Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Marc Brackett. Dr. Marc Brackett is a professor of psychology at Yale University and the director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.
He is one of the world's foremost experts on emotions, meaning what emotions are and how they regulate our relationship to ourself and others. Today's discussion gets heavily into how we should think about our emotions and the emotional expressions of others and when and how we should regulate those emotions. This is a very important aspect of our life because as we all know, emotions are present with us from the moment we are born until the moment we die.
So much like having a body, we need to learn how to work with our emotions in order to have the best quality of life. We all know that we are supposed to pay attention to our emotions but at the same time, we are often told that we shouldn't take all of our emotions seriously nor should we react to all of our emotions with behaviors and indeed that is true.
What's been lacking, however, and what Dr. Marc Brackett finally delivers to us is a road map to think about our emotions in a very structured way and thereby to engage with our emotions, sometimes shift our emotions and certainly to understand the emotional expressions of others in ways that best serve our quality of life. So today's discussion centers very heavily on scientific data that plays out in the real world that we can all use.
We talk about conflict resolution, we talk about how to think about and work with emotions, we talk about bullying, both in children and in adults, how to deal with that sort of thing effectively, and we talk about emotional intelligence, which it turns out can be increased at any stage of life.
So by the end of today's discussion, you will be armed with a tremendous amount of new knowledge and many new tools, many new protocols that you can immediately apply in your life in order to improve your relationship to yourself and to others. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years. I consider doing regular therapy just as important as getting regular exercise.
Now, there are essentially three things that great therapy provides. First of all, it provides good rapport with somebody that you can trust and talk to about the issues that are most critical to you. Second of all, it can provide support in the form of emotional support or directed guidance. The third expert therapy should provide insights. Insights that are useful in allowing you not just to feel better in your emotional life and your relationship life, but of course to be better.
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Udemonia is an in-person event that offers science back tools, live fitness classes, and a range of treatments and protocols to optimize your physical and your mental health. I'll be giving a keynote talk with none other than Dr. Gabrielle Lyon on Saturday. As some of you may know, she's a former guest on the Huberman Lab podcast and has a terrific podcast of her own. That's going to be on November 2nd, and we will discuss all things neuroscience and neuroplasticity.
We'll talk about some of the benefits and protocols related to cognition and mood and much more. We're presenting at Udemonia, our other excellent scientists and clinicians who have appeared on the Huberman Lab podcast, including Dr. Sarah Gottfried, Dr. Zachary Knight, and Dr. Robin Carthart Harris, along with nearly 70 other experts. To see the full lineup of speakers and topics, and to register, visit udemonia.net, spelled e-u-d-e-m-o-n-i-a.net.
It sure to be a terrific gathering, and I hope to see you there. And now for my discussion with Dr. Mark Brackett. Dr. Mark Brackett, welcome. Thank you. Great to be here. I'm excited to talk to you today about many things related to emotions. We hear the word emotions, and we have all sorts of ideas about what they are, what they aren't. We also hear about emotional intelligence quite a lot these days, and I have a feeling that the way it's discussed is often not the way it really is.
So to just kick things off, could you clarify for me, for everyone, what is emotional intelligence? What does it pertain to, and then maybe we can use that as a way to drill into the deeper question of what are emotions? Sure. I think, you know, at the simplest level, it's how we reason with and about our emotions and feelings. That's like the simple definition. The way I talk about it is, as a set of skills. And we use the acronym ruler to describe those skills.
The first is recognizing emotions. I'm trying to read your facial expression right now, right? Are you interested or are you bored already? I'm trying to understand emotions where they're coming from, like, why am I feeling this way? What's the consequence of that feeling? The third is labeling emotions, so being precise with the words that we use to describe our feelings.
The fourth is expressing emotions, knowing how and when to express emotions with different people across context and culture. And then the big one is the final R, which is regulating emotions. One of the strategies that we use to help us deal with everyday emotions. So if I were to take an emotional intelligence test, would it have me looking at pictures of facial expressions? Would it have me reading paragraphs about emotional exchanges, engaging who felt what and why and how?
That sort of thing. If you were to take a test from, like, 20 years ago, yes, we try to be a little bit more innovative now in our measurement of the skills. So for example, I just finished with a bunch of colleagues publishing a test of emotion perception, but it's not static images. It's video clips that are around three to four seconds that show subtle emotions. It's about vocal tone.
It's about body language, and we're trying to get people to accurately label these emotions in face's body and voice. And I think about most uses of the words emotional intelligence. It seems to correlate, again, in a very non-scientific way, seems to correlate with one's ability to tolerate others' emotions and make sense of the emotions of others. For instance, I've heard it said before, not about me, that so and so has high emotional intelligence.
Because in the presence of their child or someone else's kid reacting in a certain way, they were able to see, ah, they just feel blank, and therefore they are screaming. As opposed to defaulting to a broad beginning of what they were observing and saying, oh, my goodness, that kid is a brat, for instance. You're describing emotional intelligence as a self-perception as well.
Yes. And so is our task, therefore, to do the equivalent of what, in my little anecdote, this other person was doing to be able to parse one's own emotions in a fine enough way to understand the experience in kind of a third person way that one can regulate their behavior, what they say, how they act.
How much is recognition of others' emotions and understanding of those, as opposed to what is recognition and understanding of their own emotions, factoring into this thing that we call emotional intelligence? So the whole set of skills are intra and interpersonal. That's really important. It's about self and others always. For example, right now we are co-regulating each other's emotions, right? Our facial expressions, our vocal tones, we're influencing how we feel.
When you think about the recognition piece, we'll just start there. Right there is self-awareness, like Mark. How are you feeling right now? And I'm, you know, I'm having mixed emotions, right? This is a great podcast, I want to be articulate. You know, I'm excited, but I'm a little overwhelmed because I got so much I want to share, but I don't know how much I want to share. So there's like all that awareness of my emotion. Sometimes I have language for it, sometimes I don't, like any of us.
And that's why it starts off with kind of just a general awareness, like am I pleasant? Am I unpleasant? Do I have a lot of energy? Or do I feel depleted? And we call that, you know, your core affect. And then I could start asking myself questions, like, well, what are you doing right now, Mark? Well, I'm sitting across from Andrew being interviewed. Oh, okay, well, how does that, what comes up for you with that? And then I try to label that feeling.
So that's like the R, the U, and the L of emotional intelligence for the self. And I'm doing the same thing for you. I'm looking at your facial expressions, your body language, I'm listening to you. I'm trying to understand if I say something to you shift and I'm trying to put language to it. So itself and other. So given that we're both scientists interested in emotions, you're the expert. I'm also just the student today.
I think it's worth pointing out to people that there isn't one location in the brain that governs this complex process that you just described. It's a network-wide phenomenon. But you did mention the body. You mentioned feeling, you know, how is one feeling both in brain and body. So what extent does somebody who has high emotional intelligence have more or less body awareness or somatic awareness as opposed to somebody who's quote unquote in their head, put differently.
Can somebody who is very much in their head who has very poor body awareness have high emotional intelligence? Well, I think another big deal about emotional intelligence is that we like to think of it as our people think of it as this construct. I don't think that's the best way to look at it. I think it's much more interesting to look at it as a set of discrete skills that come together. They're not that highly correlated.
And so, you know, it's, I really like to think of them as emotion skills and that within the R, the U, the L, the E and the R that I described, there are sub-skills. And so part of what you're talking about is the body awareness. Some people are more cognitive. You know, they're just very language oriented. Some people, you know, a lot of therapists, somatic, you know, talking about somatic sensory things, all good.
I think at the end though, you know, this is why I teach this stuff is that we have to know how we feel. We got to know what we want to do with those feelings. And we have to know how the people we live with and love and work with and teach how they feel too. And so we need language in the end. Some years ago, I went to this course, it was, you know, broadly could be described as personal development. It was interesting. It was grounded in science and psychology.
And each day would start with going around the circle, as typically is done at these things. And you'd have to say how you feel. But you couldn't use a valuation. You couldn't say good or bad or so, so. And I found it very difficult. I found it difficult for a number of reasons. First of all, I don't think I was ever trained to use specific language for my feelings. In fact, I don't think I was ever trained to understand what feelings were.
In fact, I know neuroscientists and psychologists are still trying to figure out what feelings and emotions really are. So a couple of questions. When it comes to using language to describe our emotions, how important do you feel it is to have a broad buffet of options? You know, a previous guest on this podcast, Lisa Feldman-Barritt. And I talked about this a bit. And she mentioned that in some cultures, there's very specific language for specific emotions.
In fact, there's even a word to describe the feeling of sadness one has in a particular culture after getting a really bad haircut, which is incredible when one thinks about it. We all know what that feels like. Right. We know what it feels like. Right. But there isn't, to my knowledge, a word for that in the English language. I mean, I'm sure there's a curse word for it in the English language, but not necessarily for that specific feeling or unique to that specific feeling.
So what is the relationship between language labels and emotion? And I asked that as a way to kind of wedge into the ruler approach. Because as you pointed out, one recognizes, understands labels. And the label is central, literally, to the ruler approach. It is. Yeah, so I like, I'm very similar to Lisa in terms of there are emotion, concepts, or categories. Well, let's use the anger category. If you only have one word for anger, that means all you know is there's one form of anger.
But if you start teaching people, well, there are other words that we could use like peeved, irritated, angry, and raged, livid. And then you have rich conversations, which is what I do in schools with kids and teachers themselves. Like what is when you're feeling peeved? Like what are the things that make you feel peeved versus the things that make you feel enraged? What does it feel like in your body when you're feeling that way?
Granted that everybody feels things differently in their bodies, that really doesn't matter. What matters is that we have a common language and a common understanding of what these emotions are. Because otherwise we can't communicate. You know, I'm really like this is a big deal for me in terms of having a common language within a community to talk about emotion. Because right now we're in a crisis of anxiety. I'm not 100% bought into that. I think that people use the word anxiety improperly.
Anxiety is about uncertainty about the future if we're going to define it. It's different than stress. You know, there's different forms of stress as you know. But the distress is usually when you have too many demands and not enough resources, which is different than when you're overwhelmed, right, which is my emotion of the year, which is I'm just saturated like, you know, what's can't even figure out what's going on anymore, which is also different from fear.
And that's what we call that emotion differentiation or granularity. People call it they're slightly different. The differentiation is like between emotions and the granularity might be within the emotion. But from my work, just to go on about this for a moment. The dust example I have is they do a lot of corporate training. And so I'm in a room filled with lawyers or executives and I'm asked them how they're feeling. Nobody's really sure how they're feeling like you were saying.
And then I'll do these little kind of quizzes with them. Tell me the difference. You got three minutes in a group. Anxiety, stress, pressure, fear, overwhelmed. And they come back and the number one response is they're all the same. And I'm like, really? Take another few minutes, like just try to define them. They can't even define them. They say things like, you know, one is internal, one is external, one is, you know, one is higher energy and lower energy.
I'm like, I get that, but what do these concepts mean to you? What do they mean to you? Anyhow, finally, we get to like the definitions. And then I say, you know, who cares? Like why am I asking you to like understand these differences? Go back to your groups and talk about it. And then after like, this is like a 45 minute, like I thought this is going to be like a two minute activity. It turns into like a 45 minute to an hour exercise because they finally realize, oh, yeah.
So if I'm anxious because I'm worrying about the future, you know, maybe the breathing exercise is not going to be as helpful because maybe I need a cognitive strategy to say, you know, Mark, stop worrying about the stuff. Mark, stop worrying about the university closed down because of the pandemic. You got no control over the university's decisions.
And so helping people make connections between the feeling and the reason for the feeling from my perspective has been very helpful to help them learn how to regulate the emotion. So connecting the feeling and the reason for the feeling as opposed to just labeling the feeling. Yeah. It's the why, the why that you really have to deal with. How do you feel about emojis from everything you're saying? They seem like more than benign to me.
Yeah. I mean, I could imagine that the emojification of culture as I refer to it. I don't think that's a real word. Sorry. It is now set up a Wikipedia page tomorrow. The emojification is a serious problem because it's what we call in science too much lumping. In science like lumbers and splitters. Yeah. Right. And both can have fabulous careers. But if you lump too much or split too much, you create more confusion and you often create problems.
And I just see emojis as lumping this incredible set of different continuums within us that we call emotions. Exactly. I really got a small icon and I can imagine this would lead to all sorts of problems. Not just in communication, but in understanding our own emotions. Put differently. Do you think that the use of emojis has degraded our level of emotional intelligence and processing?
I mean, I haven't done the research, but from my perspective, it's not helpful because the goal is to get granular. You know, think about the difference. And I'm not going to quiz you right now. But anger and disappointment, do you know that 95% of the people that I asked to find those two things cannot do it? Yeah. I mean, right off the cuff, I'll just say, you know, I'm familiar with both of those feelings. I know they're different since they're different.
I mean, but the disappointment piece could be directed outward or inward. I'd have to work systematically through until I found a violation of one or the other. So we're an example applied to one and not the other. It would take me a few minutes longer than I want this audience to have to wait. There you go. So we should just have. But you have a growth mindset. There you go. But the, you know, so disappointment, I'm an expectations. Everything was legit. It just didn't work out.
Anger received injustice. And that's a really important distinction because if you're a parent or someone at work and someone is like yelling and screaming, first of all, we'd grossly make mistakes in terms of labeling emotion from behavior. We got to just throw that out. There's no correlation really between behavior and emotion. I can stop my feet, you know, as a boy because I'm feeling sad, just because it's more culturally acceptable for me to stop than to cry. And so why are you so angry?
Maybe I'm feeling shame, which is my experience. You know, I was yelling and screaming as a kid because I was being bullied so much. And then my mother would be like, you know, who do you think you are talking to me that way? And then my father would say, go to your room.
And I'd be like, is anybody reading my, you know, emotions popular asking me how I'm feeling because you would know that I'm acting out because of fear and shame never happened because of a variety of reasons of, you know, triggering my parents and they didn't have such high emotional intelligence. They love me. Just didn't have high emotional intelligence. And so going back to the anger disappointment one, unmanned expectations versus perceived injustice.
And so when you think about it in terms of the strategy, like for example, my other career, just seen it as a martial arts teacher. So I have a fifth reblock belt in a Korean martial art called Hap Kido. So this podcast doesn't go so well. Anyhow. The, you know, I was an awkward kid and had a, you know, very insecure, low self esteem. I got into the martial arts. I thought, I'm going to get my yellow belt and I'm going to feel tough and proud. Failed my freaking yellow belt test.
I mean, 13 years old. You couldn't imagine like, there's nothing worse for a 13 year old kid who is feeling shame and being bullied to fail a yellow belt test. So what do I do? I go home. I hate karate. Everybody's in an uproar. I'm getting yelled at. I'm paying for your karate. You're going back to, you know, whatever. And the truth was like, let's think about that for a minute. So I go to take the test and I've got to do my blocks and my kicks, you know, my punches.
I know there's five kicks, there's five punches. And let's say I do them the best I can, but the sense they just says, you know, Mark, just not good enough. You're not ready yet. That's legitimate disappointment. I expected to pass. I didn't pass. I'm feeling disappointed. So the strategy for that is what? Like, tutor, help. Show me what I have to do better. On the other hand, let's say, which was true for me, that some of the kids who were the bullies in my middle school also took karate.
And let's imagine they're watching me take my test and they're giving me some dirty looks because they're going to, you know, threaten me and which did happen, you know, you know, getting changed, going, you know, like, wait, you see what it's going to be like for you tomorrow in the way to school. Now how am I feeling? Terrorized, fearful. And I felt my test because of that. So you can see how I could show up with a particular behavior. People are attributing emotion to me.
They're labeling my emotions for me because they don't have this skill to deactivate as a parent or a teacher or a partner to be present, to help me understand my experience and then label my experience, understand where it's coming from and then strategize accordingly. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens.
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Again, that's drinkag1.com slash huberman to claim that special offer. You said that disappointment is when one does everything essentially correctly, meaning gave as much effort as they could, etc. and it didn't work out versus anger, which is perceived injustice. Would you say that your response to not getting your yellow belt then, because as a fifth degree black belt now, clearly you got that yellow belt eventually. I want to hear that part of the story too, that you were experiencing anger.
In this case, could we even call it inappropriate anger? Really inappropriate because what you really needed to understand was this notion of disappointment but no one had taught it to you. I think what you're getting at though is this not knowing how you're feeling because I was never taught language. A Kevin experience that could be many feelings at once, which could be disappointment, could be anger, could be embarrassment. But you got to unpack the situation.
What was the real event that happened? What really happened in that moment? If it were legitimate, legitimate tests, and I just blocked the punch and I just didn't have this trend to block it to really stand firm, it's disappointment. It's like, it's sudden. You thought your blocks were strong. Unfortunately, you need some work. Let's practice every day after school together. We're going to get these blocks down so you can get that yellow belt test. There's no other reason.
If it's because the bullies are staring at me and I'm not capable of dealing with those piercing eyes that are at me and I'm feeling so anxious and overwhelmed, then I just can't block because I'm just freaked out. That's a whole other story. Do you see how a parent or a teacher would have to really differentiate their support? But you have to really get at the experience, which means we have to have relationships that are trustworthy, loving, caring with all people.
Because otherwise, we don't build that connection to really understand how people feel. We just take the kind of behavior. We're like, why are you being heavy in that way? Go to your room or just practice. It's like, no. I've been bullied at school and now the bully is threatening me. That's serious stuff that needs to be taken care of. Online emojis and downward facing thumbs versus upward facing thumbs and this kind of thing and vomit emojis and things like that, a mind blown.
I'm starting to realize that these may be doing far more harm than we realize. Yeah, I think it's fun. Maybe it's just if you want to just use it for fun, not a problem. If we're going to use it to really communicate, that's so great. I'm thinking of instances where people are just using these with the intention of expressing their dislike of something. But that the people on the receiving end experience a lot of self-criticism as a consequence, mostly kids, but adults too.
I know some adults that really can't handle somebody commenting on their Instagram post like Big L or something like that. It's devastating for people. Or this kind of thing. It's also interesting because I see it even in the academic community, especially on Twitter, X, where I know that sure people reject each other's papers, critique each other's papers, but they do that with a degree of intellectual nuance that transmits a sense of care.
If scientists really care, then they're going to do a careful review as much as we would all love this as a perfect paper. That's it. I think when somebody critiques something that we do with intention to detail, provided its fair, we feel cared for. Totally. They care for the work and we care for the work. There's a relationship there, even if it's an anonymous review. But I'm shocked to see how scientific colleagues have known for decades, really how they comport themselves online.
They'll swear, they'll come out. They won't bother to punctuate things. They just sort of behave in a very, what seems to be a very activated way, not all of them, of course. But it's been very interesting. The words that come to mind are, I feel like online, especially on social media. The kids are acting like adults and the adults are acting like children. There seems to be a kind of regression toward what I'm calling the emogification or the kind of high amplitude expression with blunt tools.
I don't know what that is because I know these people. The reason I'm using the academic community as an example, by the way, it's cost some of these people their jobs, chairs of departments, not at Stanford or Yale, fortunately. But it's kind of striking to me the way that when we remove the face-to-face connection, when people will behave that way. And I use the parallel example of anonymous review because they're its anonymous.
So in theory, they could behave, however, they won't, but there's an etiquette. So it seems like online etiquette is very deprived of many of the important features that we're starting to, you're starting to lay out for us here. I anonymity causes challenges. It's funny because I gave a speech at Twitter, now known as X, about five years ago, and had analyzed quite a lot of data. It was actually the year that Mariah Carey sang and it got messed up.
And I was like the week before I was going in January, it was like New Year's Eve, and I just was curious because it really was messed up. And I said, how are people going to respond? And it was 99.99% ripping this amazing diva to shreds. So I don't recall the sensitive, so she's obviously phenomenally talented, but she made them an error. God forbid, she made an error. Yeah, there was something that was a mic. And she just basically like the mic wasn't working the way she wanted it to work.
And she's like, I'm out of here. I'm not singing. And you should have seen how people just, I mean millions and millions and millions of comments, you know, like I'm not gonna repeat what people said because it was really disgusting. And I got really curious. Like what about things like, gosh, you've like won 15 Grammy Awards, like this bus really sting for you, maybe one post like that.
And so it does make you wonder about a, the type of person who is interested in commenting, like we may have a bias there. I do think we have a bias there. You know, people who, you know, they feel protected by, you know, something. If it's, you know, a more famous person in politics, obviously people are very clear how they feel. Politicians sort of open themselves up to it. Yeah, they do. Like facing people in general, I've heard, open themselves up to it.
But politicians in particular, I think we give, we sort of give the general public a pass to say almost anything about them. But it's, it's not pretty. It's not pretty. And it's not emotionally intelligent to go back to the concept, right? It's like what's your goal here? Like I always ask people that like, like what are you getting at of being nasty? I perceive it as evacutive. I look at that and I think, gosh, what they must feel inside to be able to say those things can't be good.
But maybe it feels good to them. I don't know. I mean, I don't, I don't think I've ever made a negative comment. If I have someone can call me out on it. I hopefully it was in sarcasm with a friend as the target and they were okay with it or happy with it. But I don't know what internal, emotional or psychological state it would take to go say something cruel to somebody online. And my earlier research with Facebook, we analyzed millions and millions of posts.
And you know, people can be intentionally mean and hurtful. Just people want to rip people to shreds and they want to instill fear. And you know, it's very hard to disentangle that too, just to be honest. So like what we found in our research was that I could say if you're like, you're Andrew is wearing a black shirt, you'll see that. I could say like nice shirt and it might mean nice shirt or it might mean I'm making fun of your shirt.
And it just hard like that's that's the problem, you know, with social media in terms of posts. We don't really know because the person who's receiving it has a story, right? That was one challenge we found around like getting posts taken down was that it was hard to have that objective criterion of what was, you know, painful to a person.
Which is why what we tried to do was help the person who was receiving the content, communicate in a way with the person who posted the content to get them to take it down. And what we found was that it actually worked really well. If you taught a teenager, for example, they say, hey, you know, hey, Andrew, like that comment you made really was hurtful, would you please take it down? We were more likely to get people to take it down.
And what we found in experimental research was that if we just let people go on their own devices, it tended to be more retaliatory. Like who do you think you are? You know, you want to fight back, you know, and that did not motivate the person to take it down. So even meeting gross behavior with compassion can be helpful. Can we provide a counter example for the anger versus disappointment that's on the positive valence? Aside what's a positive set of feelings that people often conflate?
Like happiness and contentment. Yeah, that's a tough one. For me, I'm getting f-solving. Good thing I became a biologist. Extatic and elated. Cool. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, this is, you know, this is why I do what I do. Yeah. So I'm good at this. Yeah. Yeah. But I'm happy about the fact that happiness, you know, it's usually about when you're achieving something, right? You're going to, I'm going to be happy when you know, this will bring me happiness. Contentment is the opposite.
Contentment is, everything is just great as it is. I feel complete. I have enough. And part of my argument against the happiness research is that we don't spend enough time helping people strive for contentment and we push people to strive for happiness, which There's a show, you know, backfires. You know, if you're waking up every day, saying, what am I going to do to be happy? What am I going to do to be happy? Chances are, you know, it's not going to work out a lot.
And that kind of backfires to create more despair. Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but as soon as you describe contentment that way, and thank you for parsing those two. Very useful to me. As soon as you describe contentment that way, I imagine waking up and rather than thinking about what needs to be done and the things I want to achieve, which I want to achieve, they bring me joy. Yeah. Throwing a third word there just to confuse myself.
This notion of contentment the way that you described, I could see might lead me to pay attention to how good it feels to have gotten some sleep to, you know, I sleep almost nights, but what a privilege that is. And to, you know, maybe feel the comfort of the, the comforter and the mattress for a moment before barging into the day to chase happiness, is it worth? Exactly. I think, you know, the idea that we have to be happy all the time is also ridiculous. I mean, I'm a neurotic professor.
Like I'm never happy. You know, it's just, it's tough. And so, and also like, I don't know about you, but given that my dispositional affect, another term, you know, is more on the lower energy kind of contented little and anxiety. When I'm around the people who are like high energy and pleasant all the time, I have a difficult time. You know, it's like, because you somehow feel like you're not living up to some stand. No, I just feel like overwhelmed and smothered by it.
You know, it's like, stop being so happy all the time. Here's where I get to appropriately make a joke about, because before we started, we were talking about East Coast schools versus West Coast schools. Like, maybe you come West and, and that'll change or maybe you're right where you belong there at the also phenomenal university that is Yale. But anyway, that's kind of inside ball stuff. East Coast University is amazing. Midwest University is amazing. West Coast University is amazing.
Different perceived temperaments, but for sure. And styles just look at the walking speeds, for instance, not just the weather. But yeah, you raise a very important point. We have a member of our podcast team that is like always in a great mood. He's always in a great mood. And it's for me a reminder to be in a better mood. I'm not somebody that I would say gets, I'm not moody. I don't change moods quickly.
But I wouldn't say that my disposition is to be like, take her like and just have you all the time. But his energy around that doesn't drain me. But it makes me wish I was him. That's good. That's okay. That's you. I mean, part of being emotionally intelligent with colleagues, romantic partners with children, whoever is picking up on that. Like now that I know that about you, it makes me think differently about you in terms of what your needs are. That's emotional intelligence.
And for me, I am like, I wake up every morning like having an existential crisis. And like, what am I doing with my life? And you know, what am I doing this today for? And then I got to publish this paper. I got to finish my book. I got to run my team. Like, what I want to do? And then I'm doing it. And then I'm like, when I'm doing one thing, I think I should be doing the other thing. That's just who I am. And I've tried everything. And that's just my operating system. I'm more aware.
Like, when I was working on another book, and as I was working on it, you know, in a chapter, and I'll like to think about it as an extra-after. And I started like, Mark, give yourself permission to be with this freaking chapter. It's okay. Like, you can focus on one thing and not worry about the future. And I had to literally kind of do that for myself. That's how I am, you know. And so knowing that about myself is useful because it helps me find the strategies that work for me.
And going back to the happiness thing, it's because I'm also introverted. And so when I'm around extroverts a lot, I'm drained. You know, I just like, after something like this, this intense conversation, I'm not going to go to a sports bar, you know, like, have a beer and like, watch the game. I would never do that anyway. But anyway, that's just not my thing. You know, like, that would make me, I would like, my brain would be burnt.
Like my dream would be to leave here, go take a hot yoga class, and take a walk, have a glass of wine, maybe by myself or with a friend, and then end of the day. All those things are readily available within less than a mile of here. We can point you in the right direction. It sounds lovely. The introversion, extroversion bit is going to prick up people's ears. It certainly did mine. I like time alone. I also like time alone in the presence of many people.
In fact, I get my best work done, always either alone in nature or in Manhattan, where there are people around me, but I'm completely isolated. I love that too. So how should we think about introversion and extroversion? These things get thrown around so much in popular culture. Are there some solid scientific studies that support that introversion can best be defined as blank and extroversion as blank? And I'm guessing there's a range there. It's got to be on a continuum. It can't be two bins.
I mean, for some people, it's very clear. You know, they are a clear, traded introvert. And for some people, they're just like endlessly extroverted no matter. They wake up wanting to be with people. The end of the day, they want to go out with people more. And so what research shows, for example, with creative people is they tend to be both. They tend to be high introverts and high extroverts, which is interesting, right?
They're introverts when they're doing their art, and then they're extroverts when they're out there selling their art, which is hard for some artists, right? Because a lot of artists are kind of introspective in their creative types, but they really struggle with getting out there and being that extroverted like, look at my art. And so you're the lucky artist if you are traded in both directions. I think the easiest way to think about it is just this, it's a proclivity, right?
It's a proclivity to how you want to use your energy. And the introvert is more a container, you know, wants to contain their energy. They want to, you know, be in small groups. They want kind of less frenetic environments, and the extrovert just has a proclivity for, you know, more sensation seeking, you know, larger social groups. And again, it's a preference. I would say I'm an introvert with pretty good social skills. Like I can appear to be extroverted. And most people think I'm outgoing.
And I would say like, I don't even like people that much. You seem very outgoing. Yeah, I'm not. You know, it's just not my natural, like if I'm at a party, I struggle with life. Like, like, what am I going to do here? When you say you don't necessarily like people that much, I realize you're joking. But and I was just going to make sure to ask, because I can't presume, that doesn't mean that you dislike people.
It's just that being in the presence of a lot of people doesn't draw you out to want to be closer to or get to know all these people simply because they're there. Whereas an extrovert seems to really like forming and engaging in new, new relationships, old relationships. Relating. Exactly. If you're like running a campaign to run for, you know, mayor of your town, like you're going to, you want to hire an extroverted PR person, right?
An extroverted person do marketing because they're like going to be out there, like banging on the doors. Not very comfortable talking to people, right? The introvert is going to be better at doing the accounting, you know, and doing the planning. And we've done this research actually. If even fun with my students, I would have them take their, take measures of their valid measures of introversion and extroversion.
I would score them into groups like get that really extroverted group and then really introverted group. And it had them plan a party. Just go plan a party. And the group of extroverts is bonfires. There's beer. There loud music on the beach and the introverts are like, we have to make sure we have good napkins. We want to, you know, we're going to have four people, you know, it's going to be quiet music. That's just, you know, how we're built.
And when I think of throwing a great party, I've thrown a few, what I like to think were great parties, it involves inviting a bunch of people over and then being able to stand back from a lot of it and not have to participate in all of it. I just like seeing friends that didn't know each other start to interact. That's cool. That's fun for me. And then if I have to communicate directly with too many people at the party, I definitely feel drained.
I'm known to retreat to a room and take a nap or just disappear. Yes, so maybe you are more introverted. Yeah. So Rick Rubin, whose world renowned for his creative insights and creativity and for being Rick, I think once said on a podcast, perhaps, or maybe he said this to me, that Tom Petty was the sort of person that basically didn't do anything besides write music and read books and interact with the small number of people in his inner circle.
And the idea of leaving the house was just completely overwhelming to him. Now of course, people were always approaching him, but like really, really extreme introvert. Whereas Rick has described, and I won't name names here, other famous people, musicians and otherwise, that go out specifically to try and get the attention of fame. And if they don't, they feel absolutely isolated. Makes sense. They have people in their private life, so it becomes an extraversion requirement.
I would imagine life is much harder for the extrovert in the long run. Because there's so much to show. The rest of the extroverts tend to have a little bit more success because they're more willing to get out there and ask for it. They get higher, they get raises more quickly. I see. And in my work in schools, I always ask teachers to pay attention to the personality of their students because the introvert has a lot of great ideas. They just not die and raise their hand and get the attention.
So don't just call on the kids who are raising their hands because you're missing out on getting some great information. In that case, do you cold call on people? Whenever I'm teaching, I somewhat reluctant to cold call on people because I recall it can be terrifying when suddenly you're sitting there taking notes, trying to organize your thoughts around the material and then suddenly the whole room is looking at you.
I said expectations around that because I'm really particular about that because it drives me crazy when the talkative extrovert is always getting their thing said. I think there's good instructional practices that can help with that. One thing I'm thinking about though is this intersection of personality and emotional intelligence, you just kind of brought that up for me, which is, and people confuse those a lot.
So for example, I even confused it when I was younger before I studied it because I'm high also in neuroticism, meaning I am more mercurial in terms of I worry about things and I'm fine than I worry again. It's just that's who I am. And I just always assumed that someone who is high in neuroticism or more, as I said, is a volatile emotionally, that was this low emotional intelligence because like, how could you be emotional intelligent if you're emotionally volatile?
And then I did all this research and found there's pretty much no correlation between personality traits and emotional intelligence. And why is that? Well think about it. If you were someone who is more even keeled, maybe you don't even have that much of an opportunity to regulate your emotions, right? And then if you get triggered, you've never had experience, so it's actually harder for you. Someone like me, I'm practicing it all the time, right?
I'm always like, I'm in a bad mood, I got to give a meeting, I'm like, irritable, I get to give a presentation. So I'm constantly figuring out how to deal with my emotions. And that's why there's separate concepts. And in addition to it, just to build on this, knowing your personality traits can be extraordinarily helpful for choosing the best strategies to regulate your emotions. Why is that? I was traveling on Australia recently and I gave this speech to a group of people.
The person who was the person in charge of this speech, it was about an hour from Melbourne. And I took the train, because I preferred to stay in the city, took the train out, I was planning to take, I had bought my train, take it back. The convener said, you know, Mark, I just really would love to be with you and can we just, you know, can I drive you back to your home? Your hotel? And I'm thinking to myself, like, that is the worst thing you could ever ask me.
And on the wrong side of the road. Yeah. And I had my train take it. I really, it was a full day of presentations and stuff. I really wanted to be with myself to decompress. But I felt bad and I said, sure. The guy talked to me for an hour, like he just non-stop talked to me. I got back to my hotel. I was like, I am going to have a nervous break. Like I need another day to recover.
Because, and it just annoyed me about myself, not practicing, you know, what I teach, which was, Mark, know that I self, you're drained, be polite. You know, it was my insecurity of just saying, you know, I really appreciate you wanting to drive me back. But, you know, I really have a lot to do tomorrow. I need to rest my voice. I need to, you know, do some prep. Instead, I just sat there like, you know, shaking and like, you know, having like just went crazy. So, do you see what I'm getting at?
Like, really knowing yourself in terms of like what drives you and what your, you know, your personality traits, just introversion, extroversion alone and how that relates to like your selection of strategies is so important. Super important. And by the way, my joke about driving on the wrong side of the road, I do realize that we drive on the wrong side of the road for Australians and those in the UK. So, I'll do the two-shape for you.
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Text messaging is an interesting example of communication that nowadays, depending on how many people have access to your phone number, can either feel like a wonderful source of filling the gaps on trains and while in transit and while walking to the car, perhaps hopefully not while driving, although people seem to do that. Yet for the introvert, I can imagine that it might feel an undating, it might feel overwhelming. How do you feel about text messages?
Because it's just yet another form of communication. I asked this for a very particular reason. I could imagine that extroverts love to text message. They love to receive and send text messages that they can't stand a moment of downtime before boarding a plane. They're excited that there's yet another form of communication at all hours of the day and night, whereas introverts would be less excited to text message.
I also asked this in part because I want to protect the variable latency to respond to text option that I've tried to exercise in my life, but that seems to... Well, it doesn't really seem to work. I think most people assume, if I walk up to you and I say hello and you wait 10 minutes to say hello back, I'll first think you're a little bit... rude and then think you're a little strange. As if I text you, hello, and I don't hear back right away. I might think you're busy.
There's some wiggle room for interpretation, but I think what I'm really getting at here is do we tend to project the same latency expectation on text that we ourselves embrace? This seems like an important source of potential miscommunication, misunderstanding and maybe worse. I mean, certainly, you could imagine also that the introvert might be more comfortable texting because it's less stimulation. So it could work, I think it could work in both directions.
I think the problem with text messaging is that it's decreasing emotional intelligence because you really can't communicate the same way through a text message. Thank you. Can you repeat both those things? I'm happy to say it 100 times. Because I feel this wash of relief and now I'm looking for the appropriate word because I'm talking to you, so I feel like I have to use the exact appropriate word.
I feel emancipated because I also feel that as texting has become more routine and has crossed a number of different lines of formality and informality, not just with family members but with co-workers and people we do and don't know and just mad and have known for ages. The jargon that we use with one group is different than the jargon we use with another. But I feel that texting in general has really degraded our ability to communicate verbally and in writing elsewhere.
There's good research on even like teens right now prefer to text and to be face to face. Which is weird. Not helpful. To building like good relations. I should forgive me. I'm going to interrupt you. I have no idea what it's like to be a teenager in 2024. So I've caught myself. I have no place saying weird because there were things that I was doing as a teenager that I'm sure adults were like that. Of course. So I take that back.
But if you think about how disconnected and alienated and lonely people feel these days, that's not necessarily going to help make things better. I have an example. When my father passed away a number of years ago, I got all these text messages. I'm so sorry for your loss. I'm so sorry for your loss. From people who I thought were really good friends of mine. 20, 30 year friends.
I'm like, you're not going to pick up the phone and listen to my voice and ask me, what can I do to support you right now? And it's so strange. And actually one of my closest friends didn't even text me. She texted my assistant and said, please go into Mark's office and tell him that I love him. I'm like, this is really weird. Like, I picked up the phone. I'm like, what is happening right now? And people have preconceived notions.
Maybe she thought I was overwhelmed and devastated and needed space. But at the same time, like, make a phone call, leave me a voice message and give me some options. I had one friend. Like, Mark, I know you're going through a lot right now. I just want you to know, like, if you want to talk anytime you want to call me, call me. If you want a text, text. If you want me to come out and stay with you for a couple of days, I'm there. That's an awesome friend.
Yeah. That was like, that was exactly what I needed to hear. I wanted, you know, someone to offer, provide options or just do. But we're so hesitant these days. It's kind of scary to me. And it makes me fearful about the future of our relationships in general. Yeah. I think this is such an important topic. I think because texting is so common and has been used to, you know, communicate so many different forms of human emotion in this broad-bin format.
I mean, how much can you really put into a text? I have some friends and colleagues. Voice text. And you can voice text, which is like that. It's like, right, it's long and sometimes, well, there are issues with that too. I feel like it's enriched compared to texting. Unless the text is carefully written out, punctuated, I mean, we can see the care that people put into certain texts or emails that they tip and most people, including myself, don't write. Texting is a short form.
Yeah. Communication. Audio notes, voice memos seem like a step up. I think what this is probably done is that it's made the phone call or the goodness, the handwritten card or letter. It's kind of raised that to the pinnacle of carrot of expression. Completely. And by the way, text messaging, you know, it's fine. I always, you know, I'll be home in a little while, you know, like, can you please pick this up? Whatever. Great. The thing is wrong with text messaging.
But when it replaces intimacy, when it replaces building, you know, strong bonds, that's where I see the largest problem. Yeah. I didn't outright set this rule in my relationships, but I would say with my coworkers, family members, and in other kinds of relationships, there's a rule, which is that we don't argue over text. Yeah. It's not cool. But people do it a lot. It's easier because you don't have to feel the feelings. That's what it is.
You know, it's like, it can be psychologically distant from that person and say what I don't want to say, where if I have to say it face to face, I'm going to have to face a response and that response may be very uncomfortable for me. And I probably don't have the strategies to deal with it because I never learned them.
I mean, you and I are both aware that there is neural real estate, specifically dedicated to the processing of faces and specifically to the processing of human faces and specifically to the processing of the emotions carried in human facial expressions. So this is a hard-wired aspect to our species, which is diminishing.
You know, there was a good study done about kids and camps and they randomly assigned them to be with their phones and not with their phones and showed that after a couple of weeks of camp kids who had their phones decreased in their emotion perception skills. So it makes a difference. We need to give children and adults more face to face time. Wild. We talk about the energy pleasantness axes. Sure. And create a mental picture for people of what this is. I've found this to be incredibly useful.
If listeners or viewers have a pen or pencil in paper, you could map this out, but it's very easy to imagine in your mind. So maybe you could just tell us on the vertical axis. Yeah. So we have, you know, horizontal. We'll call that pleasantness. And this is going back to something else that we talked about earlier. It's called pleasantness, not goodness or badness. It's in this moment, am I feeling highly pleasant? Are my feeling unpleasant? Do I feel like approaching my day?
My colleagues, do I feel like avoiding my colleagues? Do I feel safe and comfortable? Do I feel uncomfortable? That's the x-axis. And the way I like to think about it is that from the moment we wake up in the morning until the time we go to bed, that is activated. We're just, you know, you wake up in the morning and you just hear all of a sudden of a thought process like, yes, I want to get out of bed. No, I want to pull the covers over my head. On the y-axis is energy or activation.
Because of vertical axis's energy. The technical term is a rousal or activation, but I think energy is a better term. And so it's either you're highly energized or you're deactivated or low in energy. This mental energy, it's physical energy. So I kind of like, how much fuel you have? And then we cross those two axes to create what we call in our work, the mood meter. And there are four quadrants. We've got high pleasant, high energy, yellow. So think about emotions there.
Happy, excited, elated, ecstatic, optimistic. We've got the green, so that's low energy and pleasant still. That's the calm, content, tranquil, peaceful, relaxed quadrant. And then we have the unpleasant side. And I'm going to repeat myself. It's not the bad emotions or the negative emotions. We're going to call them unpleasant because it's not generally pleasant to be sad or down or disappointed or hopeless or feeling despair, which is the blue or that low energy unpleasant.
And then we've got our red quadrant on the mood meter, which we'll call the high energy, highly unpleasant emotions, which are feelings of anger and anxiety. So it's very helpful for people because you know, when you're like you even said this yourself, like you're not really sure how you're feeling. And we know our inner lives are complex. So to be able to have a tool that has four quadrants where you go like, I don't know, my pleasant, I'm kind of pleasant, but my energy is low.
All right, I'm in the green. All right, now what are my options there? No, I'm feeling quite energized and pleasant. Oh, what are my options there, et cetera. We find that in for both preschoolers and CEOs, very helpful, extraordinarily helpful. And then, you know, going back to ruler for a minute, we might talk about the quadrant as being the R for self-awareness, right? Organizing like where am I in emotion space? And then you might ask yourself like, all right, well, what's going on?
You know, what's called? Why am I thinking that I'm in the yellow or red or blue or green? What just happened? What might be happening? Oh, I'm about to be on a podcast. Oh, I'm about to take a test. Oh, I'm about to go into a difficult meeting with a colleague. Oh, I'm about to go home and my partner is going to be mad. Hmm. Okay, now I understand why I'm feeling the way I'm feeling. I put a word to it. I'm more precise. I'm not enraged. I'm irritable. I'm not blissful. I'm just content.
I'm not depressed. I'm just feeling down. I'm not overwhelmed. I'm just feeling a little uneasy. That's helpful because that helps you go into the E and the R of ruler, which is, all right, is this an emotion I need to express? Why do I keep it to myself? Is this an emotion need help that we need support right now? Or am I okay with what I'm feeling? I have a great story about this, actually.
We're born to be fixtures, I think, especially in my role, like as a teacher or if you're a parent, with a kid or a teacher, partner, right? And so I go to visit this school where my program is. It's called ruler also. And we're in about 5,000 schools now across the United States. And I'm visiting this school at kindergarten. And I do this check-in. And the little boy says he's in the blue, which means unpleasant, low energy.
And of course, my little five-year-old, he's in the blue, I feel terrible. And then my fixer, like I want to fix this kid. I want this kid to be in the blue. And so I know I can't do that because it's part of the rules of ruler. You don't fix people's feelings. You don't fix people's feelings. So I just said to the boy, I'm just curious, you know, if you need a strategy. And he goes, no. And I'm like, no, I'm just curious, you know, why don't you need a strategy?
He goes, because I know it's impermanent. Wow. Maybe the next generations coming up are far more emotionally intelligent than ours, if I may. If they are, if they get direct instruction, that's my vision for the world, is that everyone gets an emotion education. And the boy says, no, you know, I know it's going to go away. I'm fine. I'm like, okay, I'm out of this kid. Like you're my teacher. You know, it was amazing.
And to think that that five year old had that insight, that he had an unpleasant feeling that didn't need to be fixed, that it was okay, that he just knew he was in a little flunk, but he has already experienced that emotions are a femoral, you know, and he can just let it go and he'll be in the green a little later or the red or whatever else. It was really kind of mind blowing.
I was going to ask, how do we resolve the contradiction between the message to feel our feelings versus to just recognize that the feelings are moving through us as this five year old gosh, wasn't is able to do because I feel like it gets to the heart of a lot of what we hear in the psychological and wellness space, which is, you know, feelings are just feelings. They're transient.
They represent all sorts of things and we can get to the biological underpinnings or the, you know, childhood trauma, root cause underpinnings, all sorts of things, genetics for that matter. Should we feel our feelings in order to best recognize them? I would imagine yes. Is there any value to suppressing our feelings, or does that tend to just grow the feeling? What is known about this from the research literature?
Because you see a lot of different opinions about this, but I'd like to know, have there been any experiments where people are placed into a negative or positive emotion or are experiencing a negative or positive emotion and then intentionally try to suppress it? Has there been any brain imaging and measurement of galvanic skin response? Like does the emotion grow or does the emotion shrink? It tends to grow.
There are cultural differences just to be frank, but in, you know, Western culture, suppression tends not to have great outcomes. Anything ways to reappraise tends to be more helpful. This really gets into though for me the core of my work because, you know, for 20 years of my life, I was running a center for emotional intelligence and teaching skills and I would go around and I would see a lot of resistance, a lot of resistance, whether it was, you know,
the hedge fund manager or the superintendent of schools or a parent, you know, I've had fathers come up to me say things like, you know, markers, so vulnerable like you shared your whole story about being bullied like I would never in my wildest dream ever share with my own son that I was bullied as a kid. And I'm like, tell me more of course, you know, I'm a psychologist. And in the end, you know, what, you know, the guy was afraid that his son would think he was weak.
And so we have a mindset about feelings that we have to talk about. People have feelings about their feelings. Sometimes we call those meta emotions or meta feelings. Sometimes it's just that happy is good and you're as bad. That's simple. My whole recent research is focused on something I call permission to feel. You know, you know, a little bit about my own story. I had a pretty rough childhood that included abuse, included a lot of bullying. And I had two parents who loved me.
But you know, my mother was a very anxious woman who never had strategies. So you know, she was always saying, I'm having a nervous breakdown and she'd lock herself in her room and she wouldn't come out for a few hours. My father was, as we might call today, you know, the tough guy who was kind of toxically masculine. So I knew her tough enough. He even said to me once, you know, he's gone now and we have a good, we had a good relationship. But I'll never forget.
He said, you know, son, I used to be kids up like you. He said that. He did. And he didn't, I mean, he thought that was the message that I needed to hear to tough enough, right? He was doing that through love. I mean, it was not emotionally intelligent parenting. But that's, that was the way he thought. And you know, he did love me. He just didn't have to be a parent in that way. And so think about that. Bullied, shame, fear, abuse, all kinds of stuff going on in my head.
Mom having nervous breakdowns, father tough enough, what happens? You suppress. You deny. You ignore. You eat. You do all kinds of weird behaviors because you have nowhere to go with your feelings. And I fear that way too many people feel that way right now. And I have good research to show that. You know, you've read my book. You know, I had an Uncle Marvin. He was a middle school teacher who, you know, by some wave of a magic wand was staying with my family one summer when I was 12.
And he noticed something in my facial expression, my body language. He knew something was off. And he was the first adult who sat with me and said, hey, Mark, how are you feeling? And I don't know if it was his facial expression, his body language, his vocal tone, but that was the opener for me. I'm not doing so well. I don't really like life very much. I'm scared. And you didn't say I'm going to have a nervous breakdown or toughen up. He said, we're going to get through this. I got you.
I'm with you. And it's really interesting to me because, you know, I feel like we're so focused on skill building, which is really important. But I want to take a step back and say, are we giving ourselves, are we giving our colleagues, our partners, our children, the permission to feel? And I feel like a lot of people don't have that permission.
Now my research shows with tens of thousands of people across cultures that only about a third of adults felt that they had someone when they were young who created the conditions for them to have permission to feel. I mean, 70% of the people walking around here right now in our corporations and our schools and our homes, 30% felt like they had that. And then you wonder, what do you think the characteristics are of these people?
The characteristics of the Uncle Marvin's or Aunt Maria's or the colleague at work, by the way, this also works in the adult workforce. You can have an emotion, mentor or a feelings coach at work. There's three characteristics. Do you want to say a guess? I'm guessing empathically attuned. Okay. All of that's for those that know empathy is it involves a bunch of subcategories. So I want to acknowledge that pathically attuned.
I'm guessing that they have themselves some high emotional intelligence. And the third is, gosh, I my hope is that there be a high situational awareness. Yeah. Right. Because your uncle needed to see something subtle in your facial expression or maybe not so subtle, but everyone else was missing it. To be able to detect that there was something that really needed, it was like a silent cry for help. Yeah. You're getting it. Like you're really nuanced, which is that's why you're assigned this to.
The three broad characteristics. The first one that shows up cross culturally, nonjudgmental. Like when we think about the people who gave us permission to feel, they just had no judgment. It let me be who I can be or who I am. The second is empathic and kind of coupled with compassionate, which is kind of the different form of empathy. The third primarily is active listening. People want to be around people who don't judge them, who listen actively and show that they care. It's that simple.
And I'll tell you, it's really interesting to me because, you know, I do a lot of public speaking and often my new strategy is I do surveys where I'm going to be presenting. So I can present the audience themselves with their data. And so I'm giving this speech to a bunch of adult parents, high school parents. And I'm showing the data from them. They feel that the survey, nonjudgmental, active listening, empathy, compassion.
And I show just like my national study, a third of you said, yes, two thirds of you said no. And she says, this is mom. And she's like just like I'm pulsably jumps out of each seat. She's like, I'm having an epiphany. I'm like, okay. And she's like, I know I'm certain that my daughter has an Uncle Marvin. I know it. And I'm also certain that my son doesn't. And you know something Mark, I am leaving your presentation today and I am finding my son his Uncle Marvin. I'm like, lady, it could be you.
And it was like. It's kind of going right by her. It's like outsourcing. Right. Like there's your karate teacher. There's your feelings mentor. And it's interesting to me. And I push on this in my research now. What is the resistance? Like what are people so afraid of? I mean, they're so afraid of feelings. Their own and their childrens or their partners. And so I ask, you know, I push on this. And what's really interesting and sad to me is that adults today. They're two barriers.
I'm going to now I'm going to push you again. What do you think the two things that get in the way of giving other people permission to feel? This is actually where my next question was going. So I'll just ask the question in the form of an answer. Is this like Jeopardy? I guess that's what you do. No, it's the other way around to Jeopardy. Sorry. You can see how many episodes of Jeopardy have watched.
But if people don't have adequate emotional boundaries and they are maybe even too empathically attuned that someone they care about experiencing anger or sadness or frustration, maybe even with them, would shift their own emotions and not make them able to be available with the three qualities that you listed off before in particular non-judgment. It's now personal. And so it would undermine the process. You're right there. The first one though is just a really interesting one. It's just time.
People, I don't have the time. You know the time to be non-judgmental. Like can you talk to me about that one please? It's actually the case. We don't have the time to be judgmental. It's far too energetically costly. Yeah, I agree. The second really goes back to the skills. I've had parents say things like I'm afraid to ask my child how they're feeling because I'm not going to be able to handle it. I mean think about that for a minute. I'm not going to be able to handle it.
So you'd rather your son or daughter suppress their fears or whatever they're feeling because you haven't developed the skills that you need to help co-regulate and support them. You know, this is again going back to my mission vision. You know, is that we need a world where everyone gets an emotional education.
High school, high school, and it's got a continuing college and it's got a continuing the work for us and it's got to continue in our as we grow older because as a 54 year old person right now who leads a large group of people. COVID hits. I had a complete meltdown. I didn't know how to like lead during COVID. I was trying to figure it out. I was doing Zoom meetings and you know, crazy stuff.
And then my mother-in-law got stuck with me and that was a real kind of wake up call in terms of like relationship building. I mean, it's really rough for me actually. She came for a wedding. One of my colleagues got married on March 3rd of 2020. Well my mother-in-law is from Panama and so just so you know, all flights to Panama got canceled by March 13th and they didn't open until September. So we had this 81 year old, lovely, lovely woman.
But like, you know, it's a lot for your mother-in-law to live with you for eight months. One little quick side story for this. So just I think it's relevant. So like it was getting really, you know, working from home. My mother-in-law was there. She wants me to make her a cappuccino every morning, which I like to do for the first week, but like after the fourth month, like learn how to use the machine. And I don't want to do it myself. I'm afraid of the machine. I'm like, sorry, I'm not.
I didn't mean to laugh out loud. That's all right. Yeah, those cappuccino machines can be scary. They can't be but like growth mindset, right? Like watch me. I'll help you do it. No, I want you to make it a coffee. Like you got to make your own coffee. I like, I don't like people in the morning. You got to make your own coffee. Anyhow, one night we're at dinner and she looks at me and she speaks Spanish. I speak Spanish.
And so she said, you know, in Spanish, are you really the director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence? And I looked at him like, not tonight. Not tonight. Like we're going down. And it was a mess. Oh, I'm sorry. I laughed before you said it was a mess. I just, your impression of the question. It's maybe a true to mind some experiences of life. Yeah. I mean, and there it was.
Like, yes, my day job is I run a Center for Emotional Intelligence, but like I'm a human being who had strong emotions and I didn't have the strategies. And I needed to cultivate a whole new set of regulation strategies to deal with that new aspect of my life. And thinking about people that can really help us by asking us the right questions or in thinking about how we can ask people the right questions to really help them and us gain an understanding of what they're experiencing.
Recalling numerous instances in my life where there seemed to be the requirement for an excuse, like an activity excuse. I currently have a very good relationship with my father, but I remember when there was a time where we had to talk about science or watches as an entry point to any conversation, let alone about emotions, right? And he's done a lot of work. I've done a lot of work and I like to think we're much, we are much further down the road. Great.
We enjoy a very close relationship as a consequence of that work in part. But I think what you're describing really makes me realize that no matter who anybody is or what their age or what their background, that as human beings, we don't just need permission, but we really should think about just having a conversation about how others feel. 100% as opposed to making an activity a prerequisite for that conversation.
And as I say this, I realize some people are probably thinking, oh boy, okay, so we're just going to sit around and talk about our feelings. But my short response to that is yes, because when you don't do that, then I can say from experience, then pretty soon you're not participating in those activities with that for exact, and potentially with anybody. You know, I mean, I'm not saying that people become so unpleasant to themselves and others that they don't have any friends.
I mean, okay, that's an extreme case. But what I hear in the backdrop of everything you're saying is that it's not just about an education, it's really about a practice of giving ourselves another's permission to simply have a conversation about what one is feeling as an exercise for both people to be able to explore that in the correct way. And there is a correct way. And you describe the ruler approach as one. Yeah, there are strategies. You know, correctness is a tricky term.
You know, it's a game. It's no matter what, it's going to be a game because you can't predict how people will respond. But I couldn't agree with you more. I'll give you another example. My father, who, like you, we ended up having an excellent relationship. My mom died when I was young and he remarried and he had moved to upstate New York and he had this lovely life. And she called me about two years after they were married and she's like, Mark, I can't take it anymore.
Your father is driving me out of my mind. I'm like, what do you mean? He's angry all the time. Really making me miserable. And she's like, I think, you know, I might have to leave him. And I'm thinking to myself, oh my goodness, like, you know, he's older and if she leaves him, he's going to want to move in with me. So like road trip. And so I went on a road trip, took my father out to the local coffee shop or sit and down. I can't take it anymore. This is what he's telling me.
I can't take it anymore. I'm like, that, like, tell me more. I can't take it anymore. I'm like, that's not enough information, Dad. Like what can't you take anymore? In the end, what I learned was that my father has three sons. All of us have doctorates. We're all independent. We're all successful. Her children were having struggles. And she was needing to babysit her grandchildren. My father didn't like that. My sons are all taking care of themselves.
You know, I want to, you know, he's not realizing this. But what he's saying is, I don't like the idea of you spending so much time with these grandkids because I want your attention. Now why do I tell you that? Because after my father and I spoke for about a half hour about this, I said, Dad, you know, it sounds like you're jealous. He's like, what do you mean I'm jealous? I said, well, you're upset that Jane, your wife wants to spend more time with the grandkids and that's not time with you.
And my emotion lexicon, I didn't use that term, you know, that's jealousy. I can't believe you're telling me I'm jealous. I'm like, I'm not telling you, you're telling me you're jealous. I'm just giving you the concept. Starts crying, stale or crying because he had awareness for the first time of his emotional experience. He was so emotionally illiterate. He just didn't know what he was feeling and he was just acting out.
Once he sat down and understood the experience of like, wife wants to be with child because they need support. I'm not happy with that because I don't know what to do with myself when she's spending time with the grandkids. It's jealousy. All of a sudden we had a pathway to helping him regulate. Now I'll finish the story by saying about two months later, Jane, she calls me, she's like, Mark, I don't know what you did at that coffee shop, but like your father's a change man.
And I don't take all the credit, take some credit, but it just shows you the power of emotional self-awareness. Once you really know how you're feeling, it can be liberating and then you can figure out what you need to do with those feelings. I'm laying that really sink in because I think these days we hear a lot about therapy, fortunately in my opinion. I think I'm going to get the numbers only crudely right, but they're certainly in the right direction and amplitude.
There was a survey done, I believe at Stanford, asking students how willing they would be to seek therapy if they were dealing with an emotionally trying time. And this was in the, I think early in mid 90s and the numbers that came back were very low. Somewhere in the teens are 20% of students pulled. Whereas nowadays it's in excess of 80 or 90%. Very high. Yeah. And I think that's representative of a lot of. Can I give you another example?
So here I am a professor at Yale teaching courses on emotional intelligence. Now I should just let you know there's resistance oftentimes. And my students are fantastic in general, but there's a resistance to wanting to learn about emotional intelligence. What they want to do in general is get an A in my course, but they don't, and they want to memorize like, oh, so the theory was written in 1990 by Mayer and Salivary. The Supreme Ed course. No, this is general. That was a joke.
That's love the pre-meds, but they they're very great conscious. I have stories about that too. And so I say, no, this is, this is about you developing the skills. Like this is going to be, you're going to think really critically about. And part of the essays you're going to write are going to be your action plans for building your own emotional intelligence. I don't want to do that. I want to, you know, get the test and take, you know, get the A. After a month, I get them bought in.
Immediately though, in my because I make my courses into research and I asked them to fill out surveys, how they're feeling, every class. Number one, emotion stressed. Everybody stressed. I'm thinking to myself, like, stressed out, like, you're going to a good life here. But nevertheless stressed, you know, I have to have empathy, I get it. But I decided that I really had a hard time. Remember, I defined stress as having too many demands and not enough resources.
I didn't feel like that was the actual feeling. Now, who might have judged? But one way to get better at it was to have my students do journaling. When you're stressed, write about it. What's on your mind? What are you thinking about? Take a guess what the number one emotion was after we did the qualitative analysis of journaling about stress. Yeah, what they were really feeling, fear. Okay. Envy. Oh, interesting. Envy. Envy. Your father is richer than my father.
Your mother is more connected than my mother. You've got better hips. You've got better lips. It was endless social comparisons. And so Envy is wanting what someone else has. And anxiety is about uncertainty. Stress is about two minute of man's, none of resources. And so here I was having deeper knowledge of what was the underlying feeling or emotion that they were having which was envy, not stress. And so I had a conversation with the counseling department. And I made a joke about it.
And I was like, you know, what's our university's envy reduction program? It wasn't the most popular conversation. And I just think it's interesting to think about it in terms of helping people to learn what to do with their emotions. You know, right now, there's a mindfulness craze. Everyone's doing mindfulness. And I do mindfulness. And I appreciate mindfulness.
But let me tell you, you know, when you're feeling chronic envy, you know, doing breathing exercises is not going to decrease the envy. You're going to have to work on your construction and your mind of your relationships with people. And so I just feel so strongly that we help people pause a little bit, reflect a little bit. Think about how they're feeling as a pathway to just having well-being. Your joke about envy reduction is something I take very seriously.
We did a four episode series with Dr. Paul Conti, who's a world expert in psychiatry, he's a psychiatrist, and among the very, very best psychiatrists in the world by many accounts. And he discussed during that series, but also on other podcasts he's appeared in, such as my friend Lex Friedman's podcast, that envy is actually the root of much of the evil in the world, small scale evil, large scale evil, and a lot of the despair that people feel.
And I think it's a word that isn't discussed enough, because the sound of it is kind of gross, right? Envious envy. Nobody wants to be associated with it. But fortunately, Dr. Conti described it as a natural human emotion in some cases.
But I had no idea, and I don't know if he knows, but maybe he does through his clinical work, but I'll certainly pass along what you just said to him, that so much of the stress that I have to imagine good people, and these students are, after all, I imagine, they're not evil. Very few. Not characterologically evil, let's hope. Are experiencing envy.
The wish to have more of what somebody else has, maybe something specific, which of course gets to these more common phrases of people feeling that they are not enough. Yeah. Which is going back to contentment. Right, I actually, oh, I didn't draw the arrow. Now I thought I'd draw the arrow between contentment and envy.
Right, so if one wants to combat envy, you can imagine that a program to combat envy might be perceived, if one didn't understand it, as a calling for people to just be content with less, which is not what we want, right? I mean, we want ambitious people in the world. We want people aspiring. We want people to have growth mindset. And yet, we don't want people to be stressed and have a pervasive feeling of envy inside either. So how would you make inroads into envy?
Well, I think, again, like all emotions, envy is not a bad emotion. You know, the way I think about emotions as being, you know, when we need to get help with our emotions, is when, if it's an unpleasant one, it's intense and long duration. Right, momentary envy. You know, I get envy is all the time. I get envy. I watch Ted Talks and I'm like, oh, that timing was amazing. You know, and I'm like, I'm going to try that out.
You know, so I use that envy of someone else's skill, you know, as a way to grow. How does that differ, sorry, to turn your own work back on you from admiration or inspiration? Like, wow, they, you know, like the... Yeah, that's what I'm getting at. So that's the difference between, you know, the envy that leans toward admiration versus the envy, like what you're referring to that leads to resentment. Right, it's if I hate you because you have, you know, what I want.
Now we're talking, you know, pathological envy, potentially. And so that's the self-awareness piece, you know, if that's the part of really getting, you know, that differentiation of emotion, that granularity. Because again, it's like anger, it's not a bad emotion. Anger's okay. There's reasons to be angry in the world. When we get treated unfairly, we should be angry. It doesn't mean that we have to be dysregulated.
Right, there's an assumption that we make that when we experience unpleasant strong emotions like anxiety or anger, you know, that we're going to be dysregulated. I have a whole new relationship with my anxiety, very different relationship. I mean, it's been years working on it. I notice it. And I'm like, hi, anxiety, how you doing today? And then it just, it's okay.
I can even be giving, you know, here with you or giving a speech or teaching, have that anxiety come in and not allow it to have power over me because I can observe it. I can welcome it. And then if it's in the way, I can say, you know, anxiety, you're going to go back there for a little while. Are you no more? I mean, sometimes, you know, when I give speeches, like it's the same speech, right? You think you're redundant. And it's like, I can't believe I have to talk about this again.
And then I'll look at the audience and like, it's their first time. You know, it's like, all of a sudden, like my despair turns into optimism and hope. That's all regulation. Conflict resolution is something that I think a lot about in any situation where emotions are discussed. And it brings me back to this earlier situation you were talking about where this woman said that she was going to find her child, somebody to help him to intervene. And you were thinking, well, why not?
Yes. This feeling's meant she was going to go, you know, buy his feelings mentor. Right. Exactly. And now there's a whole field of feelings mentors, like cropping up that actually wouldn't be such a bad thing. Hey, that's my another one of my goals. That wouldn't be such a bad thing. Sail ladder. I like that goal.
So when we were talking about that, one of the things that surfaced was this notion that some people have a natural empathic attunement or the emotion that the other person is feeling is a negative one and it's about us or about them. And as a consequence, you know, we're not able to really be present to help the person the way that you helped your dad. Like he was frustrated with his wife. Yes. How do you been to frustrated with you?
It might be a little bit, little bit more challenging to say, hey, well dad, maybe what you're experiencing in terms of your frustration with me is actually like, you're now in a tether with them. So to what extent is empathic attunement positive trait? Are there people who are better at turning it off or directing it in appropriate ways? Than others in a previous podcast that I did recently, somebody sitting right there in that chair told me and I believe them that I am codependent.
So first time anyone's ever called me that. Codependent, she defined it, she spelled it out and it in a very parsimonious way explained a huge array of challenges that I've experienced to the point where I've been learning more about codependence. All right. Not easy for me to say even though. Well, yeah. Independent. Yeah. Certainly depending on others is important. But certain, certain patterns fall well under the umbrella of codependency. So I was okay.
And even now I'm uncomfortable talking about, which is part of the reason I'm trying to desensitize myself to the word itself, let alone drilling into the process of getting through it. So the point being that if our emotions are so strongly tethered to others, we see that as empathy, we label that typically as positive, but it really diminishes our ability to be there for people if their emotions are negative and about us. I disagree. Okay. Great. That's fantastic.
Because that's empathy without emotional intelligence. And so I work with a lot of doctors. I've done quite a bit of work with the Cancer Hospital at Yale. It's called Smilow. And you know, doctors have been taught from early on, you know, like leave your empathy at the door. And I challenge that. You know, when you're a patient with cancer knowing that you may pass, the last thing you want is an unimpathic doctor. You want a relationship with someone who's treating you.
And the assumption is that you get lost in your empathy. And people have written about that. And it's true. There is overzealous empathy. You can have compassion, fatigue. But again, it's in the absence of, you know, emotional intelligence. What do I mean? Well, part of emotional intelligence is regulation. And so if I see my work as a cancer doctor as, you know, helping people have the best last few months of their lives, that's a really interesting way to think about it.
You know, so as I'm in relationship with my patient, my mindset is I've come to the understanding that my job, you know, people pass. But I could go down a rabbit hole of despair because everyone potentially may pass. Or I can see this as I'm giving someone a gift. I'm giving them a gift of my presence. I'm giving them a gift of them, you know, feeling held and cared for. And so to me, it's all about the framing, you know, of empathy.
Yes, of course, you know, if you're just, you can lose yourself and someone else's shoes. But that's not emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is saying, you know what? I've noticed myself. I'm getting lost in your feelings. I need to pull back a little bit. Do we know where in the brain empathy resides?
We hear so much about mirror neurons, but I think for those of us that have been in neuroscience and psychology long enough, we acknowledge, yes, there are appropriate conversations that include the words mirror neurons, but that they've been made out to be much more than perhaps they are in terms of empathy. And they've become sort of the default description for all forms of empathy and understanding. And it's not just that. So what do we know about the brain science of empathy?
I don't know much about that, to be honest. What I know more about is the kind of psychological experience of empathy and that there are multiple forms of it. So for example, there's the cognitive empathy piece where I, you know, I've never had your experience, but intellectually I get that you've suffered or intellectually get your experience.
There's the emotional empathy, which is, you know, when I meet other survivors of abuse who have felt shame, I understand what that means because I've lived there. And not that our experience was the same, but our feeling was the same. We have a shared emotional experience.
And then on top of that, that compassionate kind of form of empathy is what I think is what we need much more of in our society, which is we don't just cognitively understand where someone is or relate to their experience, but we feel compelled to be in relationship with that person and be supportive.
I'm thinking about something else that you spoke about earlier, which is this idea that like, and this is a misconstruel of my work and others work that the goal of this is to talk about feelings all day long. Like the last thing I want to do is talk about feelings all day long. Like that is not helpful, actually. And I've had some experiences in my life, you know, where like some, like, just to be blunt, shit happens, you know, and I call everybody I know, like my best friends, my family.
Can you believe this happened? I mean, I can't take it anymore. And then I hand the phone. I did the same thing and they all listen to me. And then I've spent two hours on the phone telling the same thing over and over again, talking about my feelings. And I feel worse because I've rehearsed it 15 times. That's an emotional intelligence. Right? When we're emotionally intelligent, we recognize and we know that just talking about it is actually not helpful.
Like, we need to be with someone who's that active listener who's non-judgmental, who shows compassion. But when you're compassionate, you actually are bringing you back to the person saying, you know, is this, you know, the right thing right now for you? You know, what else might you think about? You know, I know when I've had really difficult experiences, you know, the person who says things like, maybe could you just jump in the hot air balloon for a minute, Mark, and look down at your life?
And like besides this one thing that you feel like is the worst thing that's ever happened during your whole life, anything else going right? I mean, yeah, my partner loves me. My dog's loved me unconditionally. I got great friends. Oh, yeah. All of a sudden, that little thing that's activating it was not so big anymore. That's emotional intelligence, right? Because not getting lost in the empathy, not just endlessly talking about feelings to the point where there's no strategies.
And I think that that's really interesting because it goes back to something important, which is the permission to feel characteristics of non-judgment, active listening, and empathy compassion. Never. And I'm talking, I have tens of thousands of people who've done this. Does anyone say fixer, problem solver? I don't even get smart or wise. When we think about the people who create the conditions for us to be our true selves, we don't think about the wisest, smartest, fixer problem solver.
We think about the non-judgmental listener who shows compassion. And I just, I think that has to be reinforced that some of the fear that we have is that we're going to get lost in all these feelings, but no one's asking you to get lost in their feelings. What they're asking for is support. They're asking you to just listen and to maybe ask me a few questions to help me clarify my experience and then help me on a path towards feeling better.
Yeah. I keep hearing that the way to do this properly is to ask questions as opposed to telling people what they need to do. Your friend or this person who was an effective source of support in that moment said, can you get in the hot air balloon and look down on your life? I noticed that they didn't say get in the hot air balloon for a second. Exactly. And then do this as a former partner of mine said, who I'm still in great terms with. No one likes to be shifted.
Yeah. No one wants to be told what to do. No one wants to be shifted. No matter what state they're in, higher low, want somebody to come along and try and shift them. Or just tell them, go for a walk. Okay. Well, why am I going to do what? Or meditate. Yeah. That one's become equally grating. It's probably a great thing to do, but perhaps there's a different way posed in the form of a question that would be more effective. I think the hot air balloon example also brings to mind something.
I'll try and keep this as succinct as possible for your sake and for the audience sake. But having studied stress a bit in my laboratory and experienced a lot of stress as most people have in their lifetime, it's very clear that when we stress our mental aperture, our visual aperture, our auditory aperture, everything shrinks. It contracts. And we know that getting a different spatial perspective gives us a different temporal perspective.
And start thinking about our life, bend in larger pieces and get that perspective of the things that in life that are going well. There's a meditation that, I guess it's a meditation, I don't know what to call it, that I started doing years ago when I was a junior professor because life was so stressful. Ten year and little to little.
I know that it just continues to be stressful, but a pleasure to do the work that involves basically doing a standard type meditation for a few breaths of closing my eyes and focusing on my body and what's going on internally, but then opening my eyes and focusing on something external like my hand or the room and then going to the pale blue dot. Sure. It's a very wide aperture. So effectively the hot air balloon looking down. It's distancing. It's distancing.
Right, and making this a practice, not in a moment of stress, but each morning as I start the day, as a kind of reminder that our brains, our cognition and our emotions go through tremendous state differentiation, like these complete, we're kind of different people under these different space time references. And that when we're in stress, we tend to get locked into one space time reference. And I'm not trying to be, you know, cosmic about this, but that's true.
You know, the nature of stress is to have us anchor to the stressor. Correct. So we've got mental walls to break out of that and physical walls. So it sounds like great supporters and we can help ourselves through the more unpleasant portions of the emotion scale if we want to by taking ourselves into this different perspective, using spatial tools, hot air balloon, pale blue dot. Questions to yourself say things like Mark.
I mean, I travel a lot and, you know, I was just in Washington state for some presentations before this light delays. Am I like a canceled? I missed a dinner and I used to get really worked up about it. And I would just then I just take a seat at the airport, take a nice long inhale. I'm like, Mark, is this really going to be something that's going to bother you next week? I'm working on a book. I'm like, I got another night in a hotel to work.
I actually reframed it as an opportunity to like have some space and write. And so you can use these techniques a lot going back to my dad. So my dad, as he got older, his anger did come back and he was kind of, they were, I remember this one, you know, time where we're at a family dinner and I had already been, you know, in my position for a while.
And there was some a little bit of resentment with my father because, you know, he was a little collar worker and a very, very talented air conditioning repairman and had a good career. But all of a sudden, you went to graduate school and got PhDs and that was, you know, it was a little bit difficult for my father at some time. And so when I got a job at Yale in particular, you know, he got a little, there was some emotions about that.
And I remember we were at this one dinner and basically he, I'm not going to repeat what he said because it's really gross. But he said something like, you know, Mark, you think your blank doesn't stink anymore. And I was like, eesh. And then he just kind of went on and on and on and I had to make a choice. Like do I start crying, you know, like in the middle of the dinner because I feel so violated by my father.
Do I like tell him to go blank himself and walk out of the room and I decided to use a distancing technique. I decided to make him into a movie. I decided that he was now a TV show and that TV show was something I was observing and not feeling.
And that has proven to be one of the most powerful strategies for me is when I'm in a position with someone who has a lot of negative energy and as a kid who was bullied, I'm more affected by these things, I think I create that psychological distance by just putting that picture frame up there and I just observe it. And I kind of ask myself questions about it. I'm like, wow, or I say things like, you know, wow, that's really interesting. I wonder where that I get curious about it.
Like, I wonder where that's coming from. You know, what was his childhood like that? He's so angry. And it really is helpful. So these are very powerful techniques that can be used in real time as you just very real time. I use them all the time. You know, at the grocery store, you know, we're not going to get into my issues. But, you know, I'm like, I grew up with, you know, I would say lower middle class. We were very, we didn't have a lot of money. Everything was on a budget.
And you know, I'm fortunate to be in a different circumstance now, but I'm still cheap. And so my partner where I'm like, I don't understand like, we're not buying that. Like that is ridiculous. Like, we're not spending seven dollars on a bottle of organic almond milk. You know, like, I'm not doing it. We're not doing it. And then I have to like, move away from the aisle. You know, I'm like, you know, is this worthy relationship, the almond milk like really? Is this what you're going to do?
And so like, I don't know. Maybe I'm just the only one who needs regulation like 300 times a day. But I find that I, you know, different strategies like the picture frame works when I'm angry or someone is angry with me. My anxiety, I get into the head are balloon and I look down when I'm like, irritated with someone. I take to walk away and I ask myself, is this really that important?
And that's what I hope people will learn is that there's so many amazing strategies out there and that we use them interchangeably with different emotions and different contexts. While a lot of the stereotypes dating back to the, you know, let's just say in 1930s through to the end of the 1970s seem to couch people as more stoic, less emotionally expressive especially in public or with people that they weren't very close with.
There was also a tendency at least in movies about that time for people who were passionate to be rewarded for expressions of their passion. So it's kind of two ends of the spectrum, right? We always think of the kind of the real stoic thing, both for male and female phenotypes, right? You look at movies from the like the 30s and 40s, but you also saw intense expression, passionate expression.
And now I suppose we're in a bit of a new place where I think there's an invitation, I like to think there's an invitation for a broader range of emotional expressions and phenotypes, let's call them on my biologist after all. It's also a safe word to use still. I think you can use the word phenotypes. Stereotypes is a bit loaded. A lot loaded. But emotionality and the notion of people being overly emotional has unfortunately a bit of a negative change to it.
Whereas somebody being passionate, that sounds like a pretty good thing. Well emotional is like historically like your hysterical. It means that you are not in control of your emotions. I don't like to use that term ever, I just find it a useless term. So that's when, oftentimes when people think about emotions, they think of people being emotional. And I just don't even know what that means. It just, it has like just connotations from the past that I don't think are helpful.
Maybe that's why my graduate advisor said instead of telling you to be careful, I'll tell you to be mindful because the opposite of mindful is mindless and then you'll remember. Yeah, and also exactly. And by going by like, you'll hear people say, why are you so emotional? And again, that's a place of judgment. What they're saying is that you're experiencing a strong emotion that's making me uncomfortable. I don't know what to do with that feeling.
So by me labeling you as emotional, I can alienate you. Where is that going to lead to? Not good communication, right? Not healthy relationships. And yet we reward people still for being passionate. Even if it's tinged with some anger. Like if somebody has a cause that they're really passionate about, we don't necessarily say they're being emotional, we say they're really passionate about this. There seems to be a subtle difference. There is.
That maybe it's rooted in kind of a trajectory of like trying to achieve a specific outcome whereas just anger or sadness kind of just, you know, guys are in out of us. It doesn't seem like it's directed towards an end point. It's where the emotional is. The emotional is a judgment, right? When I say, you know, Andrew, you're so emotional, right? It's also can be a form of gaslighting, right?
Which is I'm trying to get you to believe something about yourself that I want you to believe, which may not be a reality at all, which is usually problematic in our society. I think most of our low self esteem comes from gaslighting in our childhoods. People gaslighting each other.
Yeah, I think it's the beginning of bullying, which is that, you know, mark your two skinny, mark your two over weight, mark your nose is too big, mark your nose is too small, mark your two feminine, mark your two masculine. And then all of a sudden there's no feelings, mentors. There's no education. And I just start believing in it. And then it becomes my reality. It's like a self-affilling prophecy. And it's awful. I mean, you see it all the time. We're not born being self-critics.
We're born being experience dependent, right? We depend on relationships. And if those relationships are meaning cruel and people are gaslighters, well, guess what? That's going to end up being how we think about ourselves. In your book, you include a number of really wonderful quotes, but one of them that I anchored to very quickly is the following. All learning has an emotional base. And it was none other than Plato that said that.
What is the relationship between emotions and learning and decision-making? Let's think about right now, right? Our interaction, right? As a teacher. Right? How many of you have ever been, meaning, your listeners and youth? Like how many of us have ever been in a situation in a classroom where it's like, all right, everybody, let's turn to page 3.57. All right, Mark, you're going to read paragraph one and Andrew, you're going to read paragraph two. And your brain is immediately gone.
So emotions drive our attention. It's so clear, right? If we're not feeling engaged or curious, we're going to be bored. And again, boredom, not a bad emotion. It just means like what's being presented to me and the way it's being presented is not meeting my needs. It's not engaging me. So my brain needs to do something. I'm just going to go doodle. I'm going to go push the kid here. I'm going to get on my phone. It's just where we want to, our brains are wanting to do things.
When we're in environments where there's a lot of curiosity, where there is high engagement, attention is much better. So that's the simplest thing. To think about. In my work, my whole career has been about building curriculum to help educators integrate emotions into their everyday classroom. And part of what we help them understand, going back to that mood meter, think about that for a minute. You know, a lot of us, because of our dispositions, we tend to speak with a certain cadence.
We tend to present in a certain way. And if you're someone who lives in the green, you're just calm and content and tranquil and peaceful, the spa people. All right. Some of the yoga teachers, let's all turn our attention to ourselves. They're great. I love yoga. But my point is, if you're always in that green quadrant, for me, even though I'm living there a lot, it's like, give me some energy, please.
And then there's like, I have a friend who is a principal of a middle school in San Francisco and she's a former tennis coach and she walks into this school, let's go, go, go, go every day. It's like, Heather, come on. You're overwhelming me. And then you've got people who might be in that kind of, you know, blue quadrant. You know, it's like, we've done some education work in the past, you know. And let's be real. How much education reform really matters.
You know, Mark, you do all this research, but who's reading it? Does anybody really reading it? Legend Downer. Yeah. I know that person who's always in the red, right? That's activated, you know, like it's caustic. You know, and so my point here is that, you know, we're going to default in many ways to being in one of these quadrants.
Maybe all day long, maybe part of the day, but as someone who is leading, like, because I consider leadership teaching, someone who's managing a team as a teacher in a classroom, as a parent, couple, whatever. I've got to be aware of kind of where I live emotionally, and I've got to be aware that not everybody wants to be with me where I'm at. And my job is to create an emotional rollercoaster ride for people, to bring people on an emotional journey, because that's going to keep them interested.
And believe it or not, from our research and others research, we know that certain emotions are better for certain things. So for example, if I want my high school students to be like really brainstorming ideas, I'm not going to put on like a Gregorian chant. You know, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, it's like, oh, I'm going to put on, you know, go back to Gladiaga, you know, I'll be a Jet Glory, and like, let's get pumped up and like, everybody, let's get the Posts out there.
And everybody's excited and just brainstorming. But then, you know, which one of we, like, what's going to be the project? You can't be all hyped up, because then your brain is not in a very kind of a building consensus kind of model mode. So when we bring our energy level down, it's like, oh, let me think about it for a minute. It's more your more thoughtful, you're more careful, you're more like, I don't know.
And like people would say, well, why would blue, why would, you know, unpleasant, low energy be helpful? Well, believe it or not, oftentimes we can be much more detailed oriented when we're in that low energy unpleasant place. It's like writing a, I do a lot of grant writing, right? It's like, I think it's great. Not a great idea.
Like put on the classical music, like zone everybody out, get into that place where you are going to look for every eye to dot, every comma that should be a semi colon, every dash, it should be this paragraph matching. You can't do that when you're really super excited. It just isn't, your brain doesn't operate that way. And then people say, red, like, why would red be great?
The best story I have for that is, so I actually did a collaboration with Lady Gaga and her foundation, born this way foundation many years ago, and we did a study of thousands of high school students across America. And we looked at how do they feel when they're in school? And what we found was 77% of the feelings, and I repeat that, 77% of their emotions at school were unpleasant, tired, bored, and stressed with the top three back then. So we did this study.
We were working on it as a big project called the emotion revolution, and we ended up going to the White House to present our findings. I had to make a decision. Like I had the secretary of education at that time in front of me. I'm presenting this big study on the emotional lives of teenagers. Do I want to go in there like, you know, I've got an amazing study to share with you. I'm like, hmm, that's so great.
Do I want to go in there like, secretary, let's just take a nice long inhale in an exhale. That's not going to go over so well. I want to go in the blue like, you know, it's pretty bad out there. Now I decided that red was my quadrant. I wanted the people in the education department to be fired up by this research. I want them to be, I want them to feel the passion that I had and the anger that I had that it is an injustice for kids to feel that way in our nation schools.
We need to figure out what to do to create a more engaging learning environment. And so I decided to really present that in that way. I didn't present the findings and like, look at the data. I'm like, I want you to really take a look at these data. Please, 77% of the, I'm saying 77% of the emotions tired, bored and stressed. How is that going to lead to a nation filled with people who are innovative and creative and making a difference in the world? Think about it.
We know how emotions drive the way we behave. If you're tired, bored and stressed all day long, what's the result? And so I presented that way. And, you know, I did the best I could. And I think that's the magic of understanding emotion.
Does this resonate that we're going to, we're going to be intentional about the emotions that we feel and that the emotions that we create in environments, whether they're at home or at school or in the workplace because certain emotions work better for certain things. Yeah, your examples bring me back to your earlier mention of this brilliant five-year-old kid who realized that his current emotional state was like the weather. It's going to change.
In order to have that perspective, my guess is that he had to have already, at some point, moved from the blue quadrant. So low energy, low pleasantness to the green quadrant. Right. High pleasantness, low energy to the yellow quadrant, perhaps not in this order. And yes, I'm using this to remind people about the quadrants. Higher energy, higher pleasantness, and then red, high energy, low pleasantness. Yes. Because he's checking in daily, right?
So in this school, which we call a ruler school, that's what they do. Kids check in in the morning and other times throughout the day. And they start to recognize that I can feel this way at one point of the day and I can feel this way at another point of the day. And if I'm feeling this way and I'm about to do something where that feeling is not great, I can shift out of that feeling or I can still feel that feeling and still be a good learner.
I mean, that's incredible to me that we can do that. And I see it in thousands of schools and it's done remarkably well. And you've developed an app that's freely available that allows people to essentially press the screen, right? And to denote where they are on this energy versus pleasantness scale at numerous times throughout the day and night if they choose, we'll provide a link to this app and show no caps. It's called How We Feel.
I've used it before and a previous version I need to update and get the new version and I will. I found it to be immensely useful just to start thinking about emotions along this energy versus pleasantness axis.
After one does this for a few days or weeks, you know, maybe checking in and touching the app, I don't know, a couple of times a day, maybe again in the evening upon waking, what sort of data or information does one get back that can be informative toward being a healthier, happier person, app, excuse me, a healthier person. More content. More content.
Well, what's really cool about the app and the reason why we have an app is that technology can be super helpful in this instance for building self-awareness. So if I set reminders, what you can do on the app to check in in the morning, maybe after lunch or right before I go home, you pick whatever works for you. Or you can do it randomly. And then you aggregate your data across time. Right now you have instances of your emotions over time.
But what's also cool about it is that you can disaggregate your data by things like who you're with or where you're at or what you're doing. And then you can analyze that. So you get your little mood meters that are all different colors because, wow, I thought I was more in the yellow at work, but I'm actually more in the blue at work. Before I thought when I'm with this person, I'm actually feeling calm. Actually when I look at my data, I'm always anxious with that person.
So it runs a reverse correlation. Yes. Fantastic. And then you can just look at your report and then it asks you questions to get more insights. And also importantly, we've embedded a lot of the strategies that I've been talking about.
So like these distancing strategies or the breathing exercise of the mindfulness exercises or gratitude exercises, which by the way, I was thinking in the back of my head as we were speaking about the NV reduction program, I think the number one thing is gratitude. That like if where brains are just endlessly searching for what's better that's out there than what I have, we're not experiencing any gratitude for what we have.
And so I spend a lot of time helping people really understand like, take a look, like look where you're at as a student. Think about what you have the opportunity to learn. Think about the opportunities you have in life. And all of a sudden it's like, oh yeah, my life is pretty good. As opposed to everyone else's life is better than mine. So gratitude for me, sometimes it feels cliche these days, you need to have heard so much about it.
I know I can't talk strongly enough about both the practice and the science that supports it. Amen to that. When I did an episode about gratitude now some years ago, I was positively shocked to see the data. The data on gratitude practices are so striking in terms of whether or not one looks at neurotransmitter or expression or whether one looks at happiness rating scales. Sure. Learning ability to learn so many things are improved by even short gratitude practices. Exactly.
And it was interesting for me to realize that not only do effective gratitude practices include thinking about what one has, but also in observing others expressing their own gratitude either towards us or towards others. Yeah. So there's something about the human brain that really thrives on gratitude. And the other thing that I think is worth mentioning, you said these students could through a gratitude practice realize the opportunity that they have.
I think a lot of people default to the assumption that a gratitude practice will make them complacent. Yeah. And stop seeking to reach their goals. But actually the opposite is true. There's a smaller research as far as I understand. Maybe it's expanded in recent years where if people do a regular gratitude practice, even five minutes a day, their achievement actually increases as well. So gratitude and complacency are not on, they're not in the same bin. Yeah, exactly.
These are all evidence-based strategies to help us have a better life. So clearly you're on a mission and it's a wonderful, in fact admirable, wanted that to bring more emotional awareness. Can we call it that? Emotional awareness to kids and to adults to better the world. I don't think I'm overreaching there. I think that's the goal. I'd like to get back to your origin story a bit to understand a little bit more about the motivation behind the goal.
You've written about in your book and you've spoken a little bit today about the fact that you were bullied pretty viciously. And also were the target of abuse. And when one thing's about bullying in particular, we, I think all, hopefully naturally default to, okay, how can we stop bullies? But I'm guessing this is a two-sided issue and I'm not trying to create empathy for bullies here.
But I'm guessing that in order to really disintegrate the bullying problem down to zero, which would be the ultimate goal. Sounds great to me. That we need to get into the minds of both the bullied and the bullies. And as uncomfortable as that might be, maybe this is an opportunity to embrace some of the very practices that you've been talking about. So if you would, could you tell us a little bit about how, as a kid, how you perceived your bullies? I'm very curious about that.
I can say I've never been bullied, but I've also not been a bully. I can easily say, I was thinking about this during our brief break there. I hate bullies. Like I hate them. I'm like right there in the red, no pleasantness, like top, top corner there. Like it activates me physically. Like it makes me angry, makes me want to do something about it. But as somebody who was bullied, how did you perceive your bullies? Did you think they were like correct or the authority?
And how have you embraced whatever understanding that was and morphed it over time to be able to think about how to solve the bullying problem, both from the perspective of the bullied and the bully? Yeah, that's going to have a couple of days together for this. You know, I think when I think about my eight-year-old self, 10-year-old self, 11-year-old self being bullied, remember, bullying is about a power imbalance. That's one of the core elements of it.
It's about the intent to harm, which is that it's not conflict. It's not like sibling rivalry. It's intention to harm with as a power imbalance and how long and the repetition of it. Those are the three key factors in bullying. It's repeated. It's intended to harm and is a power imbalance. And so that puts you in a really powerless position when you think about it.
When you have nobody to support you, no upstanders, no one else around you to help you get out of this situation, what happens is that you feel fear. And what I felt, and it's been the emotion that I've struggled with my whole life, a shame. What happens when you're bullied often is that you are made to feel like you are not worthy. It's diminished self-worth because I've got power over you. I want to do whatever the hell I want to you. I want to say whatever I want to say.
I want to spit on you. I want to throw you into the locker. I want to do crazy stuff, which is what happened to me. And guess what? There's nothing you can do about it. And when you're in an environment where nobody does anything about it, it creates despair. So you can see how there's a lot of emotions there. And I'll tell you right now, one of my hardest memories of being a student in around 10, I mean, when I was around 10 years old, is that I remember being in a classroom in math.
And I was wearing like a vest, like a down vest as a protection. It was like my thing to hold on to, like my little vest was going to be protective of me. The only problem was I had two bullets sitting on either side of me. And what they did throughout the entire class was they used pen and they just wrote things about me on my jacket. And I can still remember like you're sitting across from me, you being my teacher.
And I can still remember locking eyes with my teacher and him just looking away. And that feeling that you have of complete despair, like how is it that I'm not being protected, you know, by this adult in my community. And so that's the issue that we're trying to solve for. Now I could make all kinds of excuses about the teacher. Maybe he didn't really notice, I don't buy it because it was repeated over time and it was happening a lot.
I could also say that, you know, maybe he misread my facial expression. I'm not buying that either. I think it was either he had a mindset, you know, this is a right-up passage. You got a tough enough kiddo or you're not going to survive in your Clifton High School. Or another point is that he just was like, I have no idea what to do about it. And I'm just going to let it go. None of those are an option for me anymore. This is not acceptable. And so we need to teach people skills.
People need to be emotionally perceptive. Like emotions are signals. I mean, that's an important point of this conversation. My facial expression, which was probably one of depression, fear and shame, which is not one of a big smile in general. Obviously there's variability. But point is that it's pretty clear when you're wearing a jacket and sitting like this in your classroom with a hoodie on, you know, doing your work and people are writing on you, you're not in a good place.
How that perception of my experience, my emotion was not a signal to do something below as my mind. It blows my mind. I'm just saying, I can't imagine an adult being in a situation with a child that is being treated that way and not thinking action. But yet we see it all the time. All the time we see it. Even nowadays. All the time. By the way, the research shows that bullying has not really decreased in the last 30, 40 years. Really? No. It is not.
It's pretty much about a third of middle school high school kids get bullied each day in school. And so this is the point of my work, which is that a lot of the programs out there are like, let's create school rules. All right. Who's going to follow these rules? Like, what is how are rules teaching people skills? It's not working. My whole thinking about this is that we need to teach the things that we've been talking about.
Empathy, perspective taking, you know, doing role plays, having people understand what it feels like to be in that situation. Like you said, you've never been bullied, right? And never have bullied, which is great for you. Which means it might be harder for you to understand that because the empathy for you might be a little tougher. Yeah. That's part of the reason I asked the question.
I mean, I was debating to myself whether or not I asked it in that way because I didn't want to come across as insensitive. No. I've certainly, precisely because I have sat on neither side of the bullying equation that it's kind of a foreign thing to me. It also makes me realize, and especially now after what you just said, that while I was in high school, I'm guessing there was a lot of bullying. I'm sure you might have witnessed it. And I missed it.
Yeah. You know, I had some friends that could definitely be classified as misfits. Yeah. And I think looking back, they hung out with my group of friends because we were definitely different. We were into different things. We weren't, we, you know, me, meaning my peers grew up in the John Hughes film era where you had like the jocks versus the hippies versus the skateboarders versus the burnouts. Exactly. And I had my crowd and was friends with a number of people outside that crowd.
But there were these kids that would hang around us that weren't into the same things that we were. And I am looking back and realizing now that they did it because they were definitely safe with us. And that's your fun. We can be a little scary if we wanted to be, but we weren't the type to go out and be scary. So we, I think they must have sent some safety with us. And I actually have very fond memories of those kids and know some of them still now.
So yeah, I asked that way in part because I realized I missed a lot. Well, Lord knows I missed a lot of what was going on in high school for other reasons. But I just missed a lot of this.
And I think in even an academic culture as an adult, I, not now, but I certainly witnessed bullying at meetings more that was more demonstrative where people would make fun of people in general in a way that I felt suppressed the likelihood that people would ask questions, which is a kind of different form of posturing and bullying, right? They make students afraid to raise their hand and ask questions at meetings, for instance. It's intimidation. Right. Intimidation. And I experienced that too.
I remember when I was younger in my career, I was giving a speech and people were like, oh, he does the field research, you know, like in school, that's soft science. And I was very, very fortunate and I was hurt by it because it's like, by the way, like doing your, you know, experiment the laboratory with your sophomores in college is a lot easier than trying to randomize 60 schools in Brooklyn and Queens, New York and trying to find effects of your program. It's hard research.
Really difficult. Even just working on humans is hard for those of us that have worked on both animal models which I no longer do in humans, which I've done and do. Working on humans is that much harder for all sorts of reasons. They're not on the same genetic background. Exactly. Just put them in their cage, take them out, same like different like dark cycles, some slept well, some didn't sleep well. I mean, there are issues with animal work as well.
But yeah, just even embracing human research at all is an immense challenge. So the idea that it would be viewed as soft is, I mean, that's just like laughable to me, but. Exactly. But I was very fortunate that there was a professor, a very senior professor. His name was Ed Ziggler, he was one of the co-founders of Head Start. And he was like my, he became my adult Uncle Marvin.
And I'm giving this speech and all these people are like trying to like really like demolish the presentation and my research. And he was revered because he was like this famous developmental psychologist. And he just stood up and he's like, he slams the table. He's like, I like this research. I'm like, and I love you. He's like, I needed you to stand up for me because I'm like the stupid, not the stupid, I'm like the little postdoc here, right? Like I need support.
And so, you know, my argument is that it's a human right to be protected, right? Now I could protect myself now, right? Of course I can, but I'll have to, I'll give you another example of this. Gosh, this is a really tough one for me. I would say eight years ago, I was giving a speech at our university. To a bunch of funders.
And it was me and another professor who I will not name, who is bigger than I am and bigger personality than I am and has a kind of rough reputation of being kind of a bully. I went on first. Now, granted, I'm a pretty good presenter. And he was going on after. And I just, thank you. I went to the side. He gets on. Now I actually did a presentation on bullying as I'm not that's what I'm thinking about it. All right, I'm, I get off stage. I'm setting them, you know, everybody else.
He gets on stage and changes his presentation and shows a video of a kid being horrifically bullied, which has nothing to do with his research. And I'm thinking what the hell's going on here? And he plays a video. He's like doing that, like laughing to himself. And he's like, you know, I just wanted to let people know that was Mark before he got his black belt. And I'm like, what a dick. Yeah, it was not cool.
And I felt like, firstly, it was really interesting to me as a psychologist is that in that moment, I regressed to 10 years old. It was psychologically all the memories of all the feelings and the bodily reactions. I was like, boom. And then, you know, luckily, you know, I do have a fifth or a black belt. Luckily I have a PhD in psychology. Luckily I have had ten years of therapy and I've been teaching emotional intelligence for 25 years. I'm like, Mark. You're 50. You've got a black belt.
Like it took me a lot to recover. And I had to make a choice because like I'm still intimidated by that. And it makes me sad to even admit it because I don't like that I'm at this place in my life where I still can be intimidated by the bullies, but it's how I feel. And I have to just accept that. And I decided though in that presentation was like, Mark, like you got to say something. You're going to prove to yourself that you can do it.
And so after he was over, you know, I waited a little while and I just went up to him and I said, you know, I have no idea what motivated you to show that video. But number one, it was not cool. And number two, it can never happen again. Never. You know, I can cry now thinking about it because it was very difficult for me, even as an adult. And of course, I ran away. I didn't run away. But I, you know, I took my breaths.
I felt proud, you know, that I was able to handle myself, which, you know, may sound strange to some people, you know, being an adult who's a psychologist, you know, who has a fifth of a rebogs belt. I have to reinforce that now to make myself feel strong. But it was such a powerful, it was a great moment for me, one of like having the courage to face the bully.
And interestingly enough, the guy never, he was, he turned his, he, he treated me like I was like the president of the university after that. And so my point of telling that story is that like I was 50. Like that's old to only, to cultivate the skills that I needed, right, to be able to deal with that very difficult situation.
And my dream is that, you know, I always, you know, I say, I tell people, I'm so envious of that kindergartener because I've been lucky enough to be the developer of the curriculum, but I didn't live it. And so it, talking about neuroscience, like I'm not wired like that five-year-old. It's going to be wired because they're growing up in an environment or every day they're checking in on their feelings. It reminds me of just another story. I was in a school in Brooklyn.
And I mean, kids, this one school has been using our program for a decade. And they wanted, the kids wanted to meet me. And the principal of the school who's my former student, he said, you can ask Mark anything. And it's like, why do you do this and what motivates you? And, and I was telling these kids the story of my childhood. And this one girl, she must have been in sixth grade, she said, I mean, it's really hard for me to understand your experience. I said, why?
She's like, I've been going to the school since I'm in kindergarten. And I can't think of a day that someone didn't ask me how I was feeling. It's powerful. You know, when you think about, like her, and neural development, right, all the pathways that are being built for this person or these children and thousands of schools to be learning their feelings, understanding where they're, you know, why they're feeling the way they're
feeling to interact with other kids and see how they're feeling and how they express their feelings and how they deal with their feelings and learning strategies together in a cooperative environment to cultivate and how they get more complex with development, right? Because in kindergarten, you're learning about sadness and disappointment. But then you're learning about despair and alienation and exclusion. And that's what makes this work so interesting is that these concepts evolve.
Throughout our lives, right? Think about it. I mean, what anger meant to me when it was five is not what it meant to me when it was 10 or 15 or 25 or now 55. Your description of confronting this bully. I don't even want to call them your colleague because there's nothing collegial about that. I agree. I thought it was an embarrassment for the university.
But more importantly, the fact that you were able to confront them is to me and I think to anybody that hears that story, the definition of courage. Yeah. You know, because it's in the moments where we feel like this big and we're collapsed on ourselves and we don't know where the resources are and we don't have somebody sitting there like holding our shoulders saying, listen, I'm going to go talk to them or let's go talk to them that you did that for yourself.
You internalize the lessons you'd learned initially from your uncle and brought that forward. And I think anyone hearing that story, it's obvious to them that that is the great act of courage.
And it's an inspirational one too and a reminder that for people that are being bullied as adults as well, that it's important to calmly but directly and firmly express, like you basically gave them a no, like a really strong like no, like you would do a puppy that was like putting itself in danger or something except in this case, it's a human being who had agency and so he needed a sharp, he needed to be punished slightly.
Yeah, he needed to be educated about boundaries and about how this game of being a colleague is played. Well, certainly not rewarded. You're right, punished isn't the right word. He certainly, whatever dopamine hit he got from that that part of the antic was just needed, that needed to be retracted. That needed to be taken away from him. Yeah, and I think that we should spend a minute on punishment because it never works.
You know, unless it's consistent, harsh and nobody wants to be punished because it doesn't feel good and it doesn't teach people anything, right? Go to your room. What does that teach me? Teach me to go to my room and room and a and get angry. I've been in schools that are not using our model. You know, I'll never forget this one moment where I was in a principal's office, a kid had given the teacher the finger and got thrown to the office and it was a Tuesday.
And it was Tuesday before the next week was going to be a holiday break. And the, you know, it was a two day suspension, you know, forgiving the teacher the finger, but that was going to be till Thursday and then Friday, you know, after that, there'd be a week break. And I literally heard the principal say, let's just make it three days. So I went up to see this kid for 10 days. And I'm thinking, what is this person learning about empathy, about self-regulation, about emotional awareness?
They're learning nothing. They're going to be thrown out with no skills in an environment that's probably not supportive. And so I just think this has to change. And it still does happen. Not as often, thank goodness. I'm a prevention scientist. So I don't want to wait until everyone has an anxiety disorder and everyone's been bullied.
I want to cultivate a society where people have the skills they need to navigate their emotions and not to build healthy relationships and make sound decisions and have good mental health and achieve their dreams. And it occurred to me just now that you're effectively doing what your uncle did for you, but for millions and millions of people. You know, God bless Uncle Marvin. I have a, you know, as you know, now the storyteller.
But one of the most profound moments of my career was just after I had written my book and I was on my book tour, I'm in Westchester, New York, and I'm giving a speech. And I had never spoken about my uncle in that level of detail, nor my abuse, by the way. I was talking about courage. It was not until 48 writing this book that decided, like, people asked me, like, why are you so passionate? And I would say I hated school.
I was bullied, but I believe I was robbed of my emotional life as a child because of the abuse. And you know, my circumstances. And I felt I needed to just share that a little bit, not the focus, but I needed to be, I needed to be real. So I'm sharing about Uncle Marvin, the sixth great teacher from Monticello, New York State. And this guy has this like, like that woman in the audience. He had an epiphany.
He's like, are you talking about Marvin Moore, the sixth great social study teacher from Monticello New York? I'm like, yes. He's like, Mark, you're not going to believe it's about your uncle, Marvin, was my uncle Marvin. I'm like, are you kidding me? He's like, your uncle was my sixth great teacher 45 years ago. And he's the reason why I teach. I was blown away. I was like, I was shaking so excited that I never met one of my uncle's actual students. Because you know, we worked when I was older.
He was older. And so I, I sense it again. I got to finish my speech, but can I interview you afterwards? He's like, yeah, I, I, I, so I interview this guy. I have an on tape. Forty five minutes. What he remembered about his sixth great social studies class. I mean, I have no memories of my social studies class. This guy remembered details of my uncle's facial expression, body language, the way he taught feelings, the way he taught history. It was on and on and on. But here's the kicker.
So we're done with this conversation and he looks at me and he's like, you know, markets. It's really clear that your uncle had a profound influence on your life. And so I just have one question for you. For whom were you in Uncle Marvin? And it just like, like, I'm the professor here. I'm the one who does the teaching, right? I do the research. You don't ask me questions like that. And it was so eye opening for me about just, you know, my life in terms of how I spend my time with my own family.
And am I giving that non-judgment? Am I giving that active listening? Am I showing my empathy and compassion? I'm like, I'm a workaholic. You know, I write papers. I'm not living it. And it really has made a profound difference for me. You know, I really try hard to be in Uncle Marvin. And it's tough because time, right? All the factors that we talked about earlier. But gosh, you know, if we only had more of those in our world.
Well, it's absolutely clear to me that you're extremely passionate about this mission of teaching people what emotions are and how to work with them, given them really clear systems to do that, tools that they can do that.
And I think it's fair to say that you answered your own question in my opinion, if I may, that, you know, you through your Uncle Marvin to you and through the work that you do and through your public education effort, which includes your graciousness in coming here and sharing with us what you know, what you believe people can benefit from. And it's absolutely clear to me that people can so benefit from these tools.
And what you put into your book, which does include some very personal things that I must say are entirely couch toward the reader understanding and learning how they can make themselves and others and the world a better place. It's really extraordinary. I appreciate that. The rippling out effect is not a sufficient way to describe it.
It's really an enormous amplification of the hard work you've done and I'm just really, really in awe of the fact that you've taken hard experiences and transmuted those into so much good. And so on behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching, I just want to extend an enormous debt of gratitude. This is truly important work. And I don't say that lightly. I really appreciate that. Thank you.
Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Mark Brackett to learn more about his work and to find links to his book Permission to Feel, which by the way I highly recommend. As well as other links to his laboratory and other resources, please see the links in the show note captions. If you're learning from and are enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us.
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