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.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Susan David, Ph.D.

Susan David, Ph.D. Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @SusanDavid_PhD

29 Sep
Grit is overrated.

Yes, grit is extremely important, but so is adaptability.

It’s crucial to identify when to grit and when to quit.

If you’re making choices genuinely aligned with your values, there may come a time when the only smart thing to say is “enough is enough.”
2/

It’s often difficult to let go of a longtime goal without feeling like a failure.

But when you view yourself through a lens of self-compassion, this process of reevaluation and adaptation takes on a different light.
3/

Then quitting becomes the opposite of failure: a new opportunity to redirect your energy toward things of greatest importance to you.

Here are some questions to ask.

- Am I enjoying or finding satisfaction in what I’m doing—perhaps not every second, but overall?
Read 7 tweets
10 Sep
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.
Read 5 tweets
24 Aug
Are you a bottler or brooder? 💭

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
Read 5 tweets
20 Aug
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?
Read 6 tweets
24 Jul
Words matter.

If you’re experiencing a strong emotion, take a moment to consider what to call it.

But don’t stop there: once you’ve identified it, try to come up with two more words that describe how you are feeling.

Are you angry? Image
Are you hurt? Image
Are you embarrassed? Image
Read 7 tweets
11 Apr 19
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. Image
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
Read 5 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!