The gift and power of emotion courage

本智障的听写记录

in south africa where i come from sowubona is the zulu word for hello

there is a beautiful and intention behind the word because sawubona literately translated means i see you , by seeing i bring you into being. so beautiful, imagine being greeted like that.

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 work. because how we deal with our inner world drives with 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 face of complexity is toxic. we need greater levels of emotional agility for true resilience and thriving

my journey with this calling began not with the hallowed halls of a university but in the messy, tender bussiness of my life. i grew up in a white suburbs of apartheid in SA. a country and community committed to not seeing, to denial. it's denial that makes 50 years of racism legislation possible while people convince themselves that they are doing nothing wrong.

at yet, i first learned the destructive power of denial at a personal level before i understood what is 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 on and walked the passage that ran through to where the heart of my 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, say good bye 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 it with my usual smile.i didn't drop a single grade. when asked how i was doing, i was shruck and said OK. i was praised for being strong, i was a master for being OK. But back home we struggled, my father hadn't been able to keep his small bussiness going during his illness, my mother ,alone, was greiving the love of her life, tryng to raise three children and the creditors were knocked. we felt, as a family, emotionally and financially ravaged. and i began to spiral down isolated, fast

i started to use food to numb my pain, refusing to accept the full weight of my grieve. no one knew, and in a culture that values relentless positivity, i thought that no one wanted to know. but one person didn't by in my triumph of over grieve .my 8th grade English teacher fixed me with burning blue eyes when she handed out a blank notebook, she said

write what you're felling, tell the truth. write like there s nobody's watching

it was a simple act, but nothing short of a revolution for me, it was this revolution that started from 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 come to call emotional agility.

life's beauty is inseparable from its fragility. we are young until we are not, we walked on the street sexy until one day we realized we are unseen, we .. out children until .. the children that once were ..making his whole way of world., we are healthy until a diagnosis brings us to our knee.

the only certainty is uncertainty and yet we not navigating this threat of gain desperately and sustainably

WHO 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 and precedently technological, political and economical change, we are seeing how people's tendency is being more and more to lock down to rigid responses to their emotions

on the one hand we might obsessively brew with our feelings, getting stuck inside our heads, hooked on being right, or victimized by our news feed. on the other we might bottom/bottle our emotions, pushing them aside and permitting only those emotions deemed as legitimate.

in the 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 grieve, or actively try to push aside these feelings. we do this not only to ourselves but also to the people we love, like our children we might inadvertently shame them out of the emotions seen as negative jump to a solution and fail to help them to see these emotions as inherently valuable.

normal natural emotion is 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

woman to stop being so angry. and the list goes on

its a tyranny -- cit's a tyranny of being positivity, and it's cruel, unkind and ineffective. and we do it to ourselves, and we do it to others. if there is one common feature of brewing, bottling of false positivity is this: they are all rigid responses. and if there's a single lesson we are learned from the inevitable apartheid, it is that rigid denial didn't work . for individuals for families for society and as we watch the ice cap melts. it's unsustainable for our planet.

research on emotions and depression shows that when emotions are ignored or pushed aside, they get stronger.

amplification like the delicious chocolate cake in the refrigerator.

the more you try to ignore it, the greater it holds on you. you might think that you are in control of ... when 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 very happy person. but when we push aside normal emotion to embrace false positivity. we lose our capacity to develop our skills to deal with the world as it is not as we wished to be.

I've had hundreds of what they don't want to feel. they say things like:

I don't want to try because I don't wanna feel disappointed or I just want this feeling to go away.

I understand, I said to them, but you had dead peoples' goals.

only dead people never get unwanted inconvenience by their feelings, never get stressed never get broken hearts, never experience the disappointment that comes with failure.

tough emotion are part of our contract with our life. you don't get to have a meaningful career or raise a family and live a world a better place without stress and discomfort. discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life. so how do we began to dismantle this rigidity?

as that young school girl when I lean into these blank pages, I started to do the feelings of what I should be experiencing. pain and grieve and lost and regret

radical acceptance

cornerstone to resilience thriving and true authentic happiness

but emotional agility is more than 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've stressed it's the most common one that I hear. but there's a world of difference between stress and disappointment of stress and that knowing dread of "I'm in the wrong career". when we label our emotions accurately we are more able to precise call of our feeling

and what the scientists called the readiness potential in our brain is activated allowing us to take concrete steps. but not the any steps the right steps for us. because our emotions are data. our emotion takes flashing light to things that we care about. we tend not to feel strong emotion to stuff that doesn't mean anything in our world.

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 in that direction. when we are open to difficult emotions, we are able to generate responses that are values-aligned. But there's an important caveat.

emotions are data, not directives. we can show optimism 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 endorsed his ideas that he gets to give her away to the first stranger he sees in a shopping mall

we own our emotions they don't own us. when we internalised difference between how i feels and all my wisdom. and what I do in a values-aligned action. we generate the pathway to the best of ourselves via our emotions. so what does this look like in practice? when you feel a strong tough emotion don't race for what emotion exists.learn its contours, show up to the journal of your hearts.

what is the emotion telling you

try not to say iam as that iam angry or iam sad. when you say iam that 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. use iam noticing im feeling sad , i am noticing iam feeling angry. these are essential skill for us, four family and our communities, they are also critical to the workplace

in my research when i look at people what might help brings 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 your organization. Diversity isn't just people but also what's inside people, including diversity of emotions.

the most agile, resilient individuals, teams, organizations, families, communities are built on the openness to normal human emotions.it's that at last my emotions are telling me which actually brings me towards my value, 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 the steps. when i was little i was wake up at night terrified by the idea i would dead

we all died 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 guides through those nights. what he showed me is courage is not the absence of fear. courage is fear walking. Neither of us knew that in the intension year he would be gone. and the time for each of us is all too precious and all too brief

but when our moment comes to face our fragility in our ultimate time, it will ask us, are you agile .let the moment to be an unreserved yes. a yes born with of the life-long correspondence of your own heart and see yourself because by seeing yourself you will also able to see others, too. the only sustainable word in a fragile beautiful world