We reach emotional agility through a series of tiny steps in everyday moments over the course of a lifetime.
Here's a thread about how you can start this journey today.
2/ Appoint yourself the agent of your own life and take ownership of your own development, career, creative spirit, work, and connections.
3/ Accept your full-self with compassion, courage, and curiosity.
4/ Welcome your inner experiences, breathe into them, and learn their contours without racing for the exit.
5/ Embrace an evolving identity and release the narratives that no longer serve you.
6/ Let go of unrealistic goals by accepting that being alive means sometimes getting hurt, failing, being stressed, and making mistakes.
7/ Free yourself from pursuing perfection so you can enjoy the process of living and loving.
8/ Open yourself up to the love that will come with hurt adn the hurt that will come with love, and to the success that will come with failure and the failure that will come with success.
9/ Abandon the idea of being fearless, and instead walk directly into your fears, with your values as your guide, toward what matters to you.
Courage is not an absence of fear; courage is fearing walking.
10/ Choose courage over comfort by vitally engaging with new opportunities to learn and grow, rather than passively resigning yourself to your circumstances.
11/ Recognize that life's beauty is inseparable from its fragility. We're young until we're not. We're healthy until we're not. We're with those we love until we're not.
12/ Learn how to hear the heartbeat of your own why.
13/ And finally, remember to dance if you can.
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1) Toxic positivity: When people default to bypassing difficult emotions in the service of forced positivity (fake positivity) is when 'toxic positivity' takes root.
2) Just like we can get stuck in difficult emotions, we can also get stuck in the idea of 'positive only' and this is fundamentally an avoidant coping strategy (a form of gaslighting oneself - or others.)
3) When we default to 'Just Be Positive' we close ourself off from learning from difficult emotions, understanding what values emotions are signposting, and to developing skills in dealing with these difficult emotions.
Everyone has a different method of coping, and some are more productive than others.
Sometimes we settle deeply into our negative feelings and struggle to get beyond them.
2/ Bottlers push emotions to the side and get on with things.
Bottling may look like:
- Suppressing emotions
- Forcing yourself to “think positively"
- Exerting an imagined control over an emotion
3/ Brooders can’t let go.
Brooding may look like:
- Constantly discussing an emotional situation
- Ruminating on an emotion under the guise of conscientious effort
- Losing perspective
In the midst of this challenge, who do you choose to be?
Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived a Nazi death camp wrote, “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.”
2/ When you start thought-blaming, there’s not enough space between stimulus and response, in Viktor Frankl’s terms, for you to exercise real choice.
3/ How do you react to difficult moments?
Do you rely on autopilot responses, saying something sarcastic, shutting down and avoiding your feelings, procrastinating, or walking away?
What a pleasure to have breakfast with @JuliaGillard the first female Prime Minister of Australia. She's one of the world’s most influential voices for women’s rights and mental health. We spoke about the long road ahead in de-stigmatizing mental illness, but also the wins.
A major challenge is that mental health is erroneously tied to competence. In so many countries when doctors, members of the police, military personnel and other professionals seek support, reporting procedures kick in and assumptions are made that the person is ‘not competent’.
And so, the very act of seeking out preventative support for anxiety, symptoms of burnout or depression, can literally lead to the loss of a job and livelihood. This hurtful and wrong conflation between mental wellbeing and competence, prevents people from getting the help needed