Susan David > Quotes

“Life’s beauty is inseparable from its fragility.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“The most effective way to transform your life, therefore, is not by quitting your job and moving to an ashram, but, to paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, by doing what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life

“When we show up fully, with awareness and acceptance, even the worst demons usually back down. Simply”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“We still don’t like the things we don’t like –we just cease to be at war with them. And once the war is over, change can begin.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life

“Life is full of diving boards and other precipices, but, as we’ve seen throughout this discussion of emotional agility, making the leap is not about ignoring, fixing, fighting, or controlling fear—or anything else you might be experiencing. Rather, it’s about accepting and noticing all your emotions and thoughts, viewing even the most powerful of them with compassion and curiosity, and then choosing courage over comfort in order to do whatever you’ve determined is most important to you. Courage, once again, is not the absence of fear. Courage is fear walking—or”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“In looking for the right places to make these tiny changes, there are three broad areas of opportunity. You can tweak your beliefs—or what psychologists call your mindset; you can tweak your motivations; and you can tweak your habits. When we learn how to make small changes in each of these areas, we set ourselves up to make profound, lasting change over the course of our lives.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“Courage is not an absence of fear; courage is fear walking.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life

“The parent who praises a child’s accomplishment by saying, ‘You studied hard!’ promotes a growth mindset. The parent who says, ‘Look at your A, son! You’re a genius!’ promotes a fixed mindset.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life

“Perhaps the best term to describe living at the edge of our ability, thriving and flourishing, being challenged but not overwhelmed, is simply “whelmed.” And a key part of being whelmed lies in being selective in our commitments, which means taking on the challenges that really speak to you and that emerge from an awareness of your deepest values.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“Who’s in charge—the thinker or the thought?” Are we managing our own lives according to our own values and what is important to us, or are we simply being carried along by the tide?”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“Staying emotionally agile requires us to find the equilibrium between overcompetence on the one hand and overchallenge on the other. This is the teeter-totter principle.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“Emotional agility is about loosening up, calming down, and living with more intention. It’s about choosing how you’ll respond to your emotional warning system.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“Grit embodies—but is not the same as—resilience, ambition, and self-control. The University of Pennsylvania psychologist and researcher Angela Duckworth defines it as passion and sustained persistence in trying to achieve a goal over the very long haul, with no particular concern for rewards or recognition along the way. Resilience is about overcoming adversity; ambition, at some level, suggests a desire for wealth, fame, and/or power; self-control can help you resist temptations, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re persistently pursuing a long-term goal.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“change is a process, not an event.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“Luckily, scientists have uncovered a few secrets to help make the process of creating habits easier. In their bestselling book Nudge, the economist Richard Thaler and the law professor Cass Sunstein show how to influence other people’s behavior through carefully designed choices, or what they called “choice architecture.” You”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“A child’s sense of secure attachment—this idea that I, in all my glory, as well as all my stinkiness and imperfection, am loved and accepted—allows him not only to take risks in the world but also to take risks with his own emotions. Knowing he will not be invalidated, rejected, punished, or shamed for feeling whatever he feels, he can test out sadness, happiness, or anger and figure out how to manage or respond to each of these emotions in turn.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“Our hidden demons are simply the residue of perfectly ordinary and almost universal insecurity, self-doubt, and fear of failure. Maybe you still resent your sister for flirting with your boyfriends in high school. Maybe you feel undervalued by your new boss. This is not even the stuff of a good, tear-soaked Oprah episode. But it can be enough to hook you into behaving in ways that don’t serve you.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“Emotional agility means being aware and accepting of all your emotions, even learning from the most difficult ones. It also means getting beyond conditioned or preprogrammed cognitive and emotional responses (your hooks) to live in the moment with a clear reading of present circumstances, respond appropriately, and then act in alignment with your deepest values.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“Emotions pass. They are transient. There is nothing in mental experience that demands an action.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“The ultimate goal of emotional agility is to keep a sense of challenge and growth alive and well throughout your life.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“expectations are resentments waiting to happen.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life

“One way to start doing this is to answer a single question, in writing, each night before bed: “As I look back on today, what did I do that was actually worth my time?”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“Compassion gives us the freedom to redefine ourselves as well as the all-important freedom to fail, which contains within it the freedom to take the risks that allow us to be truly creative.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“Nature favors evolution, not revolution. Studies from many different fields have demonstrated that small shifts over time can dramatically enhance our ability to thrive.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“The lesson: Once our minds slip into default mode, it takes a great deal of flexibility to override this state. This is why specialists are often the last ones to notice commonsense solutions to simple problems, a limitation economist Thorstein Veblen called the “trained incapacity” of experts. Inflated confidence leads old hands to ignore contextual information, and the more familiar an expert is with a particular kind of problem, the more likely he is to pull a prefabricated solution out of his memory bank rather than respond to the specific case at hand.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“4. The obstacle course: Offset a positive vision with thoughts of potential challenges.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“what experiences of sadness, anger, guilt, or fear can do: Help us form arguments. We’re more likely to use concrete and tangible information, be more attuned to the situation at hand, and be less prone to making judgment errors and distortions, all of which lends an aura of expertise and authority that can make us more persuasive as writers and speakers.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“Acceptance is a prerequisite for change.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“When we lack compassion, we see the world as just as unforgiving as we are, so the very idea of failure is crippling.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

“Alexithymia isn’t a clinical diagnosis, but it is a difficulty that millions of people struggle with every day. And it carries very real costs. Trouble labelling emotions is associated with poor mental health, dissatisfaction in jobs and relationships, and plenty of other ills. People with this condition are also more likely to report physical symptoms like headaches and backaches. It’s as if their feelings are being expressed physically rather than verbally. It’s also true that sometimes, when people can’t clearly express their feelings in words, the only emotion that comes through loud and clear is anger, and the unfortunate way they express it is by putting a fist through the wall – or worse.”
― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life