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Once you realize that you are “hooked” – that you are being driven by your thoughts and emotions rather than what is important to you – there are strategies that are highly practical that we can put in place that help us to become more emotionally agile.
The first is the ability to show up. Acceptance of what you are thinking and feeling is the bedrock of change. It is a paradox in our human life that acceptance is the first precursor to be able to make a real change. So showing up to your feeling and your thought, to your story – not struggling with whether it’s right or wrong but being able to be with it.
Then to move into a process of stepping out, creating space between you and your thought, you and your emotion, you and your story so that you can recognize your thought, emotion, or story for what it is: a thought, emotion, or story. It’s not the definition of you, it’s not who you are and it’s not defining how you should act.
The third is being able to connect with your why – your values. What is a choice that you need to make in the situation that you’re facing? Walking your why is the process of moving values from something that feel very abstract into something that is highly tangible and can be lived on a day-to-day basis. When you have a value, for example, of being healthier or of being more connected and present as a parent, today you will be faced with what I call a choice point. You will go into a restaurant or into a cafeteria and you will have a decision: Do I order something that will bring me towards my value or do I order something that will take me away from my value? When you go home from work you will be faced with a choice point: Do I connect with my child and make a move that is towards my value or do I ask my child how his day was without even looking up from my phone?
The fourth process of emotional agility is the idea of moving on. And this involves two aspects. The first is working at the edge of your ability, living at the edge of your ability. Really what this means is moving towards things that are important to you even if they come with discomfort, fear, stress, upset, sadness, or anxiety. Because that is a decision that is connected with how you want to live. Moving on is first about choosing courage over comfort and to choose things that are edging you, moving you towards the edge of your ability, moving you away from what feels inherently comfortable.
Another aspect of moving on is cultivating a mindset and cultivating habits that are born out of your values – that are connected with your true want-to goals in life. We can all make decisions and we can all have goals that are what I call have-to goals. A have-to goal is where you are doing something because a spouse or a partner or a boss or even a sense of internal shame is driving you. A want-to goal is a goal that is driven by intrinsically what is important to you. So for example, you could have a have-to goal of losing weight that is driven by shame or because your spouse tells you that you need to lose weight. Or you could have a want-to goal– a goal that is truly about being healthier so that you can see your children grow up. What the research shows is that want-to goals quite literally alter the physics of our willpower. That when we have a want-to goal we see that piece of cake in our refrigerator differently. The taste attributes that are activated 195 milliseconds before we even make a decision as to whether we are going to have that piece of chocolate cake or not are mandated in different ways depending on whether our goal is a have-to goal or a want-to goal. When we have a have-to goal all we see is the cake in the refrigerator and all we want is the cake. Have-to goals ramp up our temptation. They make us focus on the very thing that we’ve told ourselves that we cannot have.