What is Emotional Agility and How to Achieve It in 4 Steps
“Emotional agility” is the ability to emotionally adapt to the challenging and variable nature of life. Being emotionally agile involves balancing negative emotions when faced with difficulties and coping with the situation in a healthy and quick manner. The first step to being agile in this context is to be aware of your emotions.
You can start by better understanding your emotional world and observing how you react to different situations. After that, you can practice positive thinking to cope with negative emotions and try to approach challenges with a positive perspective.
Ways to Develop Emotional Agility in 4 Steps
The process of developing emotional agility can be approached in four steps. Below are these four steps that will contribute to developing emotional agility:
Recognize Your Thinking Patterns
We see that the most challenging issue in Baltaş seminars is the first step. The first step is for individuals to recognize their thinking patterns. It starts with focusing on oneself, making an objective analysis, and finding the courage to work on it. Observing the emotion and behavior patterns triggered by thoughts supports understanding how thought processes and the resulting processes affect emotions and behaviors.
Distance Yourself from Your Emotions and Thoughts
The second step is to gain the skill to create a distance between emotions and thoughts. Being able to distance oneself from thoughts without getting caught up in judgments allows controlling the speed of reactions and viewing emotionally challenging situations more objectively.
Accept Your Emotional Experiences Unconditionally
The third step is to be open to experiencing thoughts and emotions. Approaching emotions and thoughts with curiosity requires accepting emotional experiences unconditionally. Individuals can elevate their agility to a higher level by establishing a more sincere and open relationship with their emotions.
Act in Accordance with Your Values
The final step is to make choices based on values. Directing your reactions based on your priorities rather than immediate needs in life decisions and adopting positive behavior changes helps you make choices within the framework of your values.
By developing your emotional agility in 4 steps, you can establish healthier relationships in your personal and professional life, cope with stress effectively, and increase your well-being.
Personal Traits Required for Emotional Agility
Being emotionally agile is a criterion that shows an individual's ability to stay calm and think solution-oriented when faced with sudden situations. Certain personality traits need to be more dominant to achieve emotional agility. Below are some personality traits that need to be highlighted to achieve emotional agility:
- Flexibility involves reorganizing yourself and maintaining your integrity. Adaptation is the ability to quickly adjust to new conditions and change strategies when necessary. If you want to develop emotional agility, you must first be flexible and able to adapt to new conditions.
- Stress management is an important feature in terms of emotional agility because it helps individuals make logical and sensible decisions even during tough times.
- Another personal trait required for emotional agility is leadership. A good leader motivates their team by setting an example, shows determination even in difficult situations, and takes on management responsibility.
- Empathy strengthens human relationships, facilitates communication, and is effective in resolving conflicts. Emotional agility relies on the ability to understand and empathize with others' emotions in order to be more sensitive to emotional changes.
Regulating your behaviors to live in harmony with your intentions and values will support you in being emotionally agile. For more comprehensive information on this topic, you can access the 2018 issue of the Baltaş Group publication Kaynak titled “Emotional Agility” via https://kaynakbaltas.com/dergiler/duygusal-ceviklik/.