Hi, I'm Sarah Ellis and I'm Helen Tupper and you're listening to the squiggly careers podcast. Every week we talk about a different topic to do with work and discuss practical ideas and actions to help you find your way through our squiggly world of jobs and careers. Today we're going to be talking about a topic and I guess a bit of a concept called

emotional agility, which is something that has been written and talked about by Susan

David. And I've read the book and Sarah's watched the TED Talk and Sarah's done a survey on

this. So we've been, I think, do you know what, we've probably dived into it a bit too deeply

for our 30, we've got,

we've talked about it extensively.

So we're going to try and rise above all of our exploration and curiosity and questions and

so that we can get really focused and practical for you about this topic of emotional

agility because we do think it's really, really important.

So maybe if I start Sarah with a simple definition of what it is do think it's really, really important. So maybe if I start

Sarah with a simple definition of what it is and what it isn't, and maybe if you do the and why

it's important, and that should hopefully, that should hopefully help us to create some clarity.

Yeah. Clarity for us at the very least. So a definition of emotional agility then that we're

going to work with in the context of

the podcast. So it is about being aware of and understanding our emotions and then choosing how to

respond to those emotions in a way that helps us. So rather than sort of responding by default to

what we might be thinking or feeling,

it's really about choice.

And Susan David says that it's the ability to come to your inner world,

your thoughts, emotions, experiences and self-stories with courage, compassion and curiosity,

rather than maybe feeling defensive or responding in a default mode.

The opposite of emotional agility is emotional rigidity, and that's where we get really

...