The key ideas

Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

Susan David, 2016

After her father dies, a teenage girl tells everyone she is fine. Years later she becomes a psychologist and explains why “holding it together” and “thinking positive” sometimes only get in the way. This book is about noticing the hooks your own thoughts catch you on, and choosing what to do by your values rather than your mood.

Who it is for

For anyone used to “holding it together”, who replays old hurts at night, or who feels stuck at work and in life and wants to understand what to do about it.

Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.

What the book is about

Johannesburg. A fifteen-year-old girl has just lost her father. At home there is grief and debt. And the girl tells everyone she is fine. She goes to school, smiles, holds it together.

One day her English teacher hands the class blank notebooks and says: write what you feel, write the truth, write as if no one will ever read it. The girl starts writing. And little by little she stops pretending.

That girl is Susan David. She later became a psychologist. She teaches at Harvard Medical School and has spent many years studying how people deal with their feelings. Her article on emotional agility in Harvard Business Review was named a Management Idea of the Year, and then grew into this book.

The book's central question sounds odd: why does trying to “hold it together” and “think positive” sometimes only make things worse? David gathers her answer into a four-step model. It is her own framework, built on research and her coaching experience, not a method of treatment. Ahead are the traps almost everyone falls into, and one unexpected goal that is worth giving up.

Idea 1. How we get hooked

A colleague hasn't answered your email. A minute later your head has a story ready: “He doesn't respect me.” An hour later you're cold with him in a meeting. The thought has become a fact, and you act on it.

David has a name for that moment: a hook. A thought or feeling catches you and starts running your behaviour. From what she has observed, four things hook people most often. The first is taking a thought as an order or as the truth. The second is inner chatter that jumps to the past and the future while the present goes by. The third is old rules, learned long ago and no longer fitting the life you have now. The fourth is the urge to be right at any cost, even when being right costs more than it gives.

This is not a diagnosis and not a set of personality types. It is her map of getting stuck.

Your family said “don't stick your neck out” for years. Now you stay quiet in meetings at work, even when your idea is better.

A hook in itself is no disaster: thoughts and feelings come to everyone. Trouble can start when your behaviour quietly passes into their control.

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About the author

Susan David is a psychologist from South Africa who teaches at Harvard Medical School. Her article on emotional agility in Harvard Business Review was named a Management Idea of the Year, and the book became a bestseller.

All books by this author: Susan David

Terms from the book

  • Hook
  • Emotional agility: Susan David's term: the ability to notice your thoughts and feelings without letting them run your behaviour, and to act in line with your values. The author's model, not a clinical diagnosis or a test.
  • Dead people's goals: David's image: goals like “never be upset” or “never be afraid”, which only people who are no longer alive can fully reach.
  • Tiny tweaks: The author's idea: small changes in mindset, motivation and habits that can add up over time.
  • Teeter-totter principle: The author's image: the balance between what you can already do and a new challenge. A frame for checking yourself, not an exact formula.

All terms

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