The gift and power of emotional courage Susan David
Hello, everyone.
Sawubona.
In South Africa, where I come from,
“sawubona” is the Zulu word for “hello.”
There’s a beautiful and powerful
intention behind the word
because “sawubona”
literally translated means,
“I see you, and by seeing you,
I bring you into being.”
So beautiful, imagine
being greeted like that.
But what does it take
in the way we see ourselves?
Our thoughts, our emotions and our stories
that help us to thrive
in an increasingly complex
and fraught world?
This crucial question has been
at the center of my life’s work.
Because how we deal
with our inner world drives everything.
Every aspect of how we love, how we live,
how we parent and how we lead.
The conventional view
of emotions as good or bad,
positive or negative,
is rigid.
And rigidity in the face
of complexity is toxic.
We need greater levels
of emotional agility
for true resilience and thriving.
My journey with this calling
began not in the hallowed halls
of a university,
but in the messy, tender business of life.
I grew up in the white suburbs
of apartheid South Africa,
a country and community
committed to not seeing.
To denial.
It’s denial that makes 50 years
of racist legislation possible
while people convince themselves
that they are doing nothing wrong.
And yet, I first learned
of the destructive power of denial
at a personal level,
before I understood what it was doing
to the country of my birth.
My father died on a Friday.
He was 42 years old and I was 15.
My mother whispered to me to go
and say goodbye to my father
before I went to school.
So I put my backpack down
and walked the passage that ran through
to where the heart of our home
my father lay dying of cancer.
His eyes were closed,
but he knew I was there.
In his presence, I had always felt seen.
I told him I loved him,
said goodbye and headed off for my day.
At school, I drifted from science
to mathematics to history to biology,
as my father slipped from the world.
From May to July to September to November,
I went about with my usual smile.
I didn’t drop a single grade.
When asked how I was doing,
I would shrug and say, “OK.”
I was praised for being strong.
I was the master of being OK.
But back home, we struggled –
my father hadn’t been able
to keep his small business going
during his illness.
And my mother, alone,
was grieving the love of her life
trying to raise three children,
and the creditors were knocking.
We felt, as a family, financially
and emotionally ravaged.
And I began to spiral down,
isolated, fast.
I started to use food to numb my pain.
Binging and purging.
Refusing to accept
the full weight of my grief.
No one knew, and in a culture
that values relentless positivity,
I thought that no one wanted to know.
But one person did not buy into
my story of triumph over grief.
My eighth-grade English teacher
fixed me with burning blue eyes
as she handed out blank notebooks.
She said, “Write what you’re feeling.
Tell the truth.
Write like nobody’s reading.”
And just like that,
I was invited to show up
authentically to my grief and pain.
It was a simple act
but nothing short of a revolution for me.
It was this revolution
that started in this blank notebook
30 years ago
that shaped my life’s work.
The secret, silent
correspondence with myself.
Like a gymnast,
I started to move beyond
the rigidity of denial
into what I’ve now come to call
emotional agility.
Life’s beauty is inseparable
from its fragility.
We are young until we are not.
We walk down the streets sexy
until one day we realize
that we are unseen.
We nag our children and one day realize
that there is silence
where that child once was,
now making his or her way in the world.
We are healthy until a diagnosis
brings us to our knees.
The only certainty is uncertainty,
and yet we are not navigating
this frailty successfully or sustainably.
The World Health Organization
tells us that depression
is now the single leading cause
of disability globally –
outstripping cancer,
outstripping heart disease.
And at a time of greater complexity,
unprecedented technological,
political and economic change,
we are seeing how people’s tendency
is more and more to lock down
into rigid responses to their emotions.
On the one hand we might
obsessively brood on our feelings.
Getting stuck inside our heads.
Hooked on being right.
Or victimized by our news feed.
On the other, we might
bottle our emotions,
pushing them aside
and permitting only those emotions
deemed legitimate.
In a survey I recently conducted
with over 70,000 people,
I found that a third of us –
a third –
either judge ourselves for having
so-called “bad emotions,”
like sadness,
anger or even grief.
Or actively try to push aside
these feelings.
We do this not only to ourselves,
but also to people we love,
like our children –
we may inadvertently shame them
out of emotions seen as negative,
jump to a solution,
and fail to help them
to see these emotions
as inherently valuable.
Normal, natural emotions
are now seen as good or bad.
And being positive has become
a new form of moral correctness.
People with cancer are automatically told
to just stay positive.
Women, to stop being so angry.
And the list goes on.
It’s a tyranny.
It’s a tyranny of positivity.
And it’s cruel.
Unkind.
And ineffective.
And we do it to ourselves,
and we do it to others.
If there’s one common feature
of brooding, bottling
or false positivity, it’s this:
they are all rigid responses.
And if there’s a single
lesson we can learn
from the inevitable fall of apartheid
it is that rigid denial doesn’t work.
It’s unsustainable.
For individuals, for families,
for societies.
And as we watch the ice caps melt,
it is unsustainable for our planet.
Research on emotional suppression shows
that when emotions
are pushed aside or ignored,
they get stronger.
Psychologists call this amplification.
Like that delicious chocolate cake
in the refrigerator –
the more you try to ignore it …
(Laughter)
the greater its hold on you.
You might think you’re in control
of unwanted emotions when you ignore them,
but in fact they control you.
Internal pain always comes out.
Always.
And who pays the price?
We do.
Our children,
our colleagues,
our communities.
Now, don’t get me wrong.
I’m not anti-happiness.
I like being happy.
I’m a pretty happy person.
But when we push aside normal emotions
to embrace false positivity,
we lose our capacity to develop skills
to deal with the world as it is,
not as we wish it to be.
I’ve had hundreds of people tell me
what they don’t want to feel.
They say things like,
“I don’t want to try because
I don’t want to feel disappointed.”
Or, “I just want this feeling to go away.”
“I understand,” I say to them.
“But you have dead people’s goals.”
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Only dead people
never get unwanted or inconvenienced
by their feelings.
(Laughter)
Only dead people never get stressed,
never get broken hearts,
never experience the disappointment
that comes with failure.
Tough emotions are part
of our contract with life.
You don’t get to have a meaningful career
or raise a family
or leave the world a better place
without stress and discomfort.
Discomfort is the price of admission
to a meaningful life.
So, how do we begin to dismantle rigidity
and embrace emotional agility?
As that young schoolgirl,
when I leaned into those blank pages,
I started to do away with feelings
of what I should be experiencing.
And instead started to open my heart
to what I did feel.
Pain.
And grief.
And loss.
And regret.
Research now shows
that the radical acceptance
of all of our emotions –
even the messy, difficult ones –
is the cornerstone
to resilience, thriving,
and true, authentic happiness.
But emotional agility is more
that just an acceptance of emotions.
We also know that accuracy matters.
In my own research,
I found that words are essential.
We often use quick and easy labels
to describe our feelings.
“I’m stressed” is the most
common one I hear.
But there’s a world of difference
between stress and disappointment
or stress and that knowing dread
of “I’m in the wrong career.”
When we label our emotions accurately,
we are more able to discern
the precise cause of our feelings.
And what scientists call
the readiness potential in our brain
is activated, allowing us
to take concrete steps.
But not just any steps –
the right steps for us.
Because our emotions are data.
Our emotions contain flashing lights
to things that we care about.
We tend not to feel strong emotion
to stuff that doesn’t mean
anything in our worlds.
If you feel rage when you read the news,
that rage is a signpost, perhaps,
that you value equity and fairness –
and an opportunity to take active steps
to shape your life in that direction.
When we are open
to the difficult emotions,
we are able to generate responses
that are values-aligned.
But there’s an important caveat.
Emotions are data,
they are not directives.
We can show up to and mine
our emotions for their values
without needing to listen to them.
Just like I can show up to my son
in his frustration with his baby sister –
but not endorse his idea
that he gets to give her away
to the first stranger
he sees in a shopping mall.
(Laughter)
We own our emotions, they don’t own us.
When we internalize the difference
between how I feel in all my wisdom
and what I do in a values-aligned action,
we generate the pathway to our best selves
via our emotions.
So, what does this look like in practice?
When you feel a strong, tough emotion,
don’t race for the emotional exits.
Learn its contours, show up
to the journal of your hearts.
What is the emotion telling you?
And try not to say “I am,”
as in, “I’m angry” or “I’m sad.”
When you say “I am”
it makes you sound
as if you are the emotion.
Whereas you are you,
and the emotion is a data source.
Instead, try to notice
the feeling for what it is:
“I’m noticing that I’m feeling sad”
or “I’m noticing that I’m feeling angry.”
These are essential skills for us,
our families, our communities.
They’re also critical to the workplace.
In my research,
when I looked at what helps people
to bring the best of themselves to work,
I found a powerful key contributor:
individualized consideration.
When people are allowed
to feel their emotional truth,
engagement, creativity and innovation
flourish in the organization.
Diversity isn’t just people,
it’s also what’s inside people.
Including diversity of emotion.
The most agile, resilient
individuals, teams,
organizations, families, communities
are built on an openness
to the normal human emotions.
It’s this that allows us to say,
“What is my emotion telling me?”
“Which action will bring me
towards my values?”
“Which will take me away from my values?”
Emotional agility is the ability
to be with your emotions
with curiosity, compassion,
and especially the courage
to take values-connected steps.
When I was little,
I would wake up at night
terrified by the idea of death.
My father would comfort me
with soft pats and kisses.
But he would never lie.
“We all die, Susie,” he would say.
“It’s normal to be scared.”
He didn’t try to invent
a buffer between me and reality.
It took me a while to understand
the power of how he guided me
through those nights.
What he showed me is that courage
is not an absence of fear;
courage is fear walking.
Neither of us knew that in 10 short years,
he would be gone.
And that time for each of us
is all too precious
and all too brief.
But when our moment comes
to face our fragility,
in that ultimate time,
it will ask us,
“Are you agile?”
“Are you agile?”
Let the moment be an unreserved “yes.”
A “yes” born of a lifelong
correspondence with your own heart.
And in seeing yourself.
Because in seeing yourself,
you are also able to see others, too:
the only sustainable way forward
in a fragile, beautiful world.
Sawubona.
And thank you.
(Laughter)
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)