Conversations on Healing

Welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast, where host Shay Beider speaks with renowned healthcare leaders, practitioners, and thought leaders to explore the world of wellness, the incredible powers of self-care, and what it truly means to heal today. Join us on this journey to become more whole, healed, and connected.

Shay Beider Welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast. I’m your host, Shay Beider, and today I am delighted to welcome the esteemed bestselling author and emotional intelligence scholar, Marc Brackett. As the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor at the Child Study Center at Yale, Marc has significantly influenced the field of emotional intelligence with his award-winning research and his book, “Permission to Feel”, which has been now translated into 25 different languages. Mark is the lead developer of RULER, an evidence-based approach to social and emotional learning adopted by over 5,000 schools worldwide, enhancing the lives of millions. RULER integrates emotional intelligence principles into educational systems, improving academic performance, reducing bullying, and alleviating teacher burnout. A prominent voice in the media, Marc has been featured in outlets like the New York Times and Good Morning America. He serves on the board of directors for the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, and has been a keynote speaker at over 700 conferences globally, including events at the White House and the Aspen Institute. In 2022, Mark co-created “How We Feel”, an app designed to teach emotional skills and enhance wellbeing. This is a wonderful tool, among others that you’ll be able to explore in today’s episode. We discuss some of the components of RULER and something called the Mood Meter, a valuable tool for understanding our emotions more deeply. This conversation is filled with insights that you can directly apply in your daily life. So, I can’t wait for you to join us and hear this informative conversation with Marc Brackett.

Well, welcome Marc. I’m delighted to have you on the Conversations on Healing podcast. Thanks so much for joining me.

Marc Brackett Thank you for having me.

Shay Good. I actually wanted to start- we’re going to talk quite a bit today about your book, “Permission to Feel”, which is outstanding. I had such a great time reading it, and it’s really… you start the book in very personal way about what connected you to- really, it’s so fascinating because it’s through a relationship with your Uncle Marvin that you really came to understand the importance and value of our emotions at an early age. And so, I thought it might be a nice place to start, just to share a little bit about how you first gained permission to feel.

Marc Sure. Well, as you know from reading, I had a rough childhood. Childhood was… it was tough because I had two parents who loved me a lot, but they had challenges- mental health, other kinds of challenges as well. So, for example, my mom just had terrible anxiety, and she had, as they called it back then, nervous breakdowns all the time and would kind of retreat to her room and not want to come out for hours on end. My dad suffered from a lot of anger and resentment about his upbringing. He didn’t really know how to deal with that very well. I have two brothers, both of whom were- I’m very close to- very lucky about that. But back then, one of them had some mental health challenges and the other one had physical health challenges. And my parents were really just trying to make ends meet and support their crises.

And unfortunately for me, the person that they had take care of me was a pedophile. And so, I was abused for about five years of my childhood- from about five years old till around 10 or 11. And I never talked to anybody about it, which blows my mind really. As a psychologist today, I think, “My goodness, how could it be possible for a child to go through such horrific things, and not tell their own parent?” But I think for obvious reasons, when you see your mom is having a lot of anxiety, and your dad having a lot of anger, you just sort of retreat, and you say things like, “I don’t want to make the family in a worse situation than it already is.” Now, with that said, I feel enormously blessed because around 11, I had an uncle who was my mother’s brother, who happened to be a school teacher, and happened to be a musician, who happened to be running a curriculum to teach kids about feelings.

I mean, it is kind of a magical story in many ways that, by some wave of a magic wand, some uncle happens to be developing a program to teach kids about how to deal with their feelings, and he kind of comes into your life at the time when you need it the most. And that’s what happened to me. And he was the person that I really got to talk to about all this, and he didn’t say, “I can’t handle this” or “toughen up.” He said, “We’ll get through it together.” And then, with his support and then with my parents’ support, things did turn around. But it really was that relationship that not only changed my life around in terms of my mental health and my wellbeing, but really opened me up to a whole career.

Shay And I think that’s what’s so fascinating: is your career now, in so many ways, is defined by that early experience with your uncle and learning the power of your own emotions and feelings, and then also the many layers to it. Even when I think about it, the first academics- which you talk about in the book- who presented the idea of emotional intelligence, and that idea, when they first presented, was turned down by a lot of top tier journals. And then they finally got it published, and then Dan Goleman, who we’ve interviewed on the show, came along and got it out in kind of a more public way, so that it got into the culture. But there’d been academic work that had proceeded that, obviously. And then you end up developing relationships with those early pioneers. They end up becoming a part of your whole sphere of influence and having a huge impact on the direction of your career, which now, your role as the director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, where you work on this year-round, making a huge impact not only in school systems but in work environments.

And so it’s become multilayered. And so, I think just for some of our listeners, one of the things that we’re going to talk about today are that there are core skills- core skills to emotional intelligence. You talk about it in the book, “Permission to Feel”, as being an emotional scientist, really looking at it. And you have developed these five steps that I also think will be fabulous for you to share with our listeners around how you learn these core skills. So, I think as a starting point, let’s just do a little bit of a revisiting of what is emotional intelligence, and then I want to go into those five core skills that you teach in a lot of settings, so that we get everybody on a good starting point for our conversation today.

Marc Sure. I think if I can take us one step back first, which is that I’ve written this book, I’m excited, it’s been translated into 27 languages, and I’ve run around the world talking about it, and I still find there’s resistance to their work. And I just want to address that first because I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s a step before the skills, which is this concept of permission to feel. And it’s more of a mindset: that we have to value emotions, we have to see them as being important, and we have to care about how we feel, and we have to care about how other people feel. And that really is more of a belief system than a skill.

And that gets cultivated through relationships. It gets cultivated through the way we speak about feelings, right? “Stop crying,” right? “Why are you so upset about this?” That teaches people that emotions don’t matter, that we should stuff our feelings and deny our feelings. “Tell me more. I’m just curious, Shay, how are you feeling today?” That’s saying, “Oh, I care about how you feel.” And so, step one, I think, is all about cultivating the mindsets that emotions matter. Once we do that, and then we can think about being a scientist about emotions- that curious explorer as opposed to the critical judge. We can realize that emotions are not good or bad; they’re just experiences. And some of them, when we have them for too long and they’re too intense, they don’t feel good, but they’re not bad. They’re just data. They’re information about what’s happening in our lives and what our needs might be. And so that’s, I’ll call that the prerequisite piece of building your emotional intelligence. Now the question is, okay, so what are these skills? And there are five, and we call them the RULER skills. The first is recognizing emotions. So, for example, I’m watching your nonverbal cues right now…

I believe – I may not be a hundred percent accurate, but you’re interested, but you’re curious. You’re nodding, you’re showing the thing more. Keep going. If you were making a different facial expression, I might be like, ‘Alright, Marc, you’ve talked enough, let’s move on,” or “He’s bored,” or something. But that’s a critical skill in terms of self-awareness, in social awareness. So, I need to be aware of what I’m feeling at all times- not that I have to be obsessed about it. That would be not helpful. We can’t just check in with our feelings all day long. Nobody wants to do that. And actually, research would show that that would not be helpful. But different times of the day- it’s like I wake up in the morning, how am I feeling? Going into a meeting with a colleague, how am I feeling? I’m transitioning from my workplace to my home to be with my family…

How am I feeling? Those are opportune moments to just be aware that I’m in a good mood, I’m in a tough mood, I’m irritable, I’m ecstatic, I’m content, I’m bored, I’m frustrated. And then I have to ask myself questions: how might that impact my behavior, my relationships, my decisions? And that gets at the “U” of emotions- our RULER. So, “U”, it stands for understanding. So, what we like to discuss there is the concept of the causes and the consequences of our feelings, and that’s about myself and about you. Once I get to know you, I get to learn what are the things that I do that activate you or trigger you, that make you feel disappointment, or anger, or frustration, or sadness. And then, hopefully you’ll learn that about me. And then what we say there is that there are universal themes. So, anger is generally caused by a perceived injustice, whereas disappointment is caused by an unmet expectation.

But the things that might make you feel angry, Shay, or me, could be completely different. We live in different places. We have different family upbringings, different genders, different roles in the world. And so, not everything that might make me feel angry would make you feel angry, and vice versa. And ultimately, the goal is for us to have deep understanding of that and empathy, and not to be like, “Well, why would you get angry about that?” That’s not for me to judge, right? My role is to be the empathic friend, colleague, to understand why you’re feeling the way you’re feeling.

Shay Yeah. I think a few key points that you’ve said, that I also think you map out beautifully in the book, is that this first initial idea that there is resistance to people even valuing emotion- there’s a long history of that. And that what you’ve seen, and you give specific stories about this in the book, is that once people, they might have that initial response of resistance, but once they actually go through the curriculum and come to understand point two, which is emotions are information- that they contain very powerful information that can really help how we guide our lives- that then there’s an understanding of, “Oh, this is of value. It’s not just a soft skill.” And there’s so much data now to show the importance of it in terms of the success of our career, our interaction with our colleagues. There’s a whole range of data now that shows the importance of having good EQ or emotional intelligence.

And so, I think foundationally, that concept- that first we have to give ourselves permission to feel, because this matters, it matters in all areas of our lives. And then also, what you also talk about in the book is the ways that if we ignore or suppress our feelings, the ways that they will actually govern us without our recognition- that they will affect what we think of as our rational thought. And I want to touch on this just a little because we’re interviewing Dr. Bruce Perry, who is a neuroscientist, psychiatrist and trauma specialist on the show. And he has this framework where he talks about, first you regulate, then you relate, and then you reason. And that’s totally from an understanding of the brain- that first we have to get the nervous system to feel calm and safe. And you do that through self-regulation or co-regulation, and then you’re in a place where you can start to use social engagement.

Now we’re into polyvagal theory and Steven Porges’ work, and now we can connect and talk to each other, and then we’re picking up all sorts of positive cues there. And now we’re into neocortex, and we can reason and we can get into that aspect of the brain. And he sees it as that, like a sequencing pattern of how you move up the scale. And I was so interested in your core skill model, the RULER model, that you’ve taught in so many different schools and systems- how you understand that in relationship to the way that the brain works?

Marc So, I like the model, and it’s very aligned with mine. The only thing I would say is that it depends: if you’re by yourself, it works differently than when you’re with another person. So, if you’re my partner, or my kid, and you’re triggering me, I do have to learn how to deactivate, which is the regulate piece, to then relate, to then reach and support, and reason. But if I’m sitting by myself in the airport and my flight gets canceled, and it’s more- I got to work on it on my own, right? I’ve got to just- Marc, take a deep breath, it’s going to be okay, recognize the impermanence. Marc, you’ve done this before. This sucks, but you’ll get through it, right? There’s a lot of self-work there. And so, I think just making sure that people understand that the co-regulation, the interpersonal piece, is really, really important. But we also do- we need to know how to self-regulate in certain situations. I think the easiest way to talk about how our brains operate, I’m a big fan of the neuroscience work, but for me, it’s only as good as it helps people to understand what to do, because the behavior is… people don’t struggle with not understanding how their nervous system operates.

They understand with not being able to deal with their feelings when they’re triggered by somebody. And so, I feel like what’s most important is people understand the basics of the why. That when you are activated, when someone says something that offends you, or your kid is screaming at you, and you’re tired, in those moments, what happens is that you’re going to go into an automatic way of reacting as opposed to being conscious and deliberate about responding. And that is, by the way, not just about the moment. It’s almost as if- because remember, if I scream at you in another language…

It’s not going to have the same- even if it’s the same facial expression, and the pain, the same tone- it won’t have the same impact if I say, “You’re a blank blank,” and I make fun of you and I make you feel bad about yourself. And so, everything is about appraisal. How we feel is based on the way we appraise the things that are happening to us. And that’s just important to understand for people because that is based in all of our development. So, in almost every instance of anger or sadness, I’m bringing my whole life into it because I grew up with a very angry father who had a lot of very intense facial expressions, who had piercing eyes and those pressed lips, and I got hit a lot as a kid. And so, I am 55 now, and I’ve got all those memories of that from my childhood.

And so, when I’m around someone who is a bully or who is trying to intimidate me, it’s almost if my whole childhood and life are coming through my interpretation of what’s happening, and it’s work to unlearn that kind of stuff. It’s hard work because it’s been wired, and I’ve been rehearsing it, and it’s in my memory, and it happened during my formative years. But the good news is that all of that was learned because of some bad experiences, which means that I can have a deeper understanding of that and work towards not allowing that to have so much power over me. And I think it’s the beauty of the work, which is that we’re able to acquire these skills throughout our lives and development. It’s very empowering. It says, somehow or another, you learn this way of responding or reacting. Now that you’re aware that that’s not helpful to your goals, to your relationships, to your wellbeing, and you’re learning these new ways. We have things that we can try to unlearn and things that we can practice to improve our lives and have greater wellbeing. And I find that very helpful. So, I’m going a little bit all over the place, but it’s all in the same direction. The deactivation is part of your nervous system, that you are kind of, you want to lower your heart rate and slow down breathing, so that the fight flight response, or the freeze response is not taking over
And that you can be more conscious and deliberate about what you’re going to say, and what you’re going to do. Does that cover what you wanted to cover?

Shay Yeah, and I think you give a beautiful illustration too in the book of how- so you share a story of your cousin’s daughter who is criticized and bullied at school and essentially because of how she looks. And what you share- and you share it in a couple of different places- is that somebody can say something mean to us, like a bully can say something, and it can cut to our core. And then we can internalize that, and it can change the course of our life. It can really affect us for many, many years to come. And obviously, that’s part of why you’re working so hard to get these SEL skills implemented in school systems, so that doesn’t happen, and that we’re not creating a legacy of harm for years to come. And there’s also good data on what that legacy of harm is, even physiologically.

But then there’s this other piece of how do you develop the kid in a way? And I think part of your curriculum is designed to do this, with enough skill, that when someone says the horrible thing to you, there’s enough inner resilience that it doesn’t land and go all the way to the core. And you give some examples in the book of a kid who deflects that right back and has an ability, over time and maybe through skill development- because you talk about it a lot in skill development – but to be able to push back so that it doesn’t just land and harm, but actually there’s that dynamic balance. And I’m in no way suggesting that the child should do that. This is not about that at all. I’m just saying, how do we build resilient cultures that support that when a bully or someone does something like that, that we, in a sense, instill a learning capacity where there is more intelligence around how to not even let that land in the first place. And that, to me, there’s a collective… It is part of what I think the power of your work is, actually. If you lay a broad enough collective framework around this is how we treat one another, then it starts to disempower people who are sort of invasive to that system. If you have a culture that’s basically healthy and emotionally intelligent, that people who are coming in and acting in a bullying or harsh or mean way, they lose power when they’re kind of like the fringe element.

So I think it’s actually, it’s a very interesting thing you’re doing, because you’re starting to lay a foundation that will over time, inherently disallow more of that kind of behavior.

Marc A couple things there. It’s nice to talk with someone who really has good background knowledge, has read my book. I really appreciate that. A couple of things I want to say. The first is that I do feel strongly that children deserve to be brought up in safe environments. And so, like you said, we’re not going to put the onus on my niece, who’s five years old, to figure out how to protect herself. She needs to be safe. Now, of course there’s going to be conflict. Of course, people are going to disagree. That’s not the same as being tormented, abused, made to feel less than. That’s a whole nother level that we need to figure out ways to support children in experiencing fewer of those kinds of experiences.

Life stinks sometimes, and you can’t control the environment. And so we do need to learn how to deal with these things. And it is developmental also. I think the expectations I had from my niece when she was five were very different than when she was, for example, when she was eight and she wanted to be in this full play, and she was getting nervous that she might be bullied again. We were at a different stage of her development where now she had some strategies that she could use to support herself and feeling less intimidated or less fearful. And then when she was 13, I’ll never forget this- when she was in camp, and she has a single mom, and she had started the camp a week later than most other kids had started it. And she went, and she was feeling very uncomfortable, and she just didn’t like it.

And her mother was freaking out. She had to work and really needed for her daughter to be at camp. And so Uncle Marc to the rescue- talk to Esme. I’m not going to force this kid to go to a camp she doesn’t want to go to, but we’re going to figure it out. We are going to talk about it. And so, we had these really rich conversations, and she would say things like, “Uncle Marc, I don’t feel safe.” And I said, “Well, tell me more.” And it was really getting specific. And so she said, ‘Well, they didn’t do any activities to welcome me into the group, and I felt awkward and weird just joining in a week late.” I said, “That’s really interesting.” And I said, “Well, would you feel comfortable if I spoke to the counselor about this? Not to embarrass you, but to just- let’s brainstorm together something that might be different tomorrow or the next day?”

And she thought about it. She said, “All right, maybe, but just don’t make me look like a whatever.” And then I said to her, “I don’t want to put any pressure on you because you should never go to a place where you feel unsafe. If we try some activities, like things that you can say to yourself and do to help you feel more comfortable or get to know some people, could we give it a couple days at least? Is it okay to just give it a couple days?” And in this instance, which is interesting, is that she stayed for the week, and at the end of the week, we did decide it wasn’t a good environment for her. And so, she was very self-aware, and I take very big pride in that because of her great Uncle Marvin. But I didn’t want her to give up so quickly. I really wanted her to have data.

Of course, if she ever felt unsafe in a serious way, there’s no option. We would take her out. But it was more just like it wasn’t a good fit and she just would rather have done something else. And we figured out something else for her the following week. But my whole point about this is that the work is about meeting children where they’re at, learning, being super curious, not being the knower. Notice how I approached it as a curious uncle, not judging, I didn’t say like, “Why would you feel that way? or “Get over it.” I was really non-judgmental, highly curious, compassionate, asking good questions, trying to scaffold it. I do know more than she knows; I have life experience, but I don’t want to throw that at her. I want to just figure out a way to reach her, have the conversation, let her feel like she’s making some of the decisions because nobody wants to be told or be fixed. And I think that’s the beauty of the work. My research shows that most people are just desperate to be around people who are nonjudgmental listeners who show that empathy and compassion.

Shay And it’s interesting because you’ve developed a methodology that includes things like labeling and developing an emotional vocabulary. And you talk about it in that way that it’s important to not just be like, well, I’m sad, but to have, you can of course say you’re sad, but that there’s a lot of words that can go beyond. And so in the book you include this mood meter, and it’s fun how you actually have it. I don’t know how well people can see it that are on YouTube listening. You can look it up, but look up the mood meter. And what’s fun about it is it has a lot more vocabulary and it’s also organized in this way of pleasantness and energy. And why don’t you just describe it because for our listeners that can’t see it, obviously they can look up online and mood meter, but it’s this relationship between the pleasantness and the energy of what we’re feeling. So tell us more about that. It’s a great tool.

Marc It is. And by the way, just going back to the story I was sharing a little while ago, is that when she was saying, I’m feeling unsafe, or I’m feeling uncomfortable, I’m not disagreeing. I’m asking good questions to make sure that she’s using the right concepts. When she said, I’m afraid, fear is about danger, being uncomfortable is different than being afraid. And I really needed to know, do you believe you are in danger? Is someone trying to hurt you at this camp, or are you just feeling uncomfortable and having difficulty making friends and feeling like you’re integrated into it? It really was not a fear situation. It was more of discomfort. I believe that by 13, we have to, we should go into uncomfortable situations as long as our safety is not thread. And then again, you learn and you grow from that experience of building the resilience as you talked about, because we can’t protect kids from every little thing. I think that’s the worst thing ever. We have to allow them to feel discomfort.

And the other thing, by the way that I said to her is I said, “We’re going to give it to three days, and every day at four o’clock when the camp is over, we’re going to talk to each other and we’re going to check in for the day, and you’re going to let me know how it went, and we’re going to review what worked, what didn’t worked, and then we’ll make some decisions over time together.” And so she also knew that she could speak to Uncle Marc at the end of the day. She knew that someone was listening, someone cared, someone going to help her problem solve. And in the end, I trusted her in terms of what was really best for her.

Shay And I should have clarified, because you say in the book that the mom is technically your cousin, but felt more like a sister. And so the daughter feels more like your niece. And so you’re the uncle. I should have clarified, but…

Marc My cousin is, I grew up with her. This is my Uncle Marvin’s daughter. So, we’re pretty close.

Shay Very close.

Marc So before we went to that story around Esme and resilience and all that, actually a funny quick story. She’s in college now and doing very well, but she still likes to check in, is interested in psychology, and she is seeing a counselor at her university and the counselor says to her, “I have a really great book that I think you should read.” And then there’s…

Shay And then there’s your book, “Permission to Feel”.

Marc And then of course, she turns to page whatever, 220, and it’s like, there’s a story about me in that book!

Shay Right, it’s like I know it well!

Marc Anyhow, it was a beautiful bonding experience for us too. So what I was getting at before we went on that little river stream, we talked about the “R” and the “U”, recognizing emotions, facial expressions, body language, understanding my own emotions, understanding your emotions. One point about the “R” I want to say is that we overestimate how skillful we are at reading people’s emotions. And so I just encourage people to not think they’re certain about how someone feels until they ask them the question and have them respond.

Shay And you said that so beautifully in the book where you said, ‘We’re going to assume wrong a lot of the time.” And so it’s more about asking, and listening, because that’s actually how we’re going to get more accurate information.

Marc Yeah, because I mean, if I knew you for 25 years, Shay, and we’ve lived together and we were, whatever relationship we had, I would have enough data to know when you make that guest, you try to get on. They didn’t want to come on. And you made that expression. That’s the disappointment, right? When you hang up the phone, when you got the guests you’ve wanted, and you’re like, yes, I would know that’s elation. But when we’re meeting new people, and especially people from other cultures and other racial and ethnic backgrounds, we need to be really mindful that we may be attributing emotion. We may be making guesses, which sometimes will be accurate, but oftentimes won’t.

Shay Right.

Marc Okay, so recognize, understand, label. Now we get to the mood meter. We have our axis, which are pleasantness and energy, and we think about emotions as appraisals. So here I am in this moment and I’m thinking of the cognitive piece here. Do I feel like continuing the conversation or do I feel like stopping it? Do I feel like approaching my day? Do I feel like avoiding my day? Do I feel like when I walk into a school or a home or my own workplace, do I feel like this is a place I’m going to be comfortable and safe in, where I want to be? Or do I feel like it’s something off here, something that doesn’t feel right, I’m not sure I’m welcome. I feel unwelcome. That’s that pleasantness axis. The Y axis is the energy axis or the activation axis or the arousal axis, which is what’s going on physically and mentally for me in terms of energy.

Do I feel like I’ve had a good night’s sleep and I’m rested and I feel energized, or do I feel depleted and tired and exhausted? And so we crossed those two axis to create our four quadrants of the mood meter. And so people can look at it or you can just listen to me. It’s yellow, red, blue, and green. The yellow is high energy and pleasant: happy, excited, elated, ecstatic, joyful, jubilant. Green is pleasant, but lower in energy: calm content, tranquil, peaceful, relaxed. Blue and red are the unpleasant feelings. I’m going to say this out loud- unpleasant, not negative, not bad. Life is filled with lots of unpleasant emotions. We cannot control the loss of loved ones. We cannot control the unknown of a vaccine or the unknown of a pandemic. This is just life. There are lots of unknowns. We’re going to feel anxious, we’re going to feel sad.

It’s not bad. It’s just an emotion. We just don’t want to have those emotions for very long periods of time and in high intensities. The blue- down, sad, lonely, despair, sad, hopelessness. And that red is the anger and anxiety family. So, peeved, irritated, enraged, versus uneasy, overwhelmed, anxious, panicky. And that’s the mood meter. And we love it. It’s based in a lot of rigorous research. I think it’s the best tool, just to be frank, to help people take the mess that’s in our heads, the confusion about feelings and the overwhelm about what am I feeling? And we can just take all that and just ask ourselves two questions. Am I pleasant? Am I unpleasant? Am I energized? Am I tired? And then find our quadrant. And then within the quadrant, we can get more specific or granular as we call it in psychology. So that’s the “L”. And I will tell you right now, given that if I’m right, this is people in your line of work or doing clinical work supporting people with mental health, that labeling is really important because it will guide you to a solution that might be best for you. I’m going to give one example. You might’ve read this in the book where I was going up for tenure, which is something that happens when you’re a professor. I am in the process of putting together my dossier to hand in with all my stuff. And that month, two months, three months before, I was really not feeling well. I was not sleeping well. I was kind of like jittery. I started having horrible, horrible heartburn.

And my father, I was, how old was I then? I was probably, I was like 46, and my father had a quadruple bypass at 48. And so I’m already convinced that I have heart disease, that I’m going to need a quadruple bypass- I’m a little hypochondriacal, and I go to the doctor and I’m taking, I’m convinced my heart is racing. I really was a mess. And he’s like, “Oh, this is what it’s like for all professors who are going up for tenure. This is just the norm. And so here’s your Prilosec for your heartburn and here’s your Ativan for your anxiety.” And I said, “Okay, that’s it?” And he’s like, “Yeah, yeah, you’re going to be fine.” And I had a stress test and I wasn’t having heart disease or anything, but I was annoyed. I was pissed. Just to be frank, like I’m a director of a center for emotional intelligence. Do you have any curiosity about how I feel? Do you have any other strategies other than two drugs that you want to prescribe me? And I’m not against drugs by any means, but it didn’t seem like that was the first thing that we could have gotten a little bit more into my situation. So I went for this long walk afterwards, it forced me to be curious, and I’m like, am I anxious? No, not anxious about the future. Not really. I feel pretty confident in my package. Am I stressed? Not really. Am I worried? Not really. Do I feel pressure? No.

How about overwhelmed? Oh my gosh, that’s it. I am working 15 hour days. I don’t give myself any rest or breaks. I am overwhelmed. I have no freedom, no space. I’m just not taking care of myself. And I had that epiphany, and it was almost as if the heartburn went away and all the troubles went away, because I realized that the only solution was to do less. I just needed to watch America’s Got Talent instead of doing email.

Shay Right! Relax, have some fun.

Marc I know. I’m like, we got to buy myself some yellow and green.

Shay That’s right.

Marc But it was true. It was just amazing to me how unself-aware I was and how I was not applying my own principles for my own life. And once I realized that I was not, because then you start making up stories about yourself once you label yourself as certain like, oh, I’m anxiety. I have an anxiety disorder and I’m neurotic by nature. Don’t count me wrong. I worry a lot. But the truth was in that moment, my life was just so busy and I was just so, saying yes to everything and just sort of saturated. And I have to say that’s still because I’m so achievement-oriented and I think I can change the world, I get caught up in that overwhelm a lot.

Shay But what a great illustration of how just using labeling in a positive way to refine and define a little more carefully, what am I actually feeling? Is it that? Is it that? No. And then allowing yourself to be like, bingo. It’s that I’m overwhelmed. That’s the label that actually suits what I’m feeling internally.

Marc Exactly.

Shay And how you said, you showed it so perfectly, how that’s a piece of information then that could guide you to make choices that were different. That you could say, “Okay, then I’m going to take stuff off my plate, I’m going to do less.” And that’s the brilliance of emotional intelligence and being an emotional scientist, as you describe it, because now you’re actually making new choices based on that understanding. And then that proves the quality of your life, which is fabulous.

Marc Exactly. And it really did. It just radically changed how I set up my days, and I started scheduling more of my physical fitness time, more breaks. I’m still a workaholic, but I do, now, I go to my hot yoga class pretty much every night, and it’s a priority for me. It’s like, ‘Don’t get in the way of my yoga!” It really does make a difference. And I was not prioritizing my wellbeing.

I was prioritizing achievement and accomplishment, which is important to me, but I need a greater balance. And if I were labeling myself as kind of anxious, well, anxiety is about uncertainty. So then I would’ve been really- when the pandemic hit and I was sitting at home in my office, and everybody was watching the news and people are passing and there’s the university shut down- and that was anxiety. It was anxiety. I could make no predictions about future. I had no control over my future, especially about when are we going back to work. And so how I dealt with that as a psychologist was very interesting also because I started just having a greater appreciation for the cognitive strategies.
And I just realized, Mark, remember you’re not a trustee of the university. You’re not the head of the epidemiology center, the CDC. You’re not going to make the choice about when the university opens, so why are you going to worry about it all day? Stop. Give it up. It’s not your job to think about it, to be okay with where you’re working from now. Really helpful to have that just level setting for my health, myself. Also my team, we had never worked through Zoom before that much, and so there’s uncertainty about that. And then I was like, well, guess what? Everybody in the whole freaking world is doing that too. I’m not the only one. So you can be in learner mode, Mark, how about that? Just change your mindset. This is an opportunity to learn something creative, a new creative way of running team meetings.

And then we had these fun Zoom parties where everybody’s sharing their go-to strategies for having wellbeing during the pandemic, and we learned from each other. We got recipes, we did walks. I learned every single park in the town that I live in. And so it actually ended up being something quite creative. And so that was a shift in mindset again, but that was really helpful for anxiety. When it’s pressure. For example, a lot of my students at my university, they say they’re stressed, but a lot of times it’s pressure because getting so much pressure from their parents. Did you get an A on your test? And how’d you do today? What went on in the dorm? And what happened here? And it’s like they can do all the breathing exercises in the world, but that’s not going to stop the parent from texting them or checking in 15 times a day. At some point, in order to relieve the pressure, you’re going to have to have the conversation, set some boundaries with your parents. Do you see what I’m getting at here? How this awareness of your feelings and what’s causing you to have these feelings can just be so helpful to guide you to a strategy that would be most helpful.

Shay Yeah, and you talked about specifically there how sometimes a cognitive approach is what you need. That’s why we have a whole field of CBT, or cognitive behavioral therapy. Sometimes you do need that kind of cognitive intervention. And you also- you referenced in the book, Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work around body budgeting and how emotions are predictions too. She talks about that. I feel like that might be an interesting piece to share with our listeners too, so they have a little bit of that understanding as well.

Marc So let’s just put it into the framework so that we can keep it simple for people. There’s getting to the “R” of RULER. So I am trying to make predictions, for example, at how other people feel, and I have to have data for that. I need context. I need to know the person that helps me have better accuracy. The understanding of emotions is getting to know what makes people feel the way they feel. So I’m trying to, I can make better predictions about if I say this to my partner, this is probably going to be the response. If I say that, that’s going to be the response. So we can predict future behavior. Labeling is pretty straightforward in terms of just building the vocabulary and having the understanding. What I’ll say about that is that we have to agree on the definitions. Some people argue with me on this. I stand firm on my beliefs around that. Again, we’re going to agree that anger is about injustice.

And we’re also going to agree that we can all feel anger for different reasons, and we have to hold both of those truths. The “E” in RULER is about expressing emotions, knowing how and when to express emotions with different people across contexts. So understanding that the way people express happiness varies as a function of culture. So here in Western society, people, when you ask a little kindergartner to draw a picture of someone who ‘s happy, they draw this big happy face with teeth and everything. If you go over to Asia and you ask a child to do that, they draw a more kind of serene, gentle smile. Does that mean that people are happier here than there? Absolutely not. It just means that throughout history, we’ve created norms about what it means to express a certain emotion. Same thing with eye contact, hugging, kissing. I go to Italy to give a speech. It’s like, “Marco, Marco, we have you been all my life.” And then I go to Hong Kong or China and people bow at me. And so there’s no right or wrong. It’s actually going back to being the emotional scientist who’s that curious explorer and learning. And it’s beautiful to learn things. I love learning how other cultures think about feelings. I’ve learned words. One of my favorites, which is “mudita”, which is a Sanskrit term for vicarious love and sympathetic joy. We don’t have that word in English, but we certainly can experience it, and it’s nice to have a word for it.

Shay Yeah, I know, right? Why don’t we have that word, like taking joy and other people’s joy. We need, we need mudita. We need a little nugget like that, right?

Marc Right! And then final, the final “R” of- one thing I want to say about expressing, which I think is so important, is that for parents, for teachers, for anyone who works with kids, or any if you work with adults too, is that our beliefs about who has the right to express emotions will impact how people feel in those environments. And so my hope for the world is that, everyone has the permission to feel. That’s not a privilege to be able to have permission to feel. And that includes the permission to express emotions. The rules in society are not necessarily fair for certain groups of people, just to be blunt, a very privileged person based on my skin color, based on my financial situation, based on where I work. And so when I express anger, people become curious about, why are you angry? If I were of a different background, people might not be so curious.

They might be accusatory. And I just think that’s very important for us to be aware of and to figure out: do we have an unconscious bias? Are we projecting something onto someone that is based on a stereotype or other biases that we may have grown up with, based on where we were nurtured? And then finally, it’s the big “R”, right? The regulation strategies. And we’ve talked a bit about those already, that there are different types of strategies. And I would say for that, what I think people should know is oftentimes I think we get into the false belief that it’s one strategy. We’re never using really one strategy. If you- let’s say we got into an argument here- I’m probably going to take a deep breath, going to pause for a minute, may take a step back. I’m going to try to think about, what did I say?

I’m going to think about what might I say to move the situation in a different direction. And so when we’re regulating our emotions, oftentimes we’re using multiple strategies. If I’m a parent who is really annoyed with my kid, I may take a deep breath. I may say, “Honey, I love you, but daddy needs to take a break, two minutes to just think about something.” And I’ll remove myself from the situation. I’ll think about the self that I want to be- the father that I want to be, or the husband I want to be, or whoever it is. And then I’ll come back and through that mindset, that lens, I’ll say something that might be more helpful than unhelpful to the relationship.

Shay You talk about this last point very specifically in the book as a tool or a method or an approach to when you’re in one of those difficult situations. What do you do? How do you crystallize it into- because you said earlier in our conversation, all this emotional stuff- in a way, it’s about our behavior. How are we actually interacting and engaging and relating to other human beings? And we want to actually be able to influence that and impact how we’re actually connecting, relating to other human beings. And so there is where the rubber meets the road element to this. And so what do you do when you’re in that situation? It’s triggered, it’s tense. It’s like maybe because of your history, because of all of the things- racism comes into this, gender comes into all the stories, like you said, how you were treated by your parents, who triggered you, like all the harms that were done to you.

All that is playing in our brains quite literally, and we’re getting triggered. So you catch yourself, okay, I’m triggered. And you talk about something that you just described, which is, one, you breathe and you pause, right? That’s a strategy, actually, to notice I’m triggered. I’m going to breathe. I take a breath, and I’m maybe not going to say anything right now because this is a moment where I’m just going to take a pause, which I thought was really interesting. I wasn’t sure where this was born from in the literature, but I loved the idea. I was like, this is super interesting, this idea of what is my best self? If I were to be the ideal parent or whatever role you happen to be in that moment- partner, or whatever, colleague- how would that best self respond right now? Right?

Marc Yeah.

Shay So talk about how, because it’s such a simple construct that’s very practical for people when they’re in deep.

Marc It’s my savior 90% of the time. My worst stuff does come out quite a bit. Sorry. I try, and my relationship, my partner says something like this, “You’re trying to be your best self right now, right?” I’m like, “Yeah.” He’s like, “So you really want to say something nasty?” I’m like, “Yeah..” and he says, “But you’re not going to do it because you’re trying to be your best self.” I’m like, “Yeah.”

Shay You’re like, yeah, I am. I’m trying. I’m really trying.

Marc This is not working, by the way, so I’m going to leave. Yeah, it’s hard work. I just want to say that…

Shay Do you have an idea of like where the best self came from? I don’t think I was familiar with that previously. So I’m like, where did that come from?

Marc Yeah, so that came from a relationship with a colleague of mine who is a psychologist, named is Robin. And Robin is a clinician, and she had patients for 25, 30 years and was just working with couples and trying to help them with their emotions. And she would teach them all the strategies, and they wouldn’t use them. And she’s like, “I just taught you this strategy. Why aren’t you using it?” I was coming at it from a researcher and a curriculum developer in schools, and here’s the strategy, why aren’t you using it? And so we both were struggling with getting people to be motivated to regulate, having the want and recognizing the value proposition that actually, if you choose to regulate and choose a helpful strategy, your life is going to be better. You’re going to have better wellbeing, you’re going to have better relationships, you’re going to make better choices. And so through lots of research and thinking, we came up with this idea of the best self- that when you take that moment to pause and think about the self that you want to be and the self that you want others to see, it helps you to make better choices in terms of regulation strategies. And so you can do this in many ways. You can do it through thinking about adjectives. I want to be more compassionate. I want to be more loving. I want to be kinder.

And that works really well. I have moved into a place where I keep it simple. When Mark is activated, Mark wants to say something nasty, sorry, Mark wants to avoid the situation. Mark wants to retaliate if I’m really in a bad place. But the director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence is a genius. And so I actually elevate myself to this high level status, as the director of the center for… it’s like a superhero.

Shay A superhero, I love it.

Marc I’m not kidding. And there’s research on this, by the way.

Shay I love it, yeah.

Marc And so Marc, the person who’s being yelled at, screamed at, avoided, or whatever the heck is happening, is not in a good place. And he does not know really what to say or do because he’s too triggered. And if I can pause and to kind of bring myself to this visual of this wizard of emotional intelligence, all of a sudden I’m problem-solving through the lens of a genius, not through Marc, the person who’s been violated or attacked. And we know that it helps.
And so I really encourage it. You got to practice. And what I’ll say about that, by the way I wrote a whole new book on that coming out in a year in my new kind of thing, to really focus on just the regulation piece of it. You got to give yourself permission to feel first, though. That’s what I’ve realized. You can’t jump to that until you really got the first part down. And it’s a lot of work. But what I encourage people to do is to be proactive about it. For example, I tell this story a lot in my public speeches over the last couple of years. When the pandemic hit, my mother-in-law got stuck with us, and it wasn’t because we wanted her to. So she’s from Panama, and she came over in the very first week of March in 2020.

Lo and behold, she did not go home until September. There were no flights, everything got canceled. So it got tough. And I would take my meta moments and try, and then I realized what I needed to do when I went outside, was that before I opened the door to my house, I would put my hand on the doorknob and I’d say, “Mark, what do you need to do to show up as the best son in law tonight?” Because Mark was so burnt out from dealing with this woman, and I love her, but it was just too much. And I wasn’t prepared for that for seven months, and I needed my space and my freedom, but I didn’t have it. And life stinks sometimes. So you got to make the best out of it. Well, Mark, the best possible son-in-law was going to come up with really good strategies. So I primed myself to be my best self. And I call that being prevention focused.

If I just was like, la-dee-da-dee-da, walk into the house, and she said something, and I’d be like, ‘Ah, I just had a walk. Why you have to bother me already.” But if I pause before I enter the house and think to myself, “How do you want to be seen? How do you want to be talked about? Mark, remember also, she doesn’t want to be with you, right? She is not like, this is not her dream come true. It’s like not to be in her own home for seven months. Have you ever thought about showing some compassion, empathy to this person? It’s not all about you. What about her?” And I would remind myself of those things, and then it got a lot easier. I was just better prepared to be my best self in those moments. So, I really encourage people to think about it. If you know something that’s going to activate you or trigger you, what I recommend to people is keep that in mind. Know thyself, and before you go into the situation where that might happen, stop, take a deep breath, and consider your best self, and then go in once you feel like you’ve kind of gotten to that place. And it will make a difference. It will put you in a better place to deal with whatever might come about.

Shay Yeah, that’s super interesting. Kind of that version of your best self, where you described it also as kind of almost a superhero-level status that it correlates in an interesting way to, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Richard Boyatzis, but he wrote a book on the Science of Change, one of the top, how do you create sustained desired change, right? Experts in the world. And a huge element of that is that by getting yourself into a visualization state of your perfect life, 10 to 15 years from now, you’re activating different parts of the brain that actually help to elicit change. And it’s very interesting because kind of what you’re doing in that moment, when we’re in our worst self, sort of, we’re in the broken down, reactive, not our best self. We are in a different part of our brain, and we know that now, we’re learning so much about that. And so how in that moment, in the reality of the angst of it all, how do you make the shift? And it’s a very interesting strategy, what you’re describing, it is literally shifting you into a different part of your brain, and then how you see the world and then how you interact and relate to others that can create behavior change. Yeah, intriguing.

Marc Exactly, yeah. I mean, a friend of mine, researcher, Ethan Cross, talks about it as engaging in psychological distance. And so you’re pulling the ego out of it. Marc’s ego has been hurt. Marc’s ego wants to say what’s on his mind, but the superhero is not Marc. The superhero is way above that.

Shay That’s right.

Marc And so when you go into that, when you transfer your energy over to the superhero, all of a sudden there’s no more fight flight going on. There’s the ability to be with and problem solve.

Shay It’s fascinating. I love all the ways we can play internally with ourselves to create all sorts of different outcomes in our lives. It’s pretty remarkable. Well, I want to leave our listeners with a couple of tools. You have some really good things that you’re doing. So one, is you have co-created a free application. The app is called “”How We Feel”, and it’s used to teach emotional skills to users. So I wanted to give you a chance, if there’s anything you want to share about that particular app.

Marc Yeah, so I’m very proud this app. It was a really beautiful collaboration between a scientist and my team of researchers and psychologists, and a tech entrepreneur who was obviously highly creative, who built Pinterest, and then a group of engineers and designers and others on his team. And we all worked together for a couple of years to build this app. We have about a million and a half people who’ve downloaded it already. It’s free forever, thanks to generous donations. So please check it out. It’s been Mood Meter plus Strategies plus Analytics, plus now we have an AI function where it analyzes your data and gives you insights, but that’s cool. The other thing I want to bring people’s attention to is a new web series that I created, where I interview world’s experts on emotion regulation and I also interview celebrities. I interviewed the singer Jewel. I interviewed the singer, the basist from Guns N’ Roses, Duff McKagan, and I’ve interviewed psychologists like Angela Duckworth and John Haidt, he who wrote “The Anxious Generation”, and just having really rich conversations with them about what it means to deal with emotions

Shay And what’s the easiest way for people to find that.

Marc They just go on YouTube and type my name. It’s called “Dealing With Feelings” and Mark Brackett.

Shay Great.

Marc It’s been fun because what I love about it for myself is that I get to learn more. I get to interview the people that I admire and then integrate those or their thinking into the way I do things, which has been really fun.

And then, of course, if you’re a school, you should check out our schoolwork, which is called Ruler, the Ruler Approach to Social and Emotional Learning. Proud to say that as of this month, we are in 5,000 schools across the world, 33 different countries. We’ve trained over 200,000 teachers and 5 million children. And that’s just a little moment of gratitude to my Uncle Marvin, who really was the originator of some of this work. And it was in one classroom back when he was a teacher in the 1970s and 80s. And just kind of brings me great satisfaction, hope, and joy to know that now we have reached 5 million children. This work is remarkable for kids. There are many approaches. Obviously, I’m only talking, I’m being very focused on the work that I do here, but I was visiting a school maybe six months ago, and it was a school that had been using RULER for a decade.

And so they were really doing it. And the principal of the school was my former student, and it was a big for them. It was a big deal for me to come visit the school and walk around and go to classrooms. And he got all the kids hyped up, and he asked them, “The man who built this thing called RULER is coming, do you have questions for him?” And they had the most amazing questions for me. “Why am I so passionate? Why am I so motivated? And why do we do this exercise and why do we do that thing?” And I share with them a little bit about my story- that I had a difficult childhood, that I didn’t like school, that I was a failing student, that I had a lot of bullying. And this one young girl, she was sixth grader, she said, “I’m so sorry to hear that.” And I said, “Thank you.” And she said, “But I have a hard time believing it, because I’ve been a student in this school since kindergarten, and I can’t think of a day that I’ve been here that someone didn’t care about how I felt.” And I just sit with that. Oftentimes, when I get a little worried about our education world right now, when I get worried about schools not wanting to do this work or pushing back, I just think about this young kid and what she said to me and how empowered she felt because she had permission to feel, and because she had skills that she could use to navigate her feelings. And that was the norm, that it was just the way she saw the world.

Shay Yeah. What a gift, right? What a gift. And hopefully the future of all education looks that way.

Marc Thank you. Say it again.

Shay Yeah, that’s right. I’m going to hail it out there to the crowd. We always ask, and I want to ask this in closing all of our guests, because everyone defines and describes this so differently based on their work and their life experience. But given that this is a Conversations on Healing podcast, and we’re always looking for how we heal, I want to ask you how you would define or describe what healing is.

Marc I think it’s a lifelong process. I don’t think we heal. I think we are healing as we grow. And I would say that it shouldn’t happen alone, that we should never put the pressure on someone to figure out how to heal, that we should change our mindset about what it means to be human. And what that means is that we’re built to be with people, and with people who are caring and who are nonjudgmental and who listen, who have that empathy and compassion. And I think that really is the key to healing, which is never feeling like you’re alone. And I think part of it is all of us helping people to find those people that they can be in relationship with, feel safe and comfortable with, to talk about these things and get perspective. Because we get lost in our own worlds. We ruminate. We are so judgmental of ourselves, and if we have kind, compassionate, loving, caring people who can help redirect us, I think that’s probably the best thing that can happen for anyone.

Shay I love that answer so much because all my work has been on creating healing in community, healing in groups, healing in through a healing center, through a therapeutic model that’s a group-oriented therapeutic model. Everything has always been so that you don’t feel alone. So I really value and appreciate your perspective on that. Thank you.

Marc Thank you for having me.

Shay Thanks so much for being on the show.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of The Conversations on Healing podcast. If you haven’t yet, please go to Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform and subscribe, rate, and review this podcast, it helps so you won’t miss an episode. See you next time.