Dr. Susan David | Author of Emotional Agility & Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award

Dr. Susan David

Author of Emotional Agility & Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award

Dr. Susan David
Biography

Susan David, Ph.D. is one of the world’s leading management thinkers and an award-winning Harvard Medical School psychologist. She has spent the past two decades studying how the way we navigate our emotions shapes everything that matters: our actions, careers, relationships, health, and happiness. Her #1 Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Emotional Agility—based on the concept that Harvard Business Review heralded as a “Management Idea of the Year” and winner of the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award—describes the psychological skills critical to thriving in times of complexity and change. Emotional Agility been translated into 30 languages and is winner of numerous accolades including Amazon’s Best Books of the Year Award and the Books for a Better Life Psychology Award. Dr. David’s TED Talk on emotional agility has been viewed by more than 10 million people.

Named to the Thinkers50 global list of the top management thinkers, Dr. David is a sought-after keynote speaker and advisor, with clients that include the World Economic Forum, Ernst & Young, the United Nations, Google, Microsoft, Nasdaq, and many other national and multinational organizations. She is a frequent contributor to the New York TimesWashington Post, and Wall Street Journal and a guest on national radio and television.

Dr. David trained as a clinical psychologist. She completed her Ph.D. and a post-doctorate at Yale University on emotions research. She is on the faculty at Harvard Medical School and is a Cofounder of the Institute of Coaching (a Harvard Medical School/McLean affiliate). She lives with her family outside of Boston.

Dr. Susan David
Featured Videos

Current: Speaking Reel

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Speaking Reel
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TEDx: The Gift and Power of Emotional Courage
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Emotional Agility
The Gift and Power of Emotional Courage

Susan David, Ph.D., the award-winning Harvard Medical School psychologist and one of the world’s most influential management thinkers, is the visionary behind the concept of Emotional Agility. She offers audiences her unique expertise on cultivating more agile, healthy, resilient, and authentically happy people, families, workplaces, and communities. Harvard Business Review named Emotional Agility a Management Idea of the Year. She employs powerful, engaging storytelling, humor, and insight, to create a deep and authentic connection, so each person in the audience feels understood, inspired, and able to initiate real, pragmatic change. 

Build Your Emotional Agility in Turbulent Times and Transform Your Work Culture

Dr. Susan David shows audiences how to develop the critical emotional agility habits that enable people to engage and bring their best selves to their work—and she helps leaders understand how to build a culture that helps teams flourish.
With unique expertise, powerful storytelling and a toolkit of actionable steps that help audiences transform behavior, she explains how we get “hooked”—by thoughts, emotions and stories that hinder our ability to thrive. She explains what it takes, instead, to be curious, courageous and values-committed, even in times of enormous challenge.

Dr. Susan David
Featured Book

Emotional Agilityby Dr. Susan David

Emotional Agility

by Dr. Susan David
#1 Wall Street Journal Best Seller
USA Today Best Seller
Amazon Best Book of the Year
TED Talk sensation - over 3 million views!

The counterintuitive approach to achieving your true potential, heralded by the Harvard Business Review as a groundbreaking idea of the year.

The path to personal and professional fulfillment is rarely straight. Ask anyone who has achieved his or her biggest goals or whose relationships thrive and you'll hear stories of many unexpected detours along the way. What separates those who master these challenges and those who get derailed? The answer is agility--emotional agility.

Emotional agility is a revolutionary, science-based approach that allows us to navigate life's twists and turns with self-acceptance, clear-sightedness, and an open mind. Renowned psychologist Susan David developed this concept after studying emotions, happiness, and achievement for more than twenty years. She found that no matter how intelligent or creative people are, or what type of personality they have, it is how they navigate their inner world--their thoughts, feelings, and self-talk--that ultimately determines how successful they will become.

The way we respond to these internal experiences drives our actions, careers, relationships, happiness, health--everything that matters in our lives. As humans, we are all prone to common hooks--things like self-doubt, shame, sadness, fear, or anger--that can too easily steer us in the wrong direction. Emotionally agile people are not immune to stresses and setbacks. The key difference is that they know how to adapt, aligning their actions with their values and making small but powerful changes that lead to a lifetime of growth. Emotional agility is not about ignoring difficult emotions and thoughts; it's about holding them loosely, facing them courageously and compassionately, and then moving past them to bring the best of yourself forward.

Drawing on her deep research, decades of international consulting, and her own experience overcoming adversity after losing her father at a young age, David shows how anyone can thrive in an uncertain world by becoming more emotionally agile. To guide us, she shares four key concepts that allow us to acknowledge uncomfortable experiences while simultaneously detaching from them, thereby allowing us to embrace our core values and adjust our actions so they can move us where we truly want to go.

Written with authority, wit, and empathy, Emotional Agility serves as a road map for real behavioral change--a new way of acting that will help you reach your full potential, whoever you are and whatever you face.

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