Marc Brackett || Become an Emotion Scientist

It's great to have Mark Brackett on the podcast. Doctor Mark Brackett is founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and as Professor and the Child Study Center, Yale School of Medicine at Yale University. His research focuses on the role of emotions and emotional intelligence and learning,

decision making, creativity, relationships, health and performance. Mark is the lead developer of rore in evidence based systemic approach to SEL that has been adopted by over two thousand preschool to high schools around the United States and in other countries.

He has published one hundred and twenty five scholarly articles and received numerous awards, including the Joseph E. Zen's Award for his research and social emotional learning He is also on the board of directors for the Coaberative for Academic,

Social and Emotional Learning KASSEL. For short. Mark consults regularly with corporations like Facebook, Microsoft, and Google on integrating emotional intelligence principles into employee training and product design, and as co founder of og life Lab, a digital emotional intelligence learning system for businesses. His research has been featured in popular media outlets such as The New York Times, USA Today,

Good Morning America, and NPR. He's the author of Permission to Feel, Unlocking the Power of Emotions to help our kids, ourselves, and our society Thrive, which is published by Celadon Books, which is also a division of McMillan if you're curious about that, and it has been translated into fifteen language. Is doctor Brackett? So great to chat with you today? You too? Thank you? Scott. Well, we go way back, don't we we do? I was your tas that was

the grand reveal. I thinkteen How many years ago? Is that? Oh? My god? Maybe fifteen years ago? It could have been. Yeah. I think I teaed for two of your classes, intern to Personality and intro to psych. I think it was interesting, but yeah, I remember just being in all of you, you know, like standing in the back of the classroom there as a ta be like, Oh, I hope I can be as funny as Mark someday you were. Oh, you're right, You've done pretty well. Thank you, Thank you.

You're really funny and a good teacher. So congratulations on this book. We're all really proud of you. And I wanted to just open up by asking how are you feeling what? You know, The truth is, this is a weekend that I'm home, and I am feeling just great full to be in my own home. I have been traveling NonStop for three months, and I think I did my fifty fifth presentation on Friday out of you know, in the last three months. So I'm just like, it was nice to actually have set an alarm this morning

for the first time in like three months. So I feel chill, which is atypical for me. That's great. Well, you can definitely chill on the Psychology podcast. That's it. That's the kind of vibe we go for here, none of this formal academic bs you know, very good so, and I also feel like that's very much in line with your book and the spirit of your book. Permission to feel. Yeah, So like, what's up with that title? Well, you know, the title came from a variety of places.

The first is my own life experiences. So I had a rough childhood that I never shared publicly, which was I was abuse as a child by a neighbor and you know, for many, many years he was actually a friend of the family, but you know, it was threatened that if I shared what was happening, you know, I would be harmed, My family would be harmed. And so you can imagine what it's like for a kid who is in that kind of circumstance. You know, you just

you're trapped with your feelings. And so for many reasons, I argue that I just didn't have that permission to feel. I had a suppressed repress I didn't really know how I was feeling because I couldn't talk about it with anybody. And even as I got older, you know, I was bullied pretty badly in school. And I had two great parents, but neither one of them would get an A in emotional intelligence, so they just didn't know how to deal

with their own feelings. And nevertheless, mine, you know, my mother had anxiety problems, so she'd have breakdowns all the time. My father was just a tough enough kind of guy. So for most of my life until I turned into like until about thirteen or fourteen, I just really didn't anywhere to go with my feelings. When you feel like you were trapped in your feelings, do you feel like, can you describe that experience a little bit more of

what that felt like? Yeah, you basically are living in a fight or flight kind of response, you know, on a daily basis, because you first you don't understand what's going on for you, especially when you're being abused, Like why is this happening to me? Am? I? Is this

my fault? Am I? You know, there's so many kind of ways that your brain, you know, goes into fooling itself, fulling, you know, trying to make meaning out of the world, knowing that the experiences are you know, awful, but yet you can't say anything about it, and you're wondering why it keeps happening. And that was most of my childhood. Unfortunately, I just didn't have anywhere to go with the feelings.

And I ate my feelings, you know. I screamed my feelings, I was aggressive with people, I cried alone you know, they have to go somewhere, as we all know. Yeah, so, yeah, it was pretty rough. Well I'm really sorry to hear about that prior childhood. And it's good to see how you've put all integrated, become whole as an adult, or work towards wholeness as an adult, and have used this

research to help others. As you know, a lot of people who are abused and young end up becoming abusers, far far from most, but you know, it is a thing that happens sometimes. And you know, so you have this quote from your book. You said, when we deny ourselves the permission to feel, a long list of unwanted outcomes, outcomes ensues. What are some of those outcomes? Mark? I think those are the outcomes that I mentioned just a minute ago. It's eating disorders. It's which I had, by

the way, as an adult. It is self harm in many ways, from cutting to whatever it might be. It's not knowing how to communicate, you know, with people around you. It's failing in school. I was a C and D student in school because certainly my brain wasn't in learning mode.

I was in survival mode. It's a host. It just it's basically, you know, when you think about the emotion system, how it drives our attentional capacity, it drives our decision making, it drives the quality of our relationships, it drives our mental health, it drives our creativity, which you're interested in in our performance. You know, when you're feeling lots of different feelings and don't have strategies to regulate them, life is tough. Life is tough, Yes, So it would make

sense that you'd be motivated to scientifically learn these tools. So, yeah, you cite a whole bunch of harrowing statistics in your book, could you mention a couple about, you know, relate to

how depression, anxiety and things of that nature on the rise. Sure, you know, I'm going to set that in context because I think for me, what's been so interesting, you know, with the release of my book and with the feel that I'm in, is that, you know, in nineteen ninety the president of v L, Peter salave Back when he was a professor, and John Mayer published a theory of

emotional intelligence in nineteen ninety five. You've got this big book by Goldman on emotional intelligence, and you've got the founding of Castle the collaborative academic social mocial learning, which leads to work in schools. Then you've gotten like ninety nine Seligman's you know, launch of positive psychology and happiness research and mindfulness research. And then obviously for the last twenty years, you've gotten you know, so many consultations and

interventions and experiments, et cetera. But yet when you look at the data over the last twenty years, it seems like the world's getting worse, you know, even in the life two years, in the last two years for sure, I mean in the last two years in terms of bullying and hate crimes. I mean, it's just it's a horror show. In terms of for example, the Anti Defamation League has at one hundred percent increase per year in the last couple of years in terms of reports for

you know, anti semitism and hate crimes. But then we go into anxiety. You know, at Yale and other universities, it's almost sixty percent of the undergrades who are reporting

overwhelming anxiety, around forty percent of reporting depression. In my own research, what I've shown is that seventy seven percent of the feelings that adolescents use to describe their emotional lives are negative emotions, tired and bored and stressed, and the educators who are teaching are kids are feeling frustrated, overwhelmed,

and stress. So there's a It's strange to me, right, how we've had so much focus on social emotional learning in schools and mindfulness and positive psychology, but yet you know, things look worse. Yeah, I hear you. You mentioned Daniel Goldman and that I remember when I was in high school, that book really inspired me quite a bit. How has Solivate like the original model emotional intelligence differed because I

think it's a common misconception. You know, there's not understanding that his model in the present of that book was a broader model than the original model. Could you maybe unpack that for people who want to learn the truth? Sure? Well, I think the major difference is that you know, emotional intelligence if you think about it as a mental capacity or an ability, right, it has to do with the

way your brain uses emotions wisely or not. So it's our We define it as the ability to use emotions wisely, to reason with and about your emotions to achieve goals. And I think when it got popularized, what happened is that everything that became we call non cognitive or non academic or soft skills got clumped, you know, into the space of emotional intelligence, things like optimism or motivation or self esteem. Everything good, everything good, and you know, they're

all important constructs. It's good to be optimistic most of the time. It's self esteem is a good thing to have. But it's not about, for example, the skills of emotional intelligence, like accurately reading people and accurately reading your own emotions, or understanding why we're having these feeling states, or having the labels for them, or knowing how and when to

express and regulate them. Those are what we call emotion skills, and we like to keep them defined narrowly so that we can measure them, you know, accurately, and use them to make predictions about people's lives. Emotion skills good, so skills connotes this notion that you're not necessarily born with the with emotional intelligence, you know, right out of the gate, that that's something that can be developed. I assume that's

my argument. You know, God only knows I was not born with, you know, a toolbag of effective emotion regulation strategies, you know, I learned, and I didn't have to get my doctorate to learn the bad ones, you know. Somehow another it's like you learn through your development all these unhelpful ones by observing the people that care for you in many ways, you know, like suppression and repression and

hiding and secrecy and negative self talk. And when I argue vehemently is that we place very little attention in our families and in our schools and even in the workplaces later on on helping people to become emotion scientists, you know, around their emotional lives and other people's emotional lives. So that's a self scientist to be exploring, like what am I really feeling? And also are the strategies that I'm using helpful or and helpful for my well being,

for my relationships, for my goals in life? Yeah? I like this emotion science. Do you have a whole chapter on that? Right? And that was a fun chapter. Could you maybe just talk a little bit more about, like, you know, if I pretend, let's say I'm a teacher and I want to be an emotion scientist in my classroom,

what does that really look like? So what I do in the book is I compare the emotion scientists to the emotion judge, you know, and you know in the courtroom's fine, we need judges, but when it comes to feelings, no judgment. And so the emotion scientist, as I see that person is open to emotions, is curious about emotions, wants to get granular about feelings. That doesn't just accept fine or okay, or like shit right or stressed. There's deeper meaning, you know, like Alisa Film and Barrett model

of emotion granularity right there, am I stressed? Or am I overwhelmed? Or am I anxious? Or am I feeling fearful? Am I down? Or am I disappointed? Or am I hopeless? Am I jealous? Am I envious? And that granularity is important because the emotion scientists, then, who can help people understand their feelings, can then support people in thinking about

how to regulate them. And I think importantly what the emotion scientist does is they're always in learning mode as opposed to know, they're in supportive mode as opposed to attributor or teller mode. And what I mean by that is that you know, we all have biases, you know, we all have, for example, strategies that work best for us. You know, I prefer hot yoga as a way of decreasing stress. Some people hate hot yoga. It's not my job to tell somebody to do hot yoga to reduce

their stress. It's my job to help you and people that care about find strategies that work best for them. So that's that's the way I see the emotion scientists as they explore the investigator the supporter as opposed to the emotion judge, who is you know why you're so angry? They tell people how they're feeling. Right, the emotion judge says, this is the way you should regulate, and that's going to work. Period. My father was that way, so my

fatherhood a lot of anger problems. He'd say, So I'm like, this is why, this is how I deal with my emotions. Get over it. Not a very not a growth mindset, you know, around emotional regulation, not at all. Yeah, No, that's not very very helpful of a response. And you know, your uncle was really someone who inspired you. I mean, didn't he literally say like you have the permission to

feel like did he use that title of your book? No, he didn't use that, but I mean I got the title I can share that with you in a moment from a specific experience that I had teaching emotional intelligence. Okay, But what I argue in my book was that my uncle gave me the permission to feel I see, because he was my mother's brother and he was just an amazing human being. He was a band leader in the Catskill Mountain hotels by night and a middle school teacher

by day. But Uncle Marvin was you know, way before there was a fear of emotional intelligence or the field of social emotional learning. He was developing a program literally in nineteen sixty in nineteen seventies to teach kids about their feelings. He wanted to redefine the way we taught history through the lens of emotion. And it was amazing what he did. And he came at this idea because he said, you know, when I'm playing my trumpet in

the evenings, you know everybody's feeling it. You know these gigs, everybody's dancing, their eyes are closed, and they're having a great time. And then I get up at seven in the morning and get up from my eight thirty social studies class, and all the kids are like and He's like, why is it you know, there's not feeling it in the classroom, and he thought that emotion was the missing link, that they just weren't being brought into the learning process

through feeling. It was all through rote memorization. And so what he wanted to do was rewrite the curriculum to be based on the characters' emotions and then relate those experiences to the students to then get them involved in the learning process. And by some wave of a magic wand he was going for a master's degree, and I was going through all my trauma as a childhood and he would stay at my family's home and we'd have

these just amazing conversations in the backyard, you know. And what I say in my book is that he was the first person to say, you know, Mark, you know, how are you feeling? And he did it through the lens of the emotion scientist, not the emotion judge. He didn't say tough enough, or I'm gonna have a breakdown from what I'm hearing. He said, well, what can I do to support you? And you know, it changed my life forever. Yeah, I imagine I believe it. So thank

you for sharing that. Maybe it's if you don't mind, we go into the specific ruler skills, sure, starting with recognizing emotion and also how do you like, how did ruler you know, like hit you like, did you come up with the ruler first and then fit everything into that framework or did you the other way around? I

hope the other way around it. No. So, you know, as someone who was a student of the theory of emotional intelligence or a student of Peter Salava and Jack Meyer, who were the founders of the theory, you know, I read all the work and I you know, obviously spent

my graduate school year studying these things. And you know, if they had a four part theory which was around perceiving, and using, understanding and regulating emotion, and I just realized, you know, through my work with that and through reading other theories, that maybe we could break it up a little bit more specifically. And so when you think about, you know, making sense out of your own and other emotions,

oftentimes you don't. You can't label things immediately. You know, you have a tool like we have called the mood meter, you know, which is based on the Circumplex model of emotion, which you know says basically that you know, we can define our feelings through this pleasantness or valance or arousal or energy factors, and that you know, the first thing that happens is that we are in a room and we do I feel like approaching this or do I feel like avoiding this? Do I've got the do I

feel like I can thrive here? Do I feel depleted? And that's when I talk about recognizing emotions. I mean it at that level of core. It's like this visceral sense in the moment. It's before you label, it is before you even know why you're having the feelings, and at that point in time, you can see, no, I feel energized and pleasant. What's going on? Oh, I'm on the podcast with Scott Kaufman. So I'm Scott Barry. I'm

Scott Barry Kaufman. Now Scott Barry coffin, I'm sorry, You're right and right, there's another Scott Calvin, right, and so I'm feeling excited. So that process of recognizing, you know, the kind of core affective state, to then attributing it to something that's happening or has happened in the past or will happen in the future, and then using that information to send okay, so I'm anticipating positive things. Oh I'm excited. Oh I'm anticipating I'm going to get hurt.

Oh I'm fearful. Oh I'm anticipating. I'm not going to know what the heck's going on. Oh I'm anxious. And so that's the R. The U and the L a ruler. And in the beginning they're kind of separate constructs, but in the end, right they are, the U and the L kind of go together to help us identify our feeling states. The E and the R have to do with what we do with our feeling states. So what that means specifically is, firstly, you know, do I have

the permission to express my true feelings with you? Do I feel safe? Do I feel supported? Do I feel value enough to do that work? And that's very contextual, meaning homes and schools and workplaces create different rules around expression. Expression is based on culture and race and power, gender, There's so many factors that influence whether or not we express our emotions authentically and honestly. And then I have to know how to do it. I have to learn

how to communicate effectively to get my needs met. And then finally is the last R which is the regulation of emotion. So those are the strategies that we use to prevent unwanted emotions, to reduce difficult ones, to initiate ones that are going to be helpful, to maintain ones, or even to enhance or boost emotions. And so that's the rule of framework. Nice. I like it. I like it, like the mood meter. You have the mood meter in your book, and then when you open it up, I

love that. Do you recommend that people like buy it? Do you sell like a mood meter poster that people can buy, you know, and like put in their white house fosters. You can photograph the book if you like. There's also a mood meter app Okay, it's downloadable that allows you to track your emotions over time and look at patterns, which is really cool. Well, that'd be a good sort of first date thing to pull out the

mood meter app and a good starter icebreaker. I guess it depends how you're feeling, I guess so, or how you think the person you're dating is going to feel. Yeah, I don't really think that through. Yeah, that's that one. You need to ask you that one? Maybe a second date, Yeah, because they know there's a there's an app for the ten questions or whatever is that to fall in love with each other. There's like escalating questions that the Errands came up with, and there's an app for that too,

that might be more appropriate. Yeah, so let's talk about individual differences for a second. Is it harder for some people, you know, to develop this and others? I mean, surely some people start off already with a higher level. Well, I think this is where it's you know this the construct clarity is important. So for example, I uh, in the personality literature would classify myself as someone who has high neuroticism. Even still, definitely, you know, I worry about

everything I worry about why worry? Eve have I even worry about why I worry about why I worry? Even though I don't really have very much to worry about. I'm living a great life right now, but you are, you know, the default is you know something might go wrong. Thank you Grandpa for that that language. I had a grandfather who was like, you know, we'd smile like he goes your laugh now your cry late here, thanks grandpa.

Optimistic Jewish heritage. But my point is that for years I I conflated my proclivity towards experiencing strong emotions with my skills at dealing with those experiences. And I think that what our research shows is that they're separable constructs. Right, just because you are someone like myself potentially who you know, is a little bit moody and you're easily startled and you know, ups and downs, that's your experience of emotion.

It's not your skill, right, it's your temperament, your personality. And I think for a lot of people they think their temperament is their emotional intelligence. I see, and it's not.

You know, as a matter of fact, potentially, someone with my level of emotional volatility might even be have the opportunity to be higher in emotional intelligence because I have to be so self aware and regulating more frequently because of those ups and downs to you know, make sure that I'm you know, leading properly, or you know, dealing with my partner properly, or you know, achieving goals. So does that does that make sense to separate these two things? Well,

it absolutely does make sense. But I think that even I could still come back at you and say, well, well, even if you separate the personality Big five domain from the emotional intelligence skills. There still are some people that are more intuitively higher on the emotional intelligence skills. I mean, they're surely not all one hundred percent developed. There's there's a genetic component and no doubt to even those skills, right.

I would say that the genetic component comes in primarily in the perception area, right, because we know that people on the autism spectrum have more difficulty, for example, decoding facial expressions engaging in that awareness piece. But when you get into labeling, I mean, we have to be taught the feeling words, right you Just no one is born with like the granularity around anger, Like am I peeved? Am I irritated? Am I angry? Am I enraged? Am I livid? You know? Am I happy? Am I elated?

Am I ecstatic? Or am I just calm, tranquil, peaceful, relaxed. Uh? No one is born knowing the nuances around expressing emotion right that you have to. It's like it's a real interesting discernment that you have to build over time to know. Like you ever notice that like with certain people you feel like you can just open up, you know, and with other people you're just like, I'm not going to share anything. I hope you feel like you can open

up with with Scottbury Coffin, Scott Barray, SBK. You know what you're getting everything today and so like that's a learned skill over time by you know, it's like a trust factor, it's a relationship factor. And then the regulation piece. You know, Yes, we're born with some kind of innate desire to soothe oneself, you know, whether it be right the sucking the pacifier or breastfeeding, you know, or breathing.

But the cognitive strategies, right, they it's it's they have to be learned and they're and they're really hard to learn because you know, we have a negativity bias, you know, and oftentimes our negative self views are defined by the people who are the closest to us, right like our

parents or our peers when we're young. So, you know, I really push for the fact that, you know, the the skills really are primarily learned and developed through different contexts, and they have to be practiced and they have to be refined and they have to be evaluated over time. Well, that's great news for the work you do, or else

no one would pay you money to do anything. Yeah, exactly. Well. Also, I mean, of course, if you have high trauma in your childhood and your stress response is so high because of a victimization and without intervention, right, it's going to be harder for you to regulate than other people. So I don't want to, you know, deny the fact that there are circumstances that certainly make it harder for certain

people to learn these skills. But I do believe that with the right person and the right you know, the practice, you know, they really can be developed. Yeah, You've done a lot of work to bring emotional intelligence trainings to schools nationwide and even internationally. Can you talk a little bit about what those program what are some of the nuts and bolts of those programs, and what you've learned

in the process. Yeah. I think the number one thing that I've learned around teaching emotional intelligence is that the kids are mostly all right. It's the adults who are raising and teaching kids that have the issues are mess And I mean that seriously. You know, when I first started doing this work in the mid nineteen nineties was my uncle. Because what happened is that when I graduated from college, I was an anxious mess again, and I didn't know what I was going to do with my life.

And I was in therapy, and that's when Dan Golman's book came out, and that's when I learned about Peter Salavan Jack Meyer, and that's when I realized that everything my freaking uncle was doing back with me ten years prior, fifteen years prior, was actually this stuff. I called my uncle, who was then retired, and said, let's write a curriculum nice and we did, and that was back in nineteen ninety five, which then got me into grad school, et cetera.

But what Uncle Morphn I did was we try to take everything that I kind of knew about psychology which didn't know, and everything he had done for many years as a teacher, and we tried to package it and we did it. Took us five six years to do it, but nevertheless we did it. And then we went out to schools and we try to deliver it, and we just had so much resistance. Like, my job is not to talk to students about my failings. You know, I'll do joy, jolly and cheerful, but I'm not talking about

alien nation or despair. Principles would say things like, well, we don't have time to do this until after the state tests, you know. I was like, well, we're doing the training in August, like the state tests are in April, So like what am I doing here right now? Because you're not going to even remember what I taught you. And so I learned quickly that really the hard work was getting the adults to realize that this was really important.

And then we had more success, But again we had to go even further up the leadership letter because what we learned was that principles of schools, if they weren't supportive of the teachers and doing the work, it would never get done. And then we were asked like in New York City, can you do the director or the superintendent of special education say, can you bring this to three hundred and fifty of my sites across fifty seven schools. I was like, oh, and how do you do that

at a systemic level and have sustainability? So we learned that really, when you get down to it, if you want social and emotional learning or emotional intelligence to be in a school, it has to be weaved into the way leaders lead, the way teachers teach, the way students learn in the way family's parent and that's when we found great things happen. Well, that is easier said than done. Yes, you must have. I mean, it takes a whole you've it takes a team of a quite a big team.

The Center of Promotional Intelligence. We are fifty six people. Fifty six I know, I'm friends with a lot of them, like Emma Ceppola and Zorana if Kevich Springle. Yeah, and you know, you do you you have people have people who are training, like who focus primarily on the internationals. Do people living internationally that are part of the center. We do. They're mostly consultants, but we're now building a whole approach to ruler in China and Italy and Spain, Australia.

We have lots of interests. World domination, no world permission to feel I know, I know. Remember the scientist doesn't want to dominate. The scientists want other people to develop m that's what the scientist says. I know, Well that's

what I want. There's some scientists that we both know that maybe want the other I know that's a wink wink, yeah, yeah, but yeah, So it's exciting and obviously we have to be mindful that there are cultural differences, but we've got a great team who are doing everything from basic science and emotion to interventions to skill development and assessments and

the list goes on. Yeah, you seem to just have this endless energy and enthusiasm around this like I mean, I it hasn't It hasn't changed since fifteen years ago when I knew you you were you had the same sort of like passion for this particular time. Do you ever get bored with it? Do you think you'll ever get bored with this big you know what, I'm over emotions.

I'm going to move on to like something else. Well, no, because I'm just endlessly fascinated by how emotionally stuck people are and how much resistance there is to this work. And also, you know, I'm a proponent of of divergent thinking and creativity, so you know, I'm always exploring more innovative ways to get people to take this work seriously, you know. And that's why I wrote the book, because I needed to just like sit with the material for a little while on my own, as opposed to be

running around. And now that I have this thing, I'm going out there and I've done fifty five presentations, I said, in the last couple of months, and just bringing this out into the world, I start thinking about like an emotions scientist piece a little bit differently. You know, I'm really interested in why why there's so much resistance to emotions,

you know, in the workplace. For example, I do presentations for big you know companies, pharmaceutical companies or healthcare companies or you know, the investment world, you know, and you know, it's just the prevailing notion that emotions are weak is fascinating to me. You know that people don't realize that everybody comes to work with feelings. But yet it seems that the more money you make, the more you think that you can just suppress them, because you know, money talks.

But yet, why are so many people getting divorced and why are so many people you know so unhappy? Well that's that right, there is a very good question anything. A big part of it is this, they're not giving themselves and others permission to feel. So you have this, I mean, you really do think that the permission to feel is is going to is a game changer, you think, you say, they're the less stigma racism and a third grader said to you that there would be world peace.

That's right. Wow. I mean, I'm you know, I am. I'm still a professor, so I can't I'm not just a journalist, so I can't make those ladacious claims. But a third grader again, exactly. But I do really believe, you know, from both the science that I've done and honestly I've done. You know, I've been in the real world quite a bit. You know, I'm not a traditional scientist, you know that locks themself up in the Ivory Tower.

You know. I spend a good half of my life, you know, with people, with kids, with teachers, with leaders, kind of seeing how this, you know, plays out in the real world, you know, and we, unfortunately, have created a society where there is tremendous amount of angst, where people think that talking about feelings is weak, and where people are not learning strategies and how to deal with

their feelings. And it's not a good sign. It's is not And even in my own organization, I see it, you know, at the university, you know, and I think it's because you know, this is one of my favorites, is that when I teach my course, you know, students come in thinking they're gonna have to memorize the nineteen ninety theory or the Bracket paper in two thousand and three that showed the correlation coefficient between emotional intelligence and

satisfaction is point three to five. And I tell them like, honestly, you know, I don't even remember those coefficients and I wrote the freaking papers. But what I want you to do is learn the skills. And they're like, but that's not that's how do I get an A in that, you know? And I said, well, don't worry about the grade, like, this is not a course about grades. This is a

course about building awareness and you know. And then they start pushing back and saying things like, well, you know, Professor Brackett, I didn't need emotional intelligence to get into Yale. Oh gosh, probably, And then I say, well, and it is true. But then I say to them, well, you're going to need it to get out. And I mean that seriously, because I mean most parents when they are thinking about their kid at twenty five and thirty years old,

and I think, oh, I hope my kid graduates. Yeahe with a four point zero, right, They're saying, I hope my son or daughter has purpose in life, you know, it's passionate about something, find someone to love, you know, et cetera. But yet we spend no time cultivating that. And you really can say from the front lines that you see notable changes, really substantive, large effects that give

you hope that we can change. Well. I see that there's a stronger desire than ever before to do this work that people are finally recognizing, Like, if we don't do this, I don't know what's going to happen. However, because we are a nation and just a species who wants quick fixes, I think we're going to continuously fail until we understand that this has to be a strong part of the way we develop children. And you know, because you know, what makes me annoyed is everybody now

thinks mindfulness is the answer. You do, Yeah, that's true, it's the answer everything. You just breathe you know, everything, you just breathe it out. And I'm like, I don't know, I've been going to yoga for fifteen years and now twenty years. It hasn't changed my you know, like my envy of certain people, or my feelings of being overwhelmed half the time, and does it help me kind of like be more present, Yeah for sure. Does it help me kind of reduce a little bit of my stress? Yeah?

Right afterwards I feel fabulous. But the point is is that that's a that's like a one shot wonder kind of strategy, right Yeah, And same thing with the yoga. Everybody thinks like yoga, right, you know, is the answer. I'm guess what, downward dog doesn't solve all your problems. I've said that too. It's funny, and you know, and just so like there's exercise that you have to do, there's a good eating you have to do, there's good

sleep you have to do. And I think so much of it has to do with more top down strategies, which are these more cognitive strategies. You know that we have to change the way we view ourselves and view the world, and that takes enormous practice. Yeah for sure. So I want to end this interview with this quote from your book. We need to launch an emotion revolution in which the permission to feel moves us and ways

we have yet to imagine dot dot dot. Emotional skills are the key to unlocking the potential inside each of us, and in the process of developing those skills, we each heart by heart, mind by mind create a culture in society unlike anything we've experienced us far, and very much like the one we might dare to imagine. Mark, you still got it, and you still got it. You still got the humor, the sensitivity, the compassion and the passion. And thank you so much for finally being on my

the Psychology Podcast. I'm excited to be part of it. Thank you thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, please add a reading and review of the podcast on iTunes and subscribe to the Psychology Podcast YouTube channel, as we're really trying to increase

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