Hello, everyone.

Sawubona.

In South Africa, where I come from,
"sawubona" is the Zulu word for "hello." There's a
beautiful and powerful intention behind the word because "sawubona"
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.

Life's beauty is inseparable from its
fragility. We are young until we are not. We walk down the streets sexy until
one day we realize that we are unseen. We nag our children and one day realize
that there is silence where that child once was, now making his or her way in
the world. We are healthy until a diagnosis brings us to our knees. The only
certainty is uncertainty, and yet we are not navigating this frailty
successfully or sustainably. The World Health Organization tells us that
depression is now the single leading cause of disability globally --
outstripping cancer, outstripping heart disease. And at a time of greater
complexity, unprecedented technological, political and economic change, we are
seeing how people's tendency is more and more to lock down into rigid responses
to their emotions.

On the one hand we might obsessively brood
on our feelings. Getting stuck inside our heads. Hooked on being right. Or
victimized by our news feed. On the other, we might bottle our emotions,
pushing them aside and permitting only those emotions deemed legitimate.

In a survey I recently conducted with over
70,000 people, I found that a third of us -- a third -- either judge ourselves
for having so-called "bad emotions," like sadness, anger or even
grief. Or actively try to push aside these feelings. We do this not only to
ourselves, but also to people we love, like our children -- we may
inadvertently shame them out of emotions seen as negative, jump to a solution,
and fail to help them to see these emotions as inherently valuable.

Normal, natural emotions are now seen as
good or bad. And being positive has become a new form of moral correctness.
People with cancer are automatically told to just stay positive. Women, to stop
being so angry. And the list goes on. It's a tyranny. It's a tyranny of
positivity. And it's cruel. Unkind. And ineffective. And we do it to ourselves,
and we do it to others.

If there's one common feature of brooding,
bottling or false positivity, it's this: they are all rigid responses. And if
there's a single lesson we can learn from the inevitable fall of apartheid it
is that rigid denial doesn't work. It's unsustainable. For individuals, for
families, for societies. And as we watch the ice caps melt, it is unsustainable
for our planet.

Research on emotional suppression shows
that when emotions are pushed aside or ignored, they get stronger.
Psychologists call this amplification. Like that delicious chocolate cake in
the refrigerator -- the more you try to ignore it ...

the greater its hold on you. You might
think you're in control of unwanted emotions when you ignore them, but in fact
they control you. Internal pain always comes out. Always. And who pays the
price? We do. Our children, our colleagues, our communities.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not
anti-happiness. I like being happy. I'm a pretty happy person. But when we push
aside normal emotions to embrace false positivity, we lose our capacity to
develop skills to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. I've
had hundreds of people tell me what they don't want to feel. They say things
like, "I don't want to try because I don't want to feel
disappointed." Or, "I just want this feeling to go away."

"I understand," I say to them.
"But you have dead people's goals."

Only dead people never get unwanted or
inconvenienced by their feelings.

Only dead people never get stressed, never
get broken hearts, never experience the disappointment that comes with failure.
Tough emotions are part of our contract with life. You don't get to have a
meaningful career or raise a family or leave the world a better place without
stress and discomfort. Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful
life.

So, how do we begin to dismantle rigidity
and embrace emotional agility? As that young schoolgirl, when I leaned into
those blank pages, I started to do away with feelings of what I should be
experiencing. And instead started to open my heart to what I did feel. Pain.
And grief. And loss. And regret.

Research now shows that the radical
acceptance of all of our emotions -- even the messy, difficult ones -- is the
cornerstone to resilience, thriving, and true, authentic happiness. But
emotional agility is more that just an acceptance of emotions. We also know
that accuracy matters. In my own research, I found that words are essential. We
often use quick and easy labels to describe our feelings. "I'm
stressed" is the most common one I hear. But there's a world of difference
between stress and disappointment or stress and that knowing dread of "I'm
in the wrong career." When we label our emotions accurately, we are more
able to discern the precise cause of our feelings. And what scientists call the
readiness potential in our brain is activated, allowing us to take concrete
steps. But not just any steps -- the right steps for us. Because our emotions
are data.

Our emotions contain flashing lights to
things that we care about. We tend not to feel strong emotion to stuff that
doesn't mean anything in our worlds. If you feel rage when you read the news,
that rage is a signpost, perhaps, that you value equity and fairness -- and an
opportunity to take active steps to shape your life in that direction. When we
are open to the difficult emotions, we are able to generate responses that are
values-aligned.

But there's an important caveat. 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.

We own our emotions, they don't own us.
When we internalize the difference between how I feel in all my wisdom and what
I do in a values-aligned action, we generate the pathway to our best selves via
our emotions.

So, what does this look like in practice?
When you feel a strong, tough emotion, don't race for the emotional exits.
Learn its contours, show up to the journal of your hearts. What is the emotion
telling you? And try not to say "I am," as in, "I'm angry"
or "I'm sad." When you say "I am" it makes you sound as if
you are the emotion. Whereas you are you, and the emotion is a data source. Instead,
try to notice the feeling for what it is: "I'm noticing that I'm feeling
sad" or "I'm noticing that I'm feeling angry." These are
essential skills for us, our families, our communities. They're also critical
to the workplace.

In my research, when I looked at what helps
people to bring the best of themselves to work, I found a powerful key
contributor: individualized consideration. When people are allowed to feel
their emotional truth, engagement, creativity and innovation flourish in the
organization. Diversity isn't just people, it's also what's inside people.
Including diversity of emotion. The most agile, resilient individuals, teams,
organizations, families, communities are built on an openness to the normal
human emotions. It's this that allows us to say, "What is my emotion telling
me?" "Which action will bring me towards my values?" "Which
will take me away from my values?" Emotional agility is the ability to be
with your emotions with curiosity, compassion, and especially the courage to
take values-connected steps.

When I was little, I would wake up at night
terrified by the idea of death. My father would comfort me with soft pats and
kisses. But he would never lie. "We all die, Susie," he would say.
"It's normal to be scared." He didn't try to invent a buffer between
me and reality. It took me a while to understand the power of how he guided me
through those nights. What he showed me is that courage is not an absence of
fear; courage is fear walking. Neither of us knew that in 10 short years, he
would be gone. And that time for each of us is all too precious and all too
brief. But when our moment comes to face our fragility, in that ultimate time,
it will ask us, "Are you agile?" "Are you agile?" Let the
moment be an unreserved "yes." A "yes" born of a lifelong
correspondence with your own heart. And in seeing yourself. Because in seeing
yourself, you are also able to see others, too: the only sustainable way
forward in a fragile, beautiful world. Sawubona.

And thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.