The gift and power of emotional courage | Susan David (re-release)

**Elise Hu** (0:04)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hume.
When someone asks you how you're doing, how often do you tell them the truth?
A lot of us give a reflexive answer, like, fine, good, can't complain.
Somewhere along the way, we have absorbed the idea there's a right and wrong way to feel, and that the acceptable emotions are more upbeat, while the rest are best kept to ourselves.

**Susan David** (0:34)
Being positive has become a new form of moral correctness.

**Elise Hu** (0:38)
That's psychologist, researcher, and author Susan David. She has spent her career studying what that reflex quietly costs us, calling it the tyranny of positivity, the unspoken rule that treats feelings like sadness, anger, or grief as problems to be fixed or hidden away.
She says it doesn't just fail to help, it often backfires on us and the people we love. In this 2017 talk, she walks us through a practice she calls emotional agility, a way of meeting even the hardest feelings with curiosity, compassion, and courage, because the way we handle what goes on inside us quietly shapes everything else.

**Susan David** (1:16)
Emotions are data, they are not directives. We can show up to and mine our emotions for their values without needing to listen to them.
Just like I can show up to my son in his frustration with his baby sister, but not endorse his idea that he gets to give her away to the first stranger he sees in a shopping mall.

**Elise Hu** (1:36)
That's coming up right after a short break. And now our TED Talk of the day.

**Susan David** (1:49)
Hello, everyone. My name is Suwabwana.
In South Africa, where I come from, Suwabwana is the Zulu word for hello. There's a beautiful and powerful intention behind the word, because Suwabwana literally translated means, I see you, and by seeing you, I bring you into being. So beautiful. Imagine being greeted like that. But what does it take in the way we see ourselves, our thoughts, our emotions and our stories, that help us to thrive in an increasingly complex and fraught world? This crucial question has been at the center of my life's work, because how we deal with our inner world drives everything. Every aspect of how we love, how we live, how we parent and how we lead. The conventional view of emotions as good or bad, positive or negative, is rigid. And rigidity in the face of complexity is toxic. We need greater levels of emotional agility for true resilience and thriving. My journey with this calling began not in the hallowed halls of a university, but in the messy, tender business of life. I grew up in the white suburbs of apartheid South Africa, a country and community committed to not seeing, to denial. It's denial that makes 50 years of racist legislation possible, while people convince themselves that they are doing nothing wrong. And yet, I first learned of the destructive power of denial at a personal level, before I understood what it was doing to the country of my birth.
My father died on a Friday. He was 42 years old and I was 15 My mother whispered to me to go and say goodbye to my father before I went to school. So I put my backpack down and walked the passage that ran through to where the heart of our home, my father lay dying of cancer. His eyes were closed, but he knew I was there. In his presence, I had always felt seen. I told him I loved him, said goodbye and headed off for my day. At school, I drifted from science to mathematics to history to biology, as my father slipped from the world. From May to July to September to November, I went about with my usual smile. I didn't drop a single grade. When asked how I was doing, I would shrug and say, OK. I was praised for being strong. I was the master of being OK. But back home, we struggled. My father hadn't been able to keep his small business going during his illness, and my mother alone was grieving the love of her life, trying to raise three children, and the creditors were knocking. We felt, as a family, financially and emotionally ravaged, and I began to spiral down, isolated, fast. I started to use food to numb my pain, binging and purging, refusing to accept the full weight of my grief. No one knew, and in a culture that values relentless positivity, I thought that no one wanted to know. But one person did not buy into my story of triumph over grief. My eighth-grade English teacher fixed me with burning blue eyes as she handed out blank notebooks. She said, Write what you're feeling, tell the truth. Write like nobody's reading. And just like that, I was invited to show up authentically to my grief and pain. It was a simple act, but nothing short of a revolution for me. It was this revolution that started in this blank notebook 30 years ago that shaped my life's work, the secret, silent correspondence with myself. Like a gymnast, I started to move beyond the rigidity of denial into what I've now come to call emotional agility.