Abundant Mind #006

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Read Time: 4-5 minutes

Have you ever found yourself deep into strong emotional states like frustration, anger, guilt, or shame?

Doesn’t it feel paralyzing?

Well, what if you could learn how to navigate through these stressful states and then shift into more empowering states like joy, gratitude, and bliss?

That is what we will explore in today’s issue - Emotional Agility.

But first, let’s define Emotional Agility and why it’s even important to cultivate this skill in your life.

Definition and Importance

According to Harvard Medical School Professor and Psychologist Susan David, Emotional Agility is:

The key here is being able to act in a way which is congruent with personal values and goals.

Why, you may wonder?

Emotions like frustration, anger, guilt, and shame have nothing inherently wrong with them.

In fact, these are appropriate emotions that we feel in response to certain circumstances in our lives.

It becomes harmful—whether to ourselves or to others—when we continue to choose to feel these emotions over a long period of time, and then we act on them.

Actions coming from a place of anger, for example, may only lead us to regret later down the road.

When we take action that is incongruent with our personal values and goals, we may also be self-sabotaging.

Self-sabotaging will only lead us away from our goals and the life that we desire.

The scary part is, we may not even be aware that we are self-sabotaging.

Procrastination, refusing to ask for help, or starting conflict with others are some examples of what self-sabotaging looks like.

These examples stem from succumbing to stressful emotions.

So, now that we know what emotional agility is, and why it’s important to cultivate it in our lives, you may be wondering: “how can I start cultivating this skill?”

Here are 3 steps on how to develop your emotional agility:

Step 1: Recognize Your Emotions

The first step to cultivating the skill of emotional agility is to recognize your emotions. In other words, acknowledge them.

This is one of the most important skills you can develop.

Recognizing whatever emotion you are feeling helps you understand the reason behind that emotion.

Think of your emotions as a guidance system. Your emotions help you clarify what you want, and what you don’t want.

If you don’t recognize your emotions, you are, by default, avoiding them.

Many people do this as a knee-jerk response.

While avoiding your emotions may seem to help in the short term, it has detrimental effects in the long term.

Emotions that we avoid feeling end up being bottled up inside of us.

If we keep doing this, we will be prone to having an emotional outburst one day, which isn’t good for anyone.

Instead, try this for yourself.

The next time you’re feeling emotionally charged, first try identifying what emotion you are feeling, and then acknowledge that feeling.

If you’ve identified anger, for example, you can tell yourself:

“I accept that I am feeling angry right now. It’s an appropriate emotion to feel in this moment, and I love, honor, and accept myself in spite of how I am feeling.”

I personally like to imagine sitting down with the emotion I’m feeling and listening to what it has to say, without judging it.

As if I’m just a friend listening to that emotion vent and release.

Step 2: Release Your Emotions

The second step to cultivating emotional agility is to release your emotions.

Releasing emotions has to be done responsibly and energetically.

This is so that any heaviness related to the emotion you are feeling is removed through the action of release work.

You can do release work through:

1. Expressive Writing like journaling your emotions without judgment

2. Creative Expression like art, dance, or music

3. Physical Activity like walking, running, or boxing

4. Emotional release techniques like (EFT) Tapping, breathwork, and creative visualization

These are just some of the many ways you can release your emotions energetically and responsibly.

But again, you must first recognize and acknowledge your emotions before you can effectively release them.

Step 3: Reframe Your Experience

The third step is to reframe your experience from negative to positive.

Once you have successfully released the heavy emotions, you are now ready to reframe the experience that caused that emotion to come up.

Think of this as re-writing the story from the perspective of a victim to a victor.

What benefit is this experience giving you?

What are you learning about yourself because of this experience?

How is this experience making you a better person?

Self-reflecting on these questions allow you to reframe that experience from a negative one to a positive one.

Once you have reframed that experience, if you encounter a similar one in the future, you will be able to respond to it from a place of wisdom and growth.

In Conclusion

Following these 3 steps and practicing them will help you develop Emotional Agility.

Once you have practiced this formula over and over again, you will find that the time between feeling low and recovering becomes shorter and shorter.

You will also be able to emotionally shift more efficiently which means you can flow better with your emotions.

As human beings we are meant to experience and flow with our emotions, not avoid and ignore them.

Preventing yourself from feeling “negative” emotions will only prevent you from feeling “positive” ones as well.

Prevent yourself from feeling long enough and you will start to just feel numb and life will become boring, as nothing will feel joyful or exciting anymore.

Give importance to your emotions and treat them as if they are friends with a story to tell you.

Sit with them and listen to them without judgment. You will be surprised how beautiful life starts to be.

This will translate to your relationships with others as well.

As you are able to listen to, honor, and accept your emotions—no matter how painful they may be—you will also be able to do the same for anyone in your life.

How does this relate to fulfilling your goals?

Emotional Agility trains you to practice flowing through your emotions so that eventually your baseline is that of joy, gratitude, and bliss.

The more regularly you allow yourself to feel these empowering feelings, the more you have access to action coming from those feelings which leads you to the life you truly want.

Imagine, there will come a time in your life where all your actions are coming from emotions of joy, gratitude, and bliss.

What kind of life will that be for you?

And always remember, you deserve that.

Talk soon,

Zach

P.S. Whenever you are ready, there are 2 ways that I can be of help to you:

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P.P.S. If you are from the Philippines and are looking for a personal mastery workshop to help you experience growth and transformation, check out Discovery by I Am Plus Coaching and Training Systems. It’s where my journey of self evolution personally got fast-tracked.