This is the 10% happier podcast.

I'm Dan Harris.

Hey gang, it is completely natural, I assure you, when dealing with anxiety, depression,

anger, shame, or any other unpleasant emotion to just want it to go away.

But my guest today says that is a case of you having dead people's goals.

You may not feel anything when you're dead, but when you're alive, she says discomfort

is the price of admission.

So given those hard truths, how are we going to handle our stuff, especially in times of

tumult, like right now?

How are you going to handle it?

Denial, compartmentalization, self-medication.

Susan David's answer is something called emotional agility.

Susan David Ph.D. is a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of a book called

Emotional Agility.

Her TED talk on the subject has been viewed more than 8 million times.

In this conversation, we talk about her definition of emotional agility, the four skills of

emotional agility, why she says our emotions are data, not directives, how to move skillfully

through a world that, as she says, conspires against us, seeing ourselves, how to avoid

what she calls emotional fusion, the power of tiny tweaks, and emotional granularity,

what it is, why it matters and how to practice it.

Close listeners will recall that we talked to Brunei Brown about this very subject recently.

Brunei gives a lot of credit in her work to Susan David.

...