Emotional Agility

Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

By: Susan David

Narrated by: Susan David

#1 Wall Street Journal Best Seller

Winner of the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award

Amazon Best Book of the Year

Forbes Recommended Books for Leaders

TED Talk sensation—over 12 million views!

The counterintuitive approach to achieving your true potential, heralded by the Harvard Business Review as a groundbreaking idea of the year.

The path to personal and professional fulfillment is rarely straight. Ask anyone who has achieved his or her biggest goals or whose relationships thrive and you’ll hear stories of many unexpected detours along the way. What separates those who master these challenges and those who get derailed? The answer is agility—emotional agility.

Emotional agility is a revolutionary, science-based approach that allows us to navigate life’s twists and turns with self-acceptance, clear-sightedness, and an open mind. Renowned psychologist Susan David developed this concept after studying emotions, happiness, and achievement for more than twenty years. She found that no matter how intelligent or creative people are, or what type of personality they have, it is how they navigate their inner world—their thoughts, feelings, and self-talk—that ultimately determines how successful they will become.

The way we respond to these internal experiences drives our actions, careers, relationships, happiness, health—everything that matters in our lives. As humans, we are all prone to common hooks—things like self-doubt, shame, sadness, fear, or anger—that can too easily steer us in the wrong direction. Emotionally agile people are not immune to stresses and setbacks. The key difference is that they know how to adapt, aligning their actions with their values and making small but powerful changes that lead to a lifetime of growth. Emotional agility is not about ignoring difficult emotions and thoughts; it’s about holding them loosely, facing them courageously and compassionately, and then moving past them to bring the best of yourself forward.

Drawing on her deep research, decades of international consulting, and her own experience overcoming adversity after losing her father at a young age, David shows how anyone can thrive in an uncertain world by becoming more emotionally agile. To guide us, she shares four key concepts that allow us to acknowledge uncomfortable experiences while simultaneously detaching from them, thereby allowing us to embrace our core values and adjust our actions so they can move us where we truly want to go.

Written with authority, wit, and empathy, Emotional Agility serves as a road map for real behavioral change—a new way of acting that will help you reach your full potential, whoever you are and whatever you face.

©2016 Susan David (P)2016 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

Strategy + Business - Best Leadership Books of 2017

Winner of the 2017 Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award

Winner of the 2016 Books for a Better Life Award in Psychology

Axiom Business Book Awards Medalist

800-CEOREAD Editors' Choice

Forbes.com Recommended Books for Creative Leaders

Facebook #ReadtoLead Selection

LinkedIn's 12 Books on Leadership to Read in 2017

Selection

LinkedIn's 12 Books on Leadership to Read

“I’ve got a flagged, dog-eared, Post-it-ed [version of] Susan David’s incredible book.”—Brené Brown

“Susan David teaches us to understand—and to communicate in—the unspoken language of emotion to better align how we feel with what we do. Essential reading.”—Susan Cain, New York Times-bestselling author of Quiet and Bittersweet

“It’s one thing to feel an emotion—it’s another to gain control over it. Susan David acknowledges the benefits of sadness, anger, guilt, and fear, and then shows us how to make sure they don’t take over our lives. This is a self-help book that might actually help.”—Adam Grant, New York Times-bestselling author of Originals, Give and Take, and Think Again

Must read...

There is not a person I know who wouldn’t benefit from this book. Take a read, it’s unbelievably helpful.

At last, the light overhead is on!

I have read or listened to a lot of books in the psych and social work fields trying to find the best approaches to dealing with feelings. This book really made me have an “ah ha!” moment regarding how I approach (or rather was not approaching) my emotions. Susan David does an excellent job of breaking down the unproductive methods we use to try to manage and compartmentalize our feelings, instead showing us better ways to confront and move past them. I would recommend this to anyone in the field as a helpful tool in communicating how we can control our reactions to our emotions. I’d also recommend this for anyone struggling - learning how to confront emotions is a skill everyone should have.

Give it a chance-keep listening.

The first two chapters were so hard for me to get through. I am so glad I kept listening. I will come back to this book again and again for personal and parenting advice. An excellent book.

Must Read

This is a must read / listen to book.
If you are feeling like you are stuck and struggle with change this book will help you get real and lean into your authentic self.

Recommend

Pretty decent book! Lots of great examples and stories and advice! I recommend it! Yay!

I'm on my second read (listen)

I'm on my second read. Why? Because the content has become life-changing. I've read many self-help books, and now I know why they didn't work. They caused me to beat myself up. Instead Dr. David shares in Emotional Agility how to find your values and create "Self-Compassion". The Audible Edition is read by Susan herself and there is an emotion and emphasis that made me feel she was having a personal conversation with me. And I love her accent. Fasten your seat-belt!

A must-have resource for self awareness and growth

After hearing the author, Susan David, interviewed on a few podcasts, I was very excited to read this book. I was not disappointed. The tools and ideas illustrated in this book are extremely accessible, insightful and most importantly, ACTUALLY HELPFUL to everyday mental health and mindfulness.
Her narration is soft, gentle and humorous - the best way to deliver such content.
If you read this book, you'll finish it a better person. 100% Worth it

Highly recommended

Packed full of useful simple, not always easy, tools tips, and reminders on working through emotions instead of letting them pile up.

Incredible to Listen To & Powerful

My wife and I have both read this book and/or listened to it on Audible multiple times. The Audible version is incredible largely due to our enjoyment of Dr. David's South African accent! In our opinion, Dr. David's message has just right amount of theory backed by summarized research, stories that help demonstrate the theoretical application, and practical guidelines to follow to improve emotional functioning.

Many readers/listeners may come to this book during a time of struggle, which of course if perfectly fine, and this book will likely help the struggling person get through that difficulty. However, if that's the path that leads you to read this, you should revisit the material once you've made it through that struggle or started to improve. It's likely that you will interpret, apply, and learn from the material in a way that is specific and focused on the problem you were dealing with. That path is healthy and undoubtedly helpful, but there's so much more value to get from "Emotional Agility" than that.

"Emotional Agility" is a fantastic tool for learning how to fully appreciate and process emotional experiences that can become chronic and demoralizing over time if left unchecked. Dr. David's discussion of "bottling" and "brooding" is particularly helpful here. She walks the reader/listener through how this works in a variety of settings (i.e. work, home, school, romantic relationships, parent-child relationships, and in specific events or critical incidents). My wife and I have come to understand that if we use "Emotional Agility" as a kind of ongoing emotional and mental maintenance program, we continuously improve our abilities to handle difficult emotional experiences in stride no matter in what setting they occur.

First responders (police, fire, EMS, dispatchers, corrections) should absolutely invest the time to read/listen to this material. I firmly believe it will help members of the public safety profession keep from developing burn-out and chronic stress associated with the experiences that public safety professionals are exposed to. Like continuing education, public safety professionals should incorporate "Emotional Agility" into at least an annual refresher.

My wife and I highly recommend "Emotional Agility," but don't just read/listen to it once!

Very good book. Not the best recording.

Narrator was good, but there some annoying noises at the background whenever she starts speaking and stops during a pause.