Susan David
Susan David is a psychologist, author, and speaker whose pioneering work on emotional agility has transformed how organizations, leaders, and individuals understand the role of emotions in professional and personal performance. Born in South Africa and educated at the University of Melbourne and Harvard University, she is a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and the founder and CEO of Evidence Based Psychology, a consulting firm focused on leadership, culture, and well-being.
David grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa, and was profoundly shaped by the experience of losing her father to cancer when she was fifteen. Her father’s death was kept secret at school and rarely discussed at home — an experience of emotional suppression that gave her an early and intimate understanding of the costs of what she would later call “emotional rigidity.” This personal history became the seed of her life’s intellectual project: understanding why so many people struggle to engage honestly with their emotions and what becomes possible when they do.
Her concept of “emotional agility” — the ability to be flexible and compassionate with one’s internal emotional experience, to disentangle thoughts and feelings from identity, and to act in alignment with one’s deepest values even under difficult emotional conditions — was named a Management Idea of the Year by Harvard Business Review and became the title and central argument of her bestselling book.
Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life (2016) became an international bestseller and established David as one of the leading thinkers on the psychology of well-being and performance. The book challenges both the “toxic positivity” that suppresses difficult emotions and the rumination and over-identification with negative emotions that trap people in unproductive patterns. Instead, she offers research-backed practices for developing a more nuanced, accepting, and values-aligned relationship with the full range of human emotional experience.
David’s TED Talk on emotional agility has garnered millions of views, and she has been recognized by Thinkers50 — the ranking of the world’s most influential management thinkers — as one of the most important voices shaping contemporary thought on leadership and human potential. Her work has been adopted by organizations worldwide seeking to build cultures that honor emotional authenticity and leverage it as a driver of creativity, resilience, and purpose.
