyone. Nor does it mean constant self-analysis and ‘over thinking’ of our discomfort, that can paralyse us. It means developing a healthier relationship with inner experience and recognising emotions as data, not directives. Yes, it is OK to feel angry, nervous, sad or upset – but (in a similar view as ACT), that we have the power to choose our response to those feelings.
The Austrian psychologist Victor Frankl summarises this notion of our autonomy most beautifully, when he says;
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom” – Viktor Frankl.
Deep Work. Flow. Emotional Agility
Emotional agility can perhaps be viewed as the often-missing link between wanting to focus and being able to sustain it, and it sits comfortably with the ideas of Deep Work (Cal Newport) and Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)
For example, Deep Work requires sitting with difficulty, and leaning into work that needs concentration, time and space, away from Shallow Work, and repetitive tasks and administration. Flow requires entering a space where challenge is high, outcomes are uncertain and at the edge of our ability, where we may not feel comfortable all the time. Both promote accepting some valuable stretch in our lives and see our growth as natural involving some emotional discomfort, before our actions, becomes rewarding.
When people lack emotional agility, they tend to escape that discomfort — by leaning in to low value work; checking messages, switching tasks, attending unnecessary meetings, or polishing work endlessly perfecting, without progressing it. Distraction is frequently a comforting emotional strategy rather than a technical one.
Susan David makes this explicit: avoidance behaviours are driven not by laziness, but by an unwillingness to feel (and accept) the uncomfortable emotions such as boredom, frustration or simply, self-doubt. In this sense, emotional agility is the valuable underpinning attitude, that promotes both deep work and flow, helping professionals to stay present with difficulty long enough for the personal insight, learning and absorption to occur.
Why Emotional Agility Is Hard
Digital work environments amplify emotional noise around us and raise the feelings of discomfort alongside the clamour to deliver. Constant comparison, rapid feedback loops and the pressure to appear competent at all times increases our negative self talk, our self-consciousness and reduce psychological safety.
Surveys repeatedly show rising levels of workplace anxiety and emotional exhaustion, particularly in creative and technical fields where work is subjective and publicly evaluated. Yet many organisations still treat emotions as distractions rather than as signals.
As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once advised, “Try to love the questions themselves.” Building our Emotional Agility is, in many ways, the professional capacity to do just that – recognising our emotional state, as a radar, and an insight into how we feel, but recognising too, that we have the ability to manage how we view it, and how we respond to it.
For creative professionals, and those that manage them, understanding the value of emotional agility can help us deal with challenges and grow positively. So how can we do this?
Four Ways To Build Emotional Agility
Susan David’s work can be distilled into four practical capabilities, each highly relevant to modern work.
1. SHOWING UP
Acknowledging emotions honestly, without exaggeration or suppression and accepting them for what they are. It helps to name our emotions precisely — for example; “I’m anxious about this presentation, and that is understandable” rather than endless repeating of; “I’m stressed”. This reduces the emotional intensity and helps place it in context and clarifies response.
2. STEPPING OUT
Creating distance between oneself and one’s thoughts. Acknowledging; “I’m having the thought that this won’t work” is a very different self talk from “This won’t work.” This subtle shift restores agency.
3. WALKING YOUR WHY
This means acting in alignment with values rather than our moods. Values provide stability when emotions fluctuate, they help direct us. For creative professionals, this might mean acting with intention, and choosing curiosity over comfort, and quality over speed.
4. MOVING ON
Moving forward, often means making small, intentional adjustments rather than dramatic reinventions and huge steps. Emotional agility favours progress over perfection and ‘being kind to ourselves’, appreciating that perfection is a natural but unrealistic aim.
None of this is easy to do, and it takes time and effort to apply these ideas, in a happy and sustainable life. However, understanding our behaviours, our autonomy and our emotions is a healthy place for us to start.
Deep work asks us to protect attention.
Flow rewards us with absorption and meaning.
Emotional agility allows us to stay with the discomfort long enough for either to happen. Or, as Susan David puts it: “Courage is fear walking.”
