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"Have you ever felt stressed nowadays? Or would you consider yourself your worst critic? What about anger? Do you find yourself getting angry with people? Let's not forget self-perception: Are you impatient with the parts of yourself that you don't like? And lastly, do you avoid making changes that you know deep down you need to make? These thought-provoking questions were what Prof. Dr. Belgin Elmas, our lovely guest, asked us to start our emotional agility journey in our 17th session.

Emotions are, in many aspects, significantly influential in our lives. It might take lots of effort and courage to talk about them freely, but when their importance is considered, getting out of our comfort zone and maintaining a good relationship with them is necessary. Emotions consume vast amounts of our mental energy, impact our relationships, and can directly boost or damage our overall well-being. Another essential aspect of emotions is Meta-feelings, which simply means feeling about our feelings. Have you ever felt sad about something that happened to you, only to focus on the emotion of sadness right afterwards? This is a meta-feeling.

Being agile regarding our emotions, our central concept for this session, is particularly vital when considering their changeable structure. About this point, Elmas mentions quite an essential side of feelings: "We should not organise our lives based on feelings since they are self-contained, temporary, and inaccurate." Considering this, integrating emotional agility into our teaching lives as well as our personal lives becomes highly valuable. Yet, what exactly is emotional agility?

According to a beautiful quote that Elmas shared with us from Dr. Susan David, emotional agility can be defined as the ability to be aware of our inner world – our thoughts, emotions, experiences, and self-stories with courage, compassion, and curiosity. The World Economic Forum calls emotional agility a "key skill for the future." Now that we have explained the what part, let's focus more on how we can gain this crucial skill.

Here, Elmas mentioned four critical ways to gain emotional agility: Showing up, stepping out, walking your why, and moving on. Showing up stands for realizing your emotions and accepting them as they are despite getting hooked by our cognitive structures, such as over-generalization, overriding the positive, or exaggerating. Elmas also highlighted that we speak around 16 thousand words during the average day. Yet, our silent, internal, and tireless voices produce thousands more, becoming one of the core reasons for our cognitive structures.

Stepping out signifies the space between the stimulus and the response because that space represents our power to choose our response and, therefore, signifies our growth and freedom. In addition, Elmas highly recommended the book Man's Search for Meaning by Victor E. Frankl. She also mentioned a chess analogy for creating that space: Become aware of all the possibilities rather than focusing and getting lost in any one piece on the board.

The third way, walking your way, touches upon identifying personal values and using them as a compass when it comes to finding the right direction in your daily actions. Elmas refers to Nietzsche to highlight the importance of why: "He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how." Finally, moving on dwells on being willing to change our mindset, having effective motivations, tweaking our habits, and stepping out of our comfort zone for skill development, cultivating relationships, and growth.

Another key aspect of emotional agility lies in self-compassion. It includes letting go of unrealistic self-criticism, recognizing your uniqueness instead of constant comparison, and understanding the importance of self-compassion instead of perceiving it as laziness or weakness.

As for the final part of discussing how to integrate emotional agility in our classrooms, Elmas started with another interactive part where she highlighted being honest to ourselves about our job with questions such as: Does my job reflect my values, or do I get full enjoyment and satisfaction from what I do? Another factor worth mentioning is how children navigate their emotional world, which is critical for lifelong success. Therefore, we can be their role model in terms of managing our emotions and being open-minded towards change to encourage them to cope with stressful situations and gain greater self-esteem. While doing so, Elmas also warns about the danger of emotional helicoptering. It causes an unwanted intrusion into the child's emotional space while we think we are helping them.

Instead of lecturing, underestimating, or questioning, help your students feel their emotions, guide them through correct ways of labeling why they feel the way they feel, and remind them that this emotional stage is not permanent. In Elmas' own words: "It's not how you feel, but how you respond to the feeling that counts."

It is time to conclude with the final quote Elmas shared with us during our insightful session from Pema Chödrön: "You are the sky. Everything else – it's just the weather."