Join Dr. Shoshana Poupko for a thought-provoking, authentic, honest, and nuanced discussion of Happiness, drawing from Torah sources, recently published books, articles, podcasts, and stories.

Join Dr. Shoshana Poupko for a thought-provoking, authentic, honest, and nuanced discussion of Happiness, drawing from Torah sources, recently published books, articles, podcasts, and stories.

Join Dr. Shoshana Poupko for a thought-provoking, authentic, honest, and nuanced discussion of Happiness, drawing from Torah sources, recently published books, articles, podcasts, and stories.

Today we’ll advance the conversation by delving into the narratives that lie beneath the stories we tell ourselves; the things which fuel those stories. And as you think personally, please try not to judge yourself, please try not to be too hard on yourself, focus instead as best you can to just be curious.

If we’re going to be totally honest with ourselves, then we need to state explicitly, that we human beings aren’t really wired for this kind of showing up. In fact, our natural tendency is to do whatever it takes to keep us in a state of equilibrium, of equanimity, and this is true in both the physical and emotional realms. We naturally resist anything that creates imbalance or insecurity. And so, if showing up to what we’re feeling triggers any kind of insecurity, our natural tendency will be to push it aside, to bury it, in some way to deny ourselves the opportunity to show up in full.

Dr. Susan David’s four essential components to attaining, and maintaining, emotional agility are: Showing up, Stepping out, Walking your why, and Moving on. These four pillars sound pretty generic and clearly need to be defined, and we’ll do that. But before spend significant time understanding each pillar, let’s try to gain a general understanding of each one.

Our exploration of emotional well-being will begin with the guidance of Dr. Susan David, specifically through her book “Emotional Agility.” Originally from South Africa, Dr. David is a clinical psychologist and also serves on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. She’s written for numerous publications, has a wonderful TED talk called “The gift and power of emotional courage”, and has written a deeply impactful book which will be our guide for the next few weeks.

Contrary to what most of us have been taught, we human beings are much less thinking machines, and we’re much more feeling machines that think. How did we come to believe that it’s good for us to avoid some emotions?

Sonja Lyubomirsky taught us that up 40% of our happiness can be defined by intentional activities that we choose to engage in. And Tal Ben Shahar gave structure to this by delineating 5 areas that we should focus on. Thus far we’ve discussed 4 of these areas, and today we’ll review what we’ve learned. Having unpacked intellectual, relational, spiritual, and physical well-being, it’s important that we pause and take stock. Part of why it’s good to pause specifically here, is because our fifth area - emotional well-being, is going to take us far longer to unpack than the previous four. It’s the area that trips us up most often, the area in which there is so much to learn.