Curious Neuron

The importance of giving our kid the permission to feel: Understanding emotional Intelligence with Dr. Marc Brackett

January 08, 2024 • Cindy Hovington, Ph.D. • Season 6 • Episode 2

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Today is a very special episode on emotional intelligence with world renowned researcher Dr. Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. As we navigate the intricate ties between emotions, parenting, and education, Dr. Brackett shares his profound expertise on the RULER approach and the pivotal role of emotions in shaping our lives.

Our conversation extends beyond theory to offer tangible strategies that help us grant both ourselves and our children the 'permission to feel,' a crucial step in fostering mental health and well-being.

We discuss how consistent role modeling across all environments—be it at home or school—is essential in teaching our young ones to navigate the complex world of emotions. This episode is an eye-opener for anyone looking to understand why emotional intelligence should not just be an add-on but a key component of our collective growth.

Lastly, we reflect on the profound impact that emotional intelligence can have on leadership, relationships, and personal fulfillment.

A special thank you to my guest co-host Karl Mercuri, Social and Emotional Learning Coordinator at The Priory Elementary School in Montreal.

Get Dr. Brackett's app How We Feel for free:
https://howwefeel.org/

Get his book Permission to Feel:
In Canada
In the US

Follow him on IG:
https://www.instagram.com/marc.brackett/

Publications:
Emotional Intelligence in the Classroom
The Ability Model of Emotional Intelligence

Get your FREE 40-page well-being workbook:
https://tremendous-hustler-7333.ck.page/reflectiveparentstarterkit

Please leave a rating for our podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify! Email me at info@curiousneuron.com

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Facebook group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/theemotionallyawareparent/


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Speaker 1:

You know, I think tough love is ridiculous. It doesn't make any sense. You know, it's ultimatums, it's threats. I mean 85% of people say they don't believe their parents give them permission to feel.

Speaker 2:

Hello, my dear friend, welcome back to another episode of the Curious Non-Picast. My name is Cindy Havington and I am your host. Today we are talking about feelings Not just your feelings, but giving you permission to feel. That's right. We have a very special guest today. We have Dr Mark Brackett from Yale University here with us and we are going to talk about his book not just his book, but the ruler approach that he talks about in his book and how we could, as parents, implement that within our homes and how we could implement that within our schools. We're going to talk a little bit also about the barriers that some schools might have and barriers that we might have as a system as well. So I'm really excited to share this conversation with you. But first, as always, I'd like to thank the Taninbaum Open Science Institute for supporting the Curious Non-Picast and the McConnell Foundation as well. We have two very important supporters for this podcast, and I'm so grateful that these two organizations believe in the importance of sharing science, because that's what I love doing with you. I'd also like to thank our sponsors, and you could find our sponsors in the show notes.

Speaker 2:

If you are looking for a code, we are working with BetterHelp to get you some online therapy and a discount for your first month. The discount is in the show notes and my favorite app called Poc Poc. You can get 50% off a full year subscription. It is an app that is not overstimulating. It's so fun to play with. My kids Still ask for it every day. It's a place or an app that they can use that just allows your child to explore, and that's what I love about Poc Poc. You can also get some Holsty products If you are looking for some guidance in terms of reflecting and thinking through certain aspects of your life and working on your emotional well-being. Holsty is a company that I reached out to because of how amazing their products are. They have these reflection cards and they work with Greater Good, which is this online website that you can find and that helps teachers bring emotional learning into the classroom, and it's all about your well-being. So these three really important partners are companies that I respect and reached out to for the purpose of bringing you really good quality products and services. And, as always, I am the co-founder of WonderGrade and now you can get 50% off a one year subscription If you click the link in the show notes. Wondergrade is an app that I am the co-founder of, and what we have done is created an app that supports you, the parent, in helping teach your child how to cope with emotions. So it's not just about learning meditation, mindfulness we have that on the app but we also want to make sure that you have a tool that's going to help you co-regulate, a tool that's going to help you know what to say to your child when they're experiencing emotions. So the app was developed with two sections in mind the parent center and the child center. The child center has this super interactive, beautiful character, ollie, who teaches your kids how to take different approaches or teaches them different tools on how to cope with their emotions. So you can click the link in the show notes for any of these sponsors, and thank you to everybody for supporting the Cure Snow Podcast.

Speaker 2:

I am so grateful that Dr Mark Brackett accepted to be on this podcast and we had a really lovely conversation. It was one of those conversations that were really hard to stop. I had a lot of questions for him. I had like two pages of notes in front of me. I also invited Carl. Carl was a guest in a previous podcast and he works with schools in terms of social emotional learning, and I thought it would be interesting to bring him back on so that we can have this conversation with Mark and talk about. You know social emotional skills. You know both at home and in the school.

Speaker 2:

In case you've never heard of Dr Mark Brackett, he is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor in the Child Center at Yale School of Medicine at Yale University. As a researcher for over 20 years now, mark has focused on the role of emotions and emotional intelligence in learning, decision making, creativity, relationships, health and performance. Mark is the author of the bestselling book called Permission to Feel, and if you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it. It's a really good place for you to start learning about emotions, and not just starting to learn emotions, but also giving yourself, just as the title says, permission to feel, which I think as parents, because we weren't given that permission when we were younger, we struggled to give that to our kids. So I think it's a really nice book to start off with if you're on this emotional journey or learning journey.

Speaker 2:

And also, as Mark is going to mention in the interview, he is the co-founder of an app called how we Feel. It is completely free and I've been using it for a couple weeks now. If you're also struggling with the language that you need to or the labeling of your emotions, this app is perfect to begin with, and it'll give you the language that you need and help you reflect on what is contributing to your emotions and what's happening in your environment that might be causing these emotions. So it's a really amazing app and it's free. All right, I don't want to make you wait any longer. This was just such an amazing conversation. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Carl and Dr Mark Brackett. I'll see you on the other side. Welcome back everyone to the Cure Astronom podcast. I'm so happy to have two people here that we're going to have this conversation with, but, most importantly, dr Mark Brackett, welcome to the Cure Astronom podcast.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here.

Speaker 2:

And I'm joined by Carl as well, who has been on the podcast and is acting as the co-host. Today we're going to have a really great conversation. We've asked on Cure Astronom on Instagram what your questions are around emotional learning and emotional literacy and emotional intelligence, and we're going to have that conversation, helping parents kind of understand themselves first, how to teach this to your child and what we should be looking at in schools as well. So that'll be sort of the conversation. So first, dr Brackett, I'd love to ask you you talk about this in your book, where you often ask people how they're feeling and the answers are usually the same or very similar, and I experienced this as well in therapy.

Speaker 2:

The therapist would ask this before and after, and it would just be. My answer would be I'm fine, I'm okay, I'm well. I'm thinking that I was describing what I was feeling, not really having the vocabulary around it. And when I talk about this with parents, many of them struggle with this, but now, as parents, they're being told that they have to teach this language to their child when they never learned it themselves. So why do you think we struggle with this so much when it comes to at least starting to identify our emotions and where do we start the work around that?

Speaker 1:

First please call me a Mark and secondly, in regard to the challenges that you're presenting, I think it has to do with just that. We have not made social and emotional education a really integrated part of the way we educate children, and therefore the parents who are raising and the teachers who are teaching children haven't had the education they need to talk about it in the best way possible, and so my vision is that we create policies that require schools and communities to do this work from preschool right until forever, and I think at that point it's going to just be common nature to just talk about feelings.

Speaker 2:

And it isn't yet, and we need, we're still, there's still a lot of work to do.

Speaker 1:

Oh, that's my point there is. You know, I really have been struggling over the last year or so. You know, I'm very fortunate. Our program, which is called Ruler, is in 5,000 schools now across the United States and many other countries, including Canada and the. But it's only 5,000 schools, not 50,000 schools, and probably implementation in every one of the schools isn't as great as it could be. And I wonder, why is that the case?

Speaker 1:

And I still think that we have a society that sees emotions as weak you know, then we have mindsets, you know, that are not necessarily the ones that we want people to have to take emotions seriously. And it's still an add on, you know, even when schools do adopt the work, there's not like usually a director, you know, in a school or assistant superintendent who's like responsibility it is to make sure that everyone gets the emotion education, and so that add on kind of aspect of it makes it not as important. There's no accountability for its implementation.

Speaker 2:

There's a lot of talk around these emotions. I hear lots of influencers and I think you've addressed this on your end as well. They seem to know a lot about emotions and my background is in neuroscience. I studied mental health and emotions and cognitive health and you know, sometimes it's difficult because I'm hearing a lot from parents that you know they are looking for answers and I think you know you're talking about the schools. But even going before you know, going earlier than that, parents are having children and then these children are, you know they're having lots of big emotions and parents don't feel equipped. How do we Explain Welcome to간 EC Tonight? Kind of help start the work even earlier?

Speaker 1:

you know, can.

Speaker 2:

Should there be a program for parents that are using these approaches?

Speaker 1:

There should be your attention being. You should be required to get an emotion education, a couple of things, you know. It's part of the reason why I wrote my book, to be honest with you, was that I felt like I was in schools and Doing what I think was good and important work. But you know, parents don't go to school anymore. You know school leaders don't necessarily continue their education, and then people in the community certainly are not like they're not banging on the doors saying can I have an emotional intelligence education? They may go for therapy, right and so I wanted to make something that was accessible, you know, and readable, you know, to the real world At the same time.

Speaker 1:

I don't know if I shared this with you in our email exchanges, but during the pandemic, I had the privilege and pleasure to work with the founder and CEO of Pinterest on a new app that is called how we feel, and it's free and available on iOS and Android, and it is designed to give people an emotion vocabulary. So it has the mood meter tool that helps people to plot their emotions. It gives them definitions of the words and also has 36 research based strategies to help people regulate their emotions. And so it's been. We have about a million people who've downloaded the app now, and so people can check that out as a resource. How we feel and it's all based on my book permission appeal I I have the app and I love using it you know, I.

Speaker 2:

I think this brings a really important question. So I often talk about your work and parents will share that because this is new to them. They do struggle teaching this to their child, but you bring a lot of that language and you bring that pleasant, the terms that make it easy for us to understand. You know the pleasantness and unpleasantness because parents are used to hearing good and bad when it comes to emotions. So that's something I'd like to address with you. There is a lot of unlearning when it comes to emotions and I think this is very difficult. As a parent who hasn't doesn't have any experience in this, you know if they've been raised in an environment where it was bad to express an certain emotion anger or sadness or fear, anxiety how does a parent is it just about taking the ruler approach and trying to follow that, or is there an unlearning aspect that you see that's important as well?

Speaker 1:

So you're asking a lot, you know. Okay, I like the challenge. I think, first and foremost, we just have to remember, from the science perspective, even there's no such thing as a bad emotion. There are no bad emotions. Guilt is, you know what people are. Guilt, that's terrible. What guilt says, like you know, I'm reflective. I actually said something that was unkind and you know I have some remorse. That's a good thing, in my opinion. Even anger is saying there's an injustice in the world that I need to, you know, deal with Anxiety and I always tell people that everybody loves this, but I like to hire people who are a little anxious. Right, they get stuff done, you know. You know it's like all right, but we have to actually be somewhat productive Anyhow. That just I love brownie points on my team for that one. Most importantly, no such thing as a bad emotion. All emotions are information. That's just critical. I think, like coming to your podcast and listening is a really good Way to learn, because you know scientists like myself, you know I studied these things. These are not my opinion, you know. These are like real research based concepts here, and I think it starts with honestly Unpacking our mindsets about emotion, like our feelings about our feelings and that's not something people really think about, but we all have feelings about our feelings.

Speaker 1:

Like, for example, some people think, as we were saying, anxiety, as we were saying anxiety is bad and happiness is good. But then you could push people like are there times when anxiety actually is helpful? Well, if there's a fire, you know, in your house, fear is probably a good emotion to have. You don't want to be like content right, like it's a like danger. I need to get out of here. So fear is a good emotion per se or beneficial, helpful. I find, you know, I'm a very neurotic kind of guy and I tend to be a little bit moody and so when I'm around people who are happy, all the time it drives me out of my mind and so, like happiness can be, you know, a good thing and at the same time, you know it's like if you have a mom or a dad who's always happy and you're going through a really rough time, you know it's not like that's like comforting to keep telling me that everything's gonna be fine, you know, because I don't think it is going to be fine.

Speaker 1:

I think I actually need help, and so maybe if you were to downregulate and kind of show empathy and understand my sadness, maybe I could, you know, get the support that I need. So I think we got to teach people About the mind, to unpack their mindsets first.

Speaker 3:

Can I ask Mark, I'm just gonna jump in here you mentioned before that Emotions are a form of information. Can you? Can you expand on that? You know, like in your book you talk about the impact that emotions have on decision-making, learning and memory. You speak about relationships and creativity. Can you can you kind of unpack that for a little bit for us, because I think it'd be really cool to hear.

Speaker 1:

It's funny. You asked that because in my presentations and then, and actually that chapter in my book I think it's chapter two I think I have eight hundred scholarly references just in that chapter alone. Yeah well, and I had to really fill it up with a lot of kind of good resources because I wanted there to be no argument.

Speaker 3:

Nobody could fight back like about the role of emotions and why their information.

Speaker 1:

So the first is attention. I mean, let's be real. We, how we feel, drives where our mind goes, what we attend to, and so if I'm bored right like if I were bored right now you'd catch me doing things like this yeah, you know, be thinking about like where I'm going for dinner tonight, which I am excited about.

Speaker 1:

I'm dying to go out. If I'm stressed, like I was as a kid in school, I'm thinking about, like how am I going to survive? How am I going to get home Not being bullied? Yeah, and so, if I'm right, that's data for the individual and for the people who are raising and teaching that child, because it tells you how that child is going to be operating in the world. The second decision making. I just think, gosh, if only people understood how emotions affect decision making. People would have better habits. They'd exercise more right, because we make predictions based on how we feel in the moment.

Speaker 3:

I'm tired.

Speaker 1:

You know I want to go to the gym tonight. Meanwhile, every time I've been tired and I've gone to the gym, I felt more energized after the gym. That's right. And so an emotionally intelligent person says you know, maybe that prediction you're making is not so accurate, maybe you need to actually experience it and then Reflect on it. So emotions are always affecting our decisions, for better or for worse. The third is relationships. You know I always ask people have you ever worked with someone who is really difficult? Ever lived with someone who's really difficult? Like generally the things that drive us crazy about family members and colleagues is not their cognitive ability, right, it's generally how they make us feel.

Speaker 1:

That's right, and you know their facial expressions when we speak their body language. You know, my biggest fights at home are when I do like this kind of stuff. You know, like, really, are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? That can be such a trigger, you know, and it's obviously disrespectful so I shouldn't be doing it. That's a whole other story. But my point is is that it's facial expressions, it's body language, it's vocal tone, right, that's creating emotions in other people that make them think I care about you, I don't care about you. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Physical and mental health can't deny them. You know I always say little emotions become big emotions. You can't understand that you're feeling peeved or irritated. It becomes enraged If you don't understand sadness and down in disappointment, it becomes hopelessness, discouragement, despair. So let's give ourselves that, you know, understanding, so that we can be more preventative. And then, finally, performance.

Speaker 1:

To me this has always been really interesting. You know, I work at what's called an elite university and everybody's got perfect grades, they've got high test scores, they play instruments that I've never heard of before. You know, because they're so goal-oriented and, you know, success-oriented. But now that I've been there 23 years, I've noticed like everybody comes in with the same kind of credentials, the same CV Perfect this, perfect this, perfect this. So everyone's there in the audience and the question is will everyone achieve their dreams? And the answer is no. So it can't be their general cognitive intelligence. That's the predictor. It's got to be something else. And over and over again, what I'm noticing is that the people who don't deal well with their feelings are the ones that tend to experience the most disappointment and, you know, and oftentimes don't achieve their goals because they can't deal with feedback, they can't deal with the anxiety and the frustration or the disappointment, so I don't know if that's a good answer for you. Yeah, that's great, thank you.

Speaker 3:

There's and I'll let Cindy continue after this one there's a really cool video that I use when I'm working with schools. It's a ruler video where basically, firstly, I quiz some educators and I'll ask them you know what's the best on the mood meter, what's the best color to be able to learn in? And then everyone will always resort to green or yellow and then I use the ruler video that goes through that, depending on the type of learning, you know, if you're doing debating, it would be really weird to be in the green zone where you're low energy and pleasantness and calm. You're not going to be very influential in a debate, so you need a form of red, the red zone. You need that high energy and unpleasantness to keep you motivated and alert in that state to be convincing.

Speaker 3:

But it's funny that you say that we had these kind of these misconceptions, don't we? And I think we need to really unpack these misconceptions and understand that if we go back to the emotions being negative or positive, it's more of an unpleasant and pleasant experience, with the emotion itself still has this form of purpose to really help you. So, yeah, I just wanted to share that. You know it's gonna. It's a lot of unpacking in the education system to really understand the impact that emotions have on learning also, and what learning really looks like, because without any form of emotional connection to content, you're not really gonna learn anyway, are you? So that's the really powerful part.

Speaker 2:

Actually I was gonna ask that question right Because as you were talking, you know, mark, you were describing that students who's kind of like you know, disengaged and not focusing.

Speaker 2:

But I work with schools and I often hear about like that child who can't focus or that child misbehaves, and I never hear about like their emotions and what are we doing to help them regulate and what are we teaching them. And I had gone into a school the other day and there were these three kids in this little room downstairs and they had misbehaved. So they were there and copying you know sentences or whatever. It was an elementary school and she was showing me that there was an educator showing me that they use the zones of regulation and I have my opinion around that, but I feel that there's just missing a lot. And you mentioned the amount of schools that you're in, but there are so many schools that you're not in yet and what is it that you believe that we should be doing in school? So if somebody is hearing about this for the first time and just doesn't have a system implemented in their school, what are the baby steps or what are the first steps to start working on this in their schools?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think schools are at different levels of readiness and so we have to know that. And obviously, I learned about. Ruler is not just mine, by the way. It's like I have a team of people that work on it and I've learned a lot from other people in terms of building the system, and but I've also I'm always in learning mode, like it's just I operate. It's like it's like the best and worst thing about me. You know I'm continuously learning and it drives everybody else crazy because I want to change everything all the time, but you know, that's why I became the boss. But really that was a joke. By the way, I'm losing so much credibility tonight.

Speaker 1:

But the truth is that you know, I was worked with my uncle, marvin, who you know about from reading my book, who was my hero, who was building a curriculum to teach kids about their feelings in the 1970s and 80s, and you know I was struggling. He helped me, yeah, as you know from my story, and and when I got old enough, like 24, he and I started working on a curriculum together and we published it. Took us 10 years and it was strictly like a workbook that was for middle schools, because that's where I struggled and that's where he taught to teach kids language, to teach kids feeling more, and there were little steps in the process of storytelling and all that kind of stuff. And we go to schools and here's what would happen. My job is not to. My job is not to talk to students about my feelings. Sure, yeah, I mean lots of resistance.

Speaker 1:

And so I realized very quickly the kids are not the problem, it's the adults. And so we worked with teachers and we started developing tools for teachers. But then we had the principals or the heads of school, who were like you know, we don't got time for this and this is not going to get kids into Yale, and I'm like but yeah, but like you're not really understanding this. So we had to work with the leaders. And then I got by the way, we're in a very big district in Canada I can't think of the name of it right now, it's terrible, but it's like 180 schools or something like that and what I learned is that, like they would say things like can you please come talk to the district level people because they don't want to put the resources?

Speaker 1:

into making this a whole district, a whole school initiative, and so my point here is that what I thought was originally was originally a curriculum for children and the end became a systemic approach to teaching social learning, meaning that we needed to figure out how to reach the high level leaders, the school principals, the teachers, the students and the families, so that there was a common language across all stakeholders, so that everybody was on the bus and everybody understood the value and importance of the word.

Speaker 1:

And now that we're there, we're more successful. However, not everybody's ready for that, and so that's why I wrote a book, that's why we have the app, because you know, the app is an amazing first step, like get everybody to try it and learn about themselves for a little bit. Do a book club. I've had thousands of schools just do this book club. They just get people to read chapters and they talk about it, and then if that kind of resonates with you and has meaning for you, then maybe you can like sign up for the full training you know and go through the, you know, make the commitment. But I will say I'm just gonna, I'm. One last thing to say is that I have come to the conclusion, out of 25 years of research and practice, that it is our moral obligation to do this work systemically in our nations, in our world schools.

Speaker 2:

Thank you for saying that.

Speaker 3:

Mark, did you want to take us through the rule of steps and explain the rule of steps for us?

Speaker 1:

The. You know we've talked about emotions matter. Emotions are information. For those five reasons, we talked about mindsets, right that people on the bus. Emotions are information. And then the questions are so what the heck are the skills? And so ruler is a set of skills we use to describe emotional intelligence. First is recognizing emotions, so being highly aware of my own and yours emotion, your emotions. So that means, like, what am I feeling on the inside of my body and what's going on in my head Understanding those emotions? Where are those feelings coming from, Right? Why am I feeling angry? What's the cause of anger? And how is anger different from disappointment?

Speaker 1:

Labeling emotions you know, being really granular and specific. Is it anger or is it in rage, is it down or is it disappointment, is it happy or ecstatic, is it calm or is it tranquil? Expressing emotions, knowing how and when to express emotions with different people across cultural contexts. So you know, the rules in Montreal about showing emotions might be different than the rules in New York City or Papua New Guinea or Australia or China, and there's no correct expression. It's all about being curious and asking questions and learning. And then the final one is regulation, which is actually the topic of my next book. I've decided that people have told me, mark, thank you for giving me permission to feel, but now what the heck do I do with all these?

Speaker 3:

feelings Right.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and so I've been really deep, I've been really heavily, you know, focused on that, on. You know what is emotion regulation and how do we teach it, and I think that's probably the master skill, you know, the skill that people really need the most to get themselves through life with good health and happiness, and so that's the, those are the skills of ruler and, like you know, I could probably do a graduate course on each of the skills you know for a whole semester. Yeah, Is that in my right Mark in?

Speaker 3:

saying that the first three steps are about your experience and then the last two steps are more about coming up with the strategies that will improve or help the experience or understand the experience. Is that the way in which it's interpreted, sort of?

Speaker 1:

I mean, yes, the first three are basically about self and social awareness. Basically about self and social awareness, sure. The second two are the strategic elements of it. So like how do I help Cindy deal with her feelings? What do I say to support Cindy? You know, how do I? What do I recommend to Carl, given that I know him for two minutes? What do I do to recommend, you know, a good strategy to Carl? Is it a good time and place for me to share what I'm feeling? Is it going to be? How's it going to land? Is it? You know? Have I crafted the message in a way that people will listen as opposed to be turned off? That's the strategic aspects of it.

Speaker 3:

Thank you.

Speaker 2:

Is there a time that or a right time to start talking to this, about? You know, talking about this to our children, or trying to teach them this? A lot of parents that wrote in were saying that they've read your book and they love that, but now they have like a two or three year old and they're not sure if they can start. You know, expanding their vocabulary around emotions and they often use happy, sad or mad and they thought that was enough, but now they're questioning if they should or not. Is their right age to start?

Speaker 1:

this. I think in the womb is a good time to do it, and I think it's important to say that. You know teaching this is not necessarily always giving direct instruction right.

Speaker 1:

It's not always about, you know, Mark, being the feelings mentor to someone and saying, no, you're, let's talk about this and what are you feeling here? It's being a good role model. So I think that the beginning, you know, of the teaching of this is all in being a role model. So when I, as the parent, am frustrated, I say out loud you know that is having some strong emotions right now. You know, what just happened made me very uncomfortable. I'm taking some breaths, as you can see. I'm gonna go sit down for a minute just to calm my body because you know I need to think differently about this and so, like, just doing more and more of that, I think, is critically, critically important.

Speaker 2:

I remember giving a talk in a school and I spoke about kind of revisiting an emotion If you, you know, lashed out at your child or you yelled and you feel that you wanted to kind of tell your child or talk to them about that and say like maybe I could have acted differently, I could have responded differently to you and a father raised his hand and said why would I do that?

Speaker 2:

Because that would show that I'm not perfect and I have flaws. And I responded to him no, it shows that you're human and we all, you know, struggle with our emotions. What would you say to the parent who's really struggling with expressing emotions in front of their child? And lots of parents I've read some studies around masking and you know that might come from their childhood as well but I think there's also parents that wanna show that you talked about like being happy all the time, and some parents wanna show this to their kids, like everything is fine and I'm happy. How do you, what sort of reflections do you have to, you know, start going through in order to undo that sort of, you know that aspect of hiding your emotions?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think helping people see how that's not helpful is important. I think you don't wanna just tell people like that's a bad idea. I wanna do that sometimes cause I know the patients.

Speaker 3:

But it doesn't. It's not helpful. You know.

Speaker 1:

And I think you know I've had. I'll give you an example. So dad, a couple of many years ago, said to me like gosh, mike, you're so vulnerable when you give your presentation. You talked about your childhood. You talked about being bullied.

Speaker 3:

And.

Speaker 1:

I say, you know, it took me a while to get here, just so it didn't happen overnight. And he says, like I would never tell my son that I was bullied as a kid, cause then my son would think I was a whip. And so I said, you know, let's think about your son for a minute. You know, firstly, you know, let's imagine maybe your son being bullied and let's say the vibe he got from you was like toughen up, you know, suck it up, and he didn't share. You know all the pain he was going through by kids making fun of him and maybe doing other things. How would you feel as a parent about that? That would be terrible.

Speaker 1:

I said, yeah, it would be terrible. And so we have to create the conditions for our kids to be their truthful feeling selves, and that means that we have to be able to role model, be the role model. And so the more comfortable you become you know, normalizing that like daddy's successful and he was bullied Right the more we can. I do this all the time. People, a lot of people, are surprised by, like again, how much, how vulnerable I am, and I say like I'm the director of the center for emotional intelligence.

Speaker 1:

You know, if I can't like, if I'm not comfortable talking about my feelings and sharing the mistakes I've made and how I rectified them, like who will?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

And so I think that's just so important that parents realize that we're talking about kids' mental health now, and we want our kids to be comfortable and safe and eager to share with us what they're going through, so we can provide them support. We don't want them to hide it, and where are they going to learn that? They're going to learn it from you.

Speaker 2:

You touched on mental health right now and I just want to have a quick conversation about this because I feel that as a system, we're so reactive but we're not preventative or proactive on certain aspects of mental health enough, which is why, through my work with Kyrus Neuron, I try to share, you know, emotional health and talk about the motion and motion regulation skills, as you mentioned, but the science of that because I think parents should just know that exists and, you know, get some tools to help them out. What have you seen in the work that you're doing and I know that you work with organizations as well Like, what sort of conversation should we be having in terms of a preventative system for our mental health?

Speaker 1:

I do think it all. You know there's a lot of things. You know. I would say the emotion regulation piece is top of mind for me. It's a huge piece, yeah, but I also want to say that you know, I think we focus too much on the individual and that we expect Mark, who is being abused and bullied, to like learn strategies to regulate and yes, mark does need strategies to regulate, but Mark also deserves to grow up in a home and to be in a school where he is safe.

Speaker 1:

And so if you only focus on the individual and not the system, I think you're not gonna get the same benefits.

Speaker 1:

It's also like everything is learned, like this is not something that we are born with, it's cultivated through our relationships, you know, in home, at school.

Speaker 1:

And so if everybody's not co-developing it, just the benefits are gonna be minimal because the opportunities to practice are gonna be minimal, meaning, you know, like I, always, when I disclose my abuse as a child to my family, they freaked out, which was understandable. They got me a therapist, thank goodness, and I loved being I was, you know, 11 years old in therapy and playing ping pong with my therapist and talking about my feelings, and that was important and he was normalizing how I was feeling and helping me cope. But that was one hour a week. I was in school for the other 40 hours a week and at home for the 40 hours you know whatever hundreds of hours that was. And so if you only have one hour a week of opportunity and the rest is actually kind of moving you backwards because of the way people are treating you and you're not learning anything new, how do you develop the skills? It's just that's very difficult.

Speaker 3:

Right, mark, I've got a question about misconceptions, because we're talking about, you know, systemic change and the big picture. Basically, is there any misconceptions that you kind of wanna iron out with the listeners, especially when it comes to emotional intelligence or social-emotional learning? We've got certain political agendas out there right now and a lot of misinformation and so on, and I know that you're very big on let's just look at the science and the data and it speaks for itself, but it's always nice to have someone advocate for something and, yeah, I'm just wondering if there's something that you could iron out for us.

Speaker 3:

That's definitely out there at the moment.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, there's a number of them, I think you know, the ones that I think are most relevant to your audience. You know, are that like it's people prying into the personal lives of you know? It's you know. Or it's like you have to be a trained therapist? You know, I can't tell you how many I have.

Speaker 1:

A friend last year sadly very, very close friend husband got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died very fast. I had another friend who went through a horrible divorce and they both called me, knowing that this is my work, and they wanted to chat. They wanted someone to talk to. That's what this work is for. This work is so we can be good friends, so we can be good lovers, we can be good parents. And so, like, am I trained? I am, but what I was doing was just listening. What I was doing was just asking, you know, very calm, you know easy questions to help people think about things through a different way, to help them cope. That's what I hope everybody can learn. And so it's not therapy. Therapy is therapy. You know, therapy is a private experience where you decide on your own to go to really work through a very difficult problem. Emotional intelligence training is learning skills so we can have good conversations, we can communicate effectively, we can problem solve and we can deal with our emotions. So that's to me that's the big one. I mean.

Speaker 1:

The other piece is that it's pushing a certain agenda. You know, I think that's the weirdest of them all. I will just say that I think that being self-aware is a human right. It's like everybody grows up having feelings, whether you want them or not. Some of them we want to keep, some of them we want to get rid of. And everybody should be able to label those experiences with precise words and have strategies to deal with them. And I'll say I've worked in all those different circles and I get much less pushback than I think the field does, mostly because I try to address the things that you're talking about, carl, right up front. And once I explain it people are like oh yeah, so you're trying to help my kid be able to help a kid who's having trouble problem solve pretty much.

Speaker 3:

Just giving them the life skills that they deserve. That's all, basically.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2:

I'm thinking about what you both just addressed at some point in terms of, like Marky was saying before, about that child and like they're learning something, but then, you know, leaving that environment, and that's why it's systemic, because we have to really address all aspects of that child's environment. I just want to go back to the parents, because for me, that's just what parents are reaching out for and just asking you know, these students are in some schools learning social emotional skills, and then the homes aren't equipped that way. So it's like you said, it's great that they have these skills. And also, parents tell me that there's just so much out there that is promising that their child will develop these emotional intelligence skills. You know apps as well. You know other, not yours, but some for kids. You know that they're saying here just use this and your child will be fine.

Speaker 2:

But then what's the point of all these tools and skills and games if the parent has no idea how to model this right?

Speaker 2:

So I just think it's really important that we talk about that, because thinking of the parent and not just that, thinking of the emails I get sometimes that are describing a not an emotionally safe environment for a child, lots of abuse and lots of parents being burned out right now and the environments are not conducive to, you know, healthy emotional development. A parent reached out to me, knowing that I was going to talk to you, and they said if I know that my child has experienced some sort of childhood adversity, how do I address this? Regarding their emotional intelligence, how do I? Am I doing the same thing? Am I approaching it the same way? And I think you touched on this a little bit before, but I just want to make sure that I highlight this question because there are lots of children in these environments right now. So how do we, if there's a parent that knows that child has experienced this adversity, are they still approaching the ruler, using the rule, approach the same way, or is there a little bit extra to that?

Speaker 1:

It depends what the adversity is right. And so you know, some things can be handled through conversations, some things need additional supports. I think that we need to acknowledge that also right. Whenever there's a person who's in harm or harming themselves like, that's not ruler, that's clinical work, and we know that. And you know, sometimes the ruler work will unsurface or overpower will surface. You know that's, you know I mean it will it'll bring it to the service.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think at the core here is that the first step in the process for a parent to work with their child is to have unconditional love and validation that they need to really, really, really really show through their behavior and through the way they communicate. You know that they empathize with the feelings and they're not judging those feelings. I think right now, kids are feeling more judged than ever before. We all are feeling more judged than ever before. The number one in my research, by the way, in my most recent studies, the number one hoped for characteristic that people are looking for in them and their teachers and their parents is non-judgmental.

Speaker 3:

Oh yeah.

Speaker 1:

Wow, I just think we're endlessly. You know, you're too fat, you're too skinny, you're too tall, you're too short, you're too dark, you're too light, you're too masculine, you're not masculine enough, whatever it is, it's just endlessly. Everybody's just like judging and people are saying you know what? I don't really need your judgment. I need love, I need support, I need validation, I need you know to. I want to achieve my goals, not the goals that you have for me.

Speaker 2:

I wonder if that comes. I'm thinking about like my generation and how we were parented and it was like tough love, right, Like that's how it was. Like you would get a good grade on a test, but it was never enough. You would do well at a sport, but you better win the next game. It was never enough.

Speaker 2:

And I think that's led to. When I talk to parents that are my age I am 40, they just feel like they're never enough and they're not enough for as a parent now and they struggle with that internal dialogue because of how they were raised. You think it's just those cycles that are continuing.

Speaker 1:

In part, definitely. You know. I think tough love is ridiculous. It doesn't make any sense. You know like. You know it's ultimatums, it's threats, you know.

Speaker 3:

Right, yes.

Speaker 1:

You know there's no connection in that. And it's no connection, then it's not going to work, because you can't just have tough love without teaching someone how to deal with it. Exactly, I just think that we have not broken the cycle around the perception that emotions are weak. I think we just have, you know, so much work to do to just let people understand that talking about feelings is not a feminine thing, that emotions are information and data. They're valuable source of information.

Speaker 1:

You know one way I do that is by my research in the business world. So, for example, I just published a study it got accepted this week my colleagues and I looking at the role of school principals in their modeling of emotionally intelligent behavior and what that does to a school. By the way, what it does to a school is it makes teachers a lot happier, a lot less burned out and a lot more satisfied with their jobs. Because it's just, life is better when your manager or boss or principal is high in emotional intelligence. Same thing in the workplace. If there's 50% less frustration and 40% greater inspiration on a team when there's an emotionally intelligent leader, then all of a sudden people are like well, I guess that's pretty important. We should do something about it, and so I've always tried to use good research to get people to see things differently. Yeah, I'll leave it at that.

Speaker 3:

Mark, I just wanna ask you about. You spoke about the judgment, that we're worried about being judged and so on, and your study is that with a specific demographic of kids, are we talking about teens? Are we talking about adults?

Speaker 1:

This is a. I've done both, but this is a big study. By the way, we can get your followers to participate in the study. How about that? We do a little study together.

Speaker 2:

Give me the link, yeah.

Speaker 1:

I think it would be fun. We can come back and talk about the results, but this is a study that I did across the world. Basically, I have this new rule, which is, before I do a speaking engagement, people have to fill out the survey, and so wherever I go, wherever I go, people do the survey. And then I've partnered with different mental health organizations, with different groups, and so I've got 50,000 people in the study and it's very racially and ethnically and gender diverse and it's mostly adults, okay, and I have adults reflecting on their childhoods Did you have that Uncle Marvin?

Speaker 1:

And guess what? Only 30% say yes, 70% say no. And then the top three characteristics are non-judgmental, good listening and compassionate. Right, wow. But one thing that's important, I think, given that parents are gonna listen to this, is that when I present those data, some parents get very angry with me and frustrated with me. They're like I don't like those findings. I'm like they're not to like or dislike, they're just research. And then I say, well, you filled out the survey. By the way, these are your data. And so, of the 500 people sitting here listening to me, not only 30% of you said you had an Uncle Marvin. 70% did it. And, by the way, of the 30% who did, only half of that group said it was a parent.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, wow.

Speaker 1:

So 85% of people say they're don't believe their parents, give them permission to feel I mean, that's what the data show. And then parents say well, you know it's hard to do that for your own kid. What do you mean? It's hard? Well, that's the tough love thing. Sometimes you gotta really push your kid. You know how can it be non-judgmental, like my job is to judge and push, like really, who said so? And then other people say things like well, you know, mark, truth is I don't, really I'm not comfortable talking about emotions with my kid and I say why? And they say, well, if I'm really honest with you, I'm not sure I wanna know, can you believe that? Wow, and if I find out what it really is, I'm gonna have to do something about it and I have no clue what to do. This goes back to the thing we talked about from the beginning, right, which is parents have not had an emotional and telling us education and you know. But who's gonna suffer because of it? And the kids.

Speaker 2:

Our kids. But that's why we need to have this conversation, because I feel like we're on autopilot as parents, right Like days are passing and weeks and months and years, and we're not addressing our own struggles and our own emotions, and then we're not modeling this for our kids, and then they're struggling, we're yelling, it's a mess, and it's not to end this on a dark note, but I know that parents are reaching out and saying this. So you're not. You're painting the picture that I'm hearing and I'm seeing. So we do need to be realistic.

Speaker 1:

I'm a neurotic, negative, chronic optimist. Yeah, no, no, no. And I think that people just need to learn these concepts that they haven't necessarily earned, and once you learn them, and once you practice them, and once you get benefits from them, you just want to keep doing it, cause life is better when you have good strategies and awareness.

Speaker 2:

I think the positive part of what you just said is those three characteristics that you mentioned are exactly, you know, three that we can work on, not easily, but that we can, and we don't need to go out there to take a big course or go back to school. I think those are just self-work aspects that we can do the work on.

Speaker 1:

Definitely, definitely. I. It is interesting I've been really playing with this as I'm working on this next book like unpacking these findings from this research to like help people and you know it's interesting cause like the non-judgment piece. You learn about that, like in Buddhism. You hear about like don't judge your thoughts you know, which is obviously very important or your feelings, but this is a little different. This is about kids, you know, wanting to be around adults who don't judge them. This is the more interpersonal judgment stuff. This is like the stuff that makes you feel bad about yourself or not competent, and I think that you know I haven't seen a lot of good thinking around how to teach that. I'm working on it.

Speaker 2:

We'll follow up at the next conversation, cause I know I always try to end the conversation with you know, asking the guest if you have any like. Really, we've spoken a lot of practical tips and ruler and I know that parents will. If they haven't read the book yet, the notes the link will be in the show notes. But what can a parent take home from this? You know where do they start the work and what are some simple things that they can start tomorrow.

Speaker 1:

So I think the first is ask yourself do you give yourself permission to feel? You know for yourself? Are you non-judgmental? Are you a good listener? Are you compassionate to yourself? Cause, if we're not, if we're constantly judging ourselves and tuning ourselves out and critical instead of compassionate, where is that gonna go Right? So that's the first step is give yourself permission to feel. Then you can give everybody you love, and even the people you don't love that much, permission to feel too.

Speaker 3:

Cause everybody gets the permission to feel.

Speaker 1:

That's the rule, I think. The second is that you can just strive to just be more curious, be that scientist about emotions, like just listen to your feelings a little bit more. You know, when someone says they're sad, say you know, tell me more. Like just asking those questions to gather data and information. And then the third is you know you try the strategies, try one new strategy. Here's the thing that I think is really critical for people to know is that emotion dysregulation is a real waste of time. It's a waste of time because it doesn't produce good results and it takes. Usually we spend more time engaging in the dysregulation than healthy regulation. So for me, for example, I have a tendency to ruminate and I'm gonna be, I'll hang up after this and I'll be like yeah, what did you say? You made those jokes. I weren't that funny. You know like. You said like that. And then like oh my gosh, you know you're tired, so you're like you're not as you know coherent.

Speaker 1:

You know I can work myself up into a storm, and then I'll be like and that could go on for like a while right and I'll go to bed tonight and then I'll be like, oh my God, I can't believe I said that. And then at some point I'll say, mark, it probably wasn't that bad you know, and I'll be like yeah, you're right.

Speaker 1:

Okay, and so, like pausing to have compassionate talk for myself doesn't take long. I can spend 20 minutes ruminating and revisiting and looking for all the mistakes I made. By the way, it's in the can, it's done, so there's not much I can do about it. You know I could beg you not to put it out if I really thought it was that bad, but in the end you know I'm creating, you know, a nervous system that's reacting in ways that are not healthy for my body. I'm not gonna get the good night's sleep that I need if I engage in the dysregulation when I learn how to regulate in healthy ways and actually show that it works and takes less time, like that's amazing.

Speaker 1:

Wouldn't everybody want that? Yeah, sure, of course. I think that we have to give people the knowledge and the skills, have them practice it, refine it, and then they're gonna see the benefits and then they're gonna wanna do it more themselves and make sure that every one of their kids learns it too.

Speaker 2:

Just by doing what you said. I know it'll trickle down into, like you know, modeling to our kids, and I just want to use some language that I've used with my kids to kind of help. Parents have younger kids, but I have a four, six and an eight year old and I tell them about like getting stuck in your emotions, right, so kind of like what you just said and that word helps them understand. I tell them that it's okay to feel angry, it's okay to feel whatever emotion you have, but then you wanna find ways to get unstuck, to get out of that emotion, and you know, sometimes we get stuck in our what if? Thoughts and those what if thoughts are like a snowball, they get bigger and bigger and bigger. So I think that has allowed me to kind of coach my kids and guide them in terms of like how to feel, cause we have to.

Speaker 2:

There's a phrase that you use in your book, carl. We spoke about this. Now I can't remember the phrase, but you know about coaching, being emotional coaches, I believe, or what was the phrase?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, being emotional science, and phrase is an emotion.

Speaker 2:

Scientists right, and that curiosity part comes in there, so it's just so important. I love everything that you shared and I appreciate the fact that you took your time to come chat with us.

Speaker 1:

So thank you and go drink six glasses of wine and ruminate for the rest of the night.

Speaker 2:

No, I won't. This is perfect, thank you, and thank you Carl.

Speaker 1:

Thank you guys, thank you for having me Cindy Pleasure meeting you both. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me on your show, Thank you. Thank you, Mark.

Speaker 2:

We'll share all the links to Mark's work and his book and the website in the show notes for the podcast. So thank you to everybody and please don't forget to subscribe and to leave a rating and review. Thank you Well, I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Dr Mark Brackett as much as I did. You know. For me, there were a few take home messages. The first one is when he brought up the system and that this is a systemic issue that we need to work on, and I've said this ad nauseam. In terms of children, you know we can give them as many tools as we want, we can spend as much money as we want as a society in terms of giving them these tools and teaching them about mindfulness and self-compassion, but if it's not being done within their home, if it's not being done within their daycare and preschool or school, what's the point? We need to start the change in many, many different places, not just giving those tools to kids. The onus is not on them, it's on us as the adults and caregivers in their environment. So there's a lot of work to be done. Also, what was really important to me is those characteristics that he mentioned and being non-judgmental. I think, as parents we mean well sometimes when we are telling our kids what they're doing wrong, but we forget to tell them what they've done right. Doesn't matter how old our child is, but that sort of accumulates right. And then we have a child who perhaps has this negative self-talk and it's largely because of us and how judgmental we can be on our kids. So to me those two are really key take-home messages for me, but I hope you had some as well.

Speaker 2:

Join the conversation on YouTube. On Instagram, you can follow us at curious underscore neuron. You can visit our website at curious neuroncom. But make sure that wherever you are listening to this podcast or watching on YouTube, that you click on that button and subscribe to curious neuron. Thank you to everyone has done so and for leaving a review and a rating. It means the world to me. Send me an email at info at curious neuroncom. Come say hi, let me know who you are and I will see you next time. Bye.