A book about self-management: being aware of and coming to terms with difficult emotions and moving ahead in spite of them. You'll learn:
• The difference between "emotional rigidity" and "emotional agility", and how you get stuck or "hooked" to unproductive feelings, behaviors and patterns.
• How to get unstuck or unhooked in 4 steps: Show up to your feeilngs, Step out to see the big picture, Walk your why by focusing on core values and long-term goals, and Move on through tiny steps and continual improvement.
• How to apply emotional agility at the workplace, and raise emotionally agile children.
Book summary at: https://readingraphics.com/book-summary-emotional-agility/ ( )

Ever since I learned that emotional intelligence wasn't really self-help-book-selling-gimmick (even if it is), I've done a fair bit of reading on the subject, along with seminars, discussions, etc. So I saw this book, added it to the queue, and finally got to it five weeks ago. It's not a long read...I just picked up and read 20 (true story!) other books since I started it. It didn't hold my attention and I can't recommend it... nothing new here. And it wasn't until yesterday that I found out from the review thread that the book was based on a Harvard Business Review article. I won't link that here...it's not hard to find... but it is a good summary of what you'll find in this inflation of it. As is this:

...emotional agility is not about controlling your thoughts or forcing yourself into thinking more positively. Because research also shows that trying to get people to change their thoughts from, say, the negative (“I’m going to screw up this presentation”) to the positive (“You’ll see—I’ll ace it”), usually doesn’t work, and can actually be counterproductive. 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.

Ms. David told a story about running away as five year old: "So I did what any obedient five-year-old runaway who was not allowed to step into the street would do: I walked around the block. Again, and again, and again." You might recognize that because I did; I’ve heard and read it before... an old anecdote. Maybe it did happen to her. And she kept dropping references to Kahneman, Goleman, Gladwell and even Jim Collins (of Good to Great semi-fame.) Credibility drops with me for each of those (Gladwell is a serial aggregator who is good at picking cherries; Collin's notable book was nicely exposed by Philip Rosenzweig in The Halo Effect). And when she brought up Richard Thaler and the Cass Sunstein's book Nudge which "show[s] how to influence other people’s behavior through carefully designed choices, or what they called 'choice architecture.'... I read the book and less than impressed. People need/want to be managed?? Well, the FNC crowd sure seems to. Still, Ms. David makes a good point with

As with these two characters, whose accounts of events can’t be entirely trusted, our own internal narrator may be biased, confused, or even engaged in willful self-justification or deception. Even worse, it will not shut up. You may be able to stop yourself from sharing every thought that pops into your head, but stopping yourself from having those thoughts in the first place? Good luck.

Yep. And another good point:

Walking your why” is the art of living by your own personal set of values—the beliefs and behaviors that you hold dear and that give you meaning and satisfaction. Identifying and acting on the values that are truly your own—not those imposed on you by others; not what you think you should care about, but what you genuinely do care about—is the crucial next step of fostering emotional agility.

A few other selected notes:
[On the hooks we fall for] "Monkey mind" is a term from meditation used to describe that incessant internal chatterbox that can leap from one topic to the next like a monkey swinging from tree to tree.
She has narrowed the classification of the internal conversation to “ chatterbox”… it may be a continuous discontinuous narration that doesn’t fit her repeating descriptions of “chatter”

[On bottling up emotions] The problem with bottling is that ignoring troubling emotions doesn’t get at the root of whatever is causing them. [...] This is what happens when we bottle. Trying to keep things at a stiff arm’s length can be exhausting. So exhausting, in fact, that we often drop the load
She describes the bottling as pushing the problem forward. When I bottle, I don’t push it forward; rather it gets closed behind doors, only to sometimes pop out at (always) the wrong times. Again, she seems to deal with a particular type of problem. What about compartmentalization?

[on a study where some were given an article on happiness, some not, and then both watched film clips and had to classify them] Placing too high a value on happiness increased their expectations for how things “should be,” and thus set them up for disappointment.
This is in line with just having a capacity for higher expectations regardless of being primed.

[on a study] In each study, Pennebaker found that the people who wrote about emotionally charged episodes experienced a marked increase in their physical and mental well-being. They were happier, less depressed, and less anxious.
I find this incongruous (and just because I don't buy it, doesn't mean it isn't true). How is that possible? Writing is even more permanent than thinking and it concretizes the significance, affords it a central platform and forces further rehashing. This is an old argument I have against "therapy".

(She even said herself ) "Still, I was skeptical of Pennebaker’s results, which seemed too good to be true." She buys it now, though. ( )

Ho hum. So I have been reading this book for a week on and off. It was an alright book. It was a pleasant and comforting read. It just lacked any memorable punch to it that makes it a worthwhile read. ( )

I enjoyed this well thought out and presented four step idea for rising to the emotional challenges that life sends our way. By applying the authors four steps: Showing Up; Stepping Out; Walking Your Way; and Moving on, we can go from where we are hooked by difficult situations to thriving. The visual reminders of the steps at the beginning of each chanter were helpful and the stories gleaned from the authors own experience as well as her research and consulting work, contained a lot of useful information. I received an ARC of this book through Goodreads First Reads Giveaways.
( )

I actually bought a copy of this new book to read because I have had decades of experience in the EQ (Emotional Quotient) field. I found it to be well-written - and the author has a quiz you can take online to help you better understand where you are on the spectrum! ( )