“Permission to Feel” Marc Brackett, Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence

hello I'm Kim goth cruise university secretary and vice president for student life here at Yale I'm pleased to share with you a conversation between Yale professor mark Brackett and an author and media commentator jo-ann Lippmann about the power of emotional intelligence to change our lives this conversation is a special program of Yale well an initiative that is designed to instill mindfulness and wellness in our student body dr. Brackett is a former mentee of Yale president Peter salivate and he has studied the science of emotions for twenty years he is a family director of the Center for emotional intelligence and of course a wonderful colleague in the Yale well family his book permission to feel unlocking the power of emotions to help our kids ourselves and our society thrive was published this fall miss Lippmann is the best-selling author of what she said what men need to know and when they need to tell them about working together until 2017 miss Lippmann was the chief content officer for Gannett and editor-in-chief of USA Today and the USA Today Network she serves on the Yale Daily News board the Yale School of Music advisory board and until recently she was a member of the University Council although these talks often focus on the student experience today's talk really focuses on something that's important to all of us and I hope you enjoy this conversation as well as the questions of the audience asked you actually had I want to talk about Yale students for a moment because you actually had and I have to reference this in the in the book you you mentioned trying to understand what Yale students are thinking and you talked about you asked several hundred Yale students about stress and really found that underlying it was something very very different where they talked about stress it was actually something very different yeah again I think even you know our Yale students you know high academic scores but you know no emotion education so just like everybody says happy as the positive word everybody in the world now when you ask them you know I stressed I'm stressed and then I had them do some writing about their stressors and what I learned was that a majority of that stress was really envy and to me that was super important to know and I'll get to that at a moment but what I found was that so much of what our students are doing is making social comparisons throughout the day they're sitting in class making this one's father is a famous politician they're gonna have a free ride this one's parent is really wealthy they're not gonna have to worry about anything this one is the real valedictorian I'm like the fake valedictorian and then they're on social media five to six hours a day looking at people who are doctoring up their photos and they're just in constant you know dissonance you know in terms of itself from the portrayed self or from other people and so then when I got them to realize that a lot of them are feeling Envy I believe that was the pathway towards helping them regulate and I've had some you know challenges with even colleagues here because people are thinking about one-shot ways it regulate everybody's doing yoga I'm like I love yoga too and people we do breathing exercise them I like to breathe too but you can't like the breath and yoga can't be the answers for all of our feelings and if you're living you know I always think if I'm breathing Wow even it's even clear to me why I'm so envious so we've got to teach people strategies on how to reduce those social comparisons and have a different kind of self-talk so the idea is to get rid of envy the idea is to reduce the causes of the it's to understand the causes and to use that Envy wisely so you know I'm very fortunate I get funded by a lot of wealthy people and I go to their homes and I'm like you know and the end of you can either be resentment or I can be grateful right for having them support the work or it's you know what maybe I need to work harder so I can have that kind of home or something like that or I need to challenge myself in terms of my thinking about it and saying you know because for example myself coming to Yale I had a I grew up in a more blue collar setting you know and getting here was a way you know a different world for me and I could just spend my entire life thinking wow that thought that person's father read Shakespeare to them like my father didn't even know what Shakespeare was or I can say or you know have a more positive self-talk and say you know what look at me Here I am and you know not everybody has to have the same experience to be successful so let's get to another Yale question because another Yale student question which I thought was also really interesting and maybe we can bring in the audience on this one because you asked students to share how they hoped they would feel at college and also got a really interesting response or we'll have to ask that audience what nothing sure and any just any guesses just shout it out how do you think students yale students answered the question how would you hope to feel at college anyone challenge inspired confident fulfilled creative so what blew my mind was they said loved so when I asked them you know how do you want to feel as a student the word was loved and I was taken aback by that I just was not expecting it and then when I of course you know given that I teach these course I'm like time to write an essay you know what's love got to do with it and essentially what I found was that many of them feel like they had been manufactured sadly enough you know many many students said you know my parents made me do this and I had a rote I had to write an essay about this and I had to travel to this foreign country where no one had ever stood you know step foot before and I played instruments that no one ever heard of before and they felt like they really had lost their identity but also many students said they just felt like they didn't have they had a more transactional relationship with their parent and they just were really just wanting to be loved so how do you respond to that I mean what's the what's the next step once you understand that you write a book and then you get it to all the parents [Laughter] seriously though because this is the issue we face and it's that you know unfortunately in our nation schools and workplaces right adults have not had an education and emotion and so they're not aware of the things that they're modeling the ineffective strategy that they're modeling they're not labeling their feelings accurately they're not aware of what they're saying is and how its influencing how kids feel and hence why my vision is to have an education and emotion from preschool you know until till the end of time so and you do have a framework for that which we should mention and some of you are probably familiar with it because I do think it's kind of gotten out there in the world which is ruler correct which perhaps you want to just kind of briefly tell us what ruler is sure I think what's important to know about our work is that the first stage is really what we've been talking about which is do I believe in my you know heart that emotions matter do I really believe that how people feel matters and if you mindset issue the second is all right so what are the skills and we're very blessed that emotional intelligence was coined here at Yale with Peter and his colleague Jack Mayer who was my doctoral adviser and over the years we've refined the theory and the skill now we have an acronym that we use ruler to describe the first is recognizing emotions in oneself and others picking up on like how am I feeling what's my body telling me what's my mind saying what am i appraising in the environment around me the second is understanding emotion so for example anxiety is about uncertainty fear is about danger I just won when I was going up for tenure I was completely stressed out like I had heartburn I went to the doctor and my doctor said you know here's your prilosec and here's your ativan look wait a minute there has got to be a better way and what I realized even from my own own self was that I was not labeling my own emotions correctly I was going in saying I was stressed and the truth was I really wasn't stressed I was overwhelmed and until I labeled my experiences being overwhelmed like having too much on my plate and not having any breathing space I wasn't regulating it properly I wasn't leaving work at a certain time to get my exercise in I wasn't giving myself the space that I needed so that's the the third skill which is labeling so we say the first three skills of recognizing understanding and labeling are the skills that help us build awareness of our own and other people's feelings like what am I feeling and you got to pick up on the body the mind the cause and then label it the last two skills the Ely are are what we do with our feelings expressing them regulating them so expressing emotion has to do with knowing how and when to express your feelings with different people in different contexts including culture and then we are the last star is regulating which is the big one at the top of the emotional intelligence hierarchy is regulating which is the strategies that I use to manage my own feelings but also the strategies that I can help in Co regulating other people's feelings to the labeling cuz I do think if you don't label it correctly you're never gonna be able to get to b2b expressing and regulating it correctly and it does seem like labeling seems to be a sticking point for a lot of people for parents for students yeah is there a way to sort of more accurately understand what our own emotions are so that we can label them yeah so maybe we can we have a slide if we can jump to the next slide if possible it should be a tool that we've built my colleague David Caruso's and I have built what's called the mood meter and essentially that the mood meter is at the heart of our of my book and essentially every moment of our day we are making appraisals like you walk into a room like that it's like I'm looking at all of your facial expressions right now and I'm a little worried like more seriously right you're you're you're looking at people and you're saying are they feeling comfortable are they feeling uncomfortable when you walk in to give a presentation like what it what am I feeling in my body right now do I feel overwhelmed do I feel comfortable do I feel like I want to approach - oh no avoid we also look at our energy levels like our activation levels is what do I feel like I can thrive in this space or do I feel completely depleted that's the pleasantness and the energy on the mood meter and then when we put those two things together we get these four quadrants the yellow the red the blue the green and essentially you know the goal of our work is first to take the complexity of your inner life and just project it out into a motion space am i only yellow feeling high-energy and pleasant am i on the green feeling pleasant but low and Andreo mind around the blue meaning unpleasant with high or low energy then I say all right why well I'm about to be on stage or whatever it might be so what might be the feeling associated with that oh I'm nervous or I'm excited and that's a process that in the beginning is quite slow but once you get trained in our work it becomes you know automated be amazed you go to a third-grader they're like I'm feeling I'm not feeling happy Sarah I'm feeling ecstatic or I'm not feeling calm I'm feeling tranquil and sometimes peaceful it's amazing how specific they get it takes all of that complexity right like and it just says all right what's my body I'm my body's high in energy all right am i pleasant or my unpleasant unpleasant oh I'm in the yellow so then why am I in the yellow oh because I'm on stage talking about my work that's exciting it's just that simple process and you have to give people the words they have to learn the words and that's obviously what I teach and if you don't have the four quadrants with you and by the way some schools now right they actually put the chart up there so students come in and they say this is where I'm feeling I'm in the red today so yes ruler is the name of the approach to teaching emotional intelligence or what's broadly called social and emotional learning we're in 2,000 schools across the United States 200 here in Connecticut 350 in New York City and all over you go into a ruler school and there is a mood meter everywhere because people are using this as a way to build self awareness as a way to build their vocabulary and importantly as a way to help them manage their feelings there's a question that I know you get a lot but I want to put it out there because I think probably everyone in this audience whether you're a parent or student you have heard this which is we are living in a world full of young snowflakes right that they they can't take stress and they can't take you know for those of us who are older you know we were we were much more resilient right and and they should be - right that's the that's their the criticism that you often will hear how do you respond to that well firstly I think if these are the if these who you're talking about are the children of those adults like what did you do to create the skids right so I think that we have to realize that we are co-creating this world that everybody is living in so that's just a really important piece I think to put out there the second is that like emotions are emotions their feelings you can't judge them they just exist so we have to get at the root cause of these feelings like if everyone is anxious it's time to look at it give you an example we know from statistics that suicide rates have gone up by 28 percent over the last 20 years that's that's something to make fun of that's something to say wait a minute we need to take a step back and what is the world that we have created for our children to grow up in anxiety about 25 percent of our nation's adolescents have an anxiety disorder depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide so Timmy goes back to what I said earlier is that these feelings are information and is it about raising you know children who are weak well I don't think so maybe it's that we have not had the adequate emotion education of the adults raising these children and we haven't taught children the strategies on how to make them have art to support them but secondly I just want to give you an example of a student here who is you know I had difficulty with this student and she was a little arrogant with me about best things it was nine o'clock on a Sunday night and I got an email saying professor Brackett I just can't take the test I'm overwhelmed I'm stressed I'm having a breakdown and I need you to get back to me ASAP I was like whoa like all good professors I ignored the email I figure it's nine o'clock at night on Sunday like I get some time to write anyhow my point to this story was that in the end when we I did many little mini interventions with this young woman and what I found out was that her mother lost her mother when she was a freshman in college and that her mother is putting enormous pressure on her and instilling all these fears and her mother's visiting every weekend and once they got from dinner every weekend and to me that's a demonstration of a parent who has not been adequately trained in emotional intelligence you this mom is literally instilling the fear and anxiety and her daughter so I believe it is a responsibility of adults to provide an adequate emotional education to kids and it's not just the emotion education I think which really was revelatory because that convicted me counted that in the book and I thought was really revelatory was that I think for most professors or adults if you're the boss and you get something a note like that it just you would say what an entitled young I won't use the word that I thought right and would write off that person but what you did was very different which was you instead sort of dove in and just started asking gentle questions about what was going on in her life correct because you don't really know someone to tell you another story and so I needed to get at the root of her behavior and of her you know stress levels and once I learned what it was my you know feelings of anger from her and you know being entitled went to empathy and compassion right I this this young woman really needs supports to manage her emotions and manage her mom otherwise you know she's are gonna have that constant pressure and once you understood that about her how does that help her because they gave her the awareness of where her feelings were coming from and then that's an action plan now she's got to figure out how to manage the relationship with her mother better just that's a reality that she has to face and she needs support in doing so there was a similar story that you tell about yourself when you were I guess about a teenager and you were you you you you failed a martial arts yeah test and I thought that one was also really quite revelatory about how we approach other people's emotion and maybe you could talk a little bit about that one yeah so when I was going through my struggles as a kid one thing that my father thought to make me a tough guy as you can see it worked really well was to go into the martial arts and I happen to be a martial arts instructor and have a 5th degree black belt now but I was not like a kid that you would think would go into martial arts anyhow I was like a precocious kid I want I wanted to have power I wanted to be tough and I wanted to get my yellow belt so I like push my sensei you know like let me take the test let me take this head let me see it finally he's like alright take the test lo and behold I found the freaking yellow belt test so a variety of things right happened in that moment the one that was the most painful to me was when I was putting on my street clothes one of the kids in the locker room said something like we know you're gonna fail the test you loser wait you see what it's like for you on the way to school tomorrow that's a big deal for a 13 year old and knowing that I really couldn't communicate how I was feeling which was fear and shame to my parents what did I do I went home I hate you I'm never going to karate again and that activated my mom and my dad my mother get together oh wait till your father gets home can't wait for that to happen dad comes home right I can't believe you're talking about that way again if I have to tell you one more time and so essentially I ended up getting punished and no one knew how I felt and then I had to get up in the morning go to school so this is why so much of this work again is about adults a managing their own triggers so I triggered my mom right she got overwhelmed and my father got angry they didn't have the strategies to deactivate they didn't they weren't emotions scientist who knew and I asked these delicate questions to find out what was really going on and so what happens is that a kid like me suffers unfortunately and so an alternate in an alternate scenario had your mother instead of lashing out when you came in and said I hate you I hate this I'm never going back instead of lashing out at you said it's you know tell me like what happened like let's talk about this right is that dependent like timing is everything with these things so if I can't hate you now it's not like ten what have I time gonna happen cuz that's like you know that's not gonna work you've got to both be in a place where you can become so you can have the conversation so it's being you know clever around you know what honey you know let's go for a walk or you want to go drink of water or maybe you know why don't you go take some time and watch TV in your room or whatever it might be it it just helped me deactivate also as a parent I might need strategies like I might need the space to like because I'm triggered by my kid being so mean and cruel and all the things that are going on my head about that so I need space too the big issue here is that often times when we build the space we forget to reconnect and actually do the problem solving oh now he's fine let's move on truth is the bullying is gonna happen again the fear and the shame are still there so at what point do you come together and then have that rich conversation but I think what's important is that the adult has read this kind of information because if my mom doesn't really understand how to ask the questions and doesn't herself have the language to understand the difference between fear and anxiety and shame and all these other emotions then the stories that I'm sharing are not going to come together in a way that would help her support me in the best possible way I want to go back to also in this story it was your dad who wanted you to toughen you up and that really raised questions for me my work is a lot of my work right now is focused on gender and how gender interplay and gender differences and that gender gap in the particularly in the workplace and I'm wondering if you see a gender gap in the way that we interpret emotion or experience emotion so a few things about gender and emotion there's one and then in it I'm going traditional binary here for a moment there is one gender that says they have higher emotional intelligence than the other gender and then there's that other gender that actually has higher emotional intelligence so I'll let you all figure that out but as you might imagine like men think they're higher in emotional intelligence and women of a woman actually score about a half a standard deviation higher on average than men so that's just I just like add that that men also overestimate their IQ by 15% of women underestimate theirs by the same amount so anyway yeah but I think what you're getting at here is early stereotypes that are kind of just put into our brains you know that boys don't cry and you know girls shouldn't be angry because the boys will be weak and the girls will be labeled X Y or Z and we grow up with those mindsets and those belief systems and then you know influence how we interact as adults and we know that there are differences with regard to power in the workplace so the person of the most power can feel whatever they want to feel my best example is actually in the workplace I did a talk for a big financial company in New York City and the chief executive he said to me you know like interesting stuff mark but like there's one thing that I'm clear about I don't really need this training I was like wait and then I interviewed a person who worked for him a high-level executive a woman and she said to me you know I was she was in the meeting and she said it's interesting because a couple months ago we were talking about emotional intelligence and he literally said to me it doesn't matter how you feel no one really cares because the only thing that matters is that you represent me so you can interpret that how you like to me it's a power issue it's a gender issue and an equity issue and it needs to be dealt with do you have some tips for how to deal with that I think people need again I'm going back to my treatise people need an emotional education that we have to recognize that everyone deserves the right to have the permission to feel and I think what's most interesting about this CEO is that he's so naive about the role of emotion in the workplace so I don't know about you but has anyone here ever worked in an environment where you woke up in the morning and you thought I actually cannot stand the person I work for and I feel disrespected and undervalued does anyone ever have that experience you can raise your hand it's okay and when you have that feeling when you wake up in the morning how many of you save yourself like today's gonna be the best day of my life at work right you're just like oh can I get a sick day I oh my ankle hurts you know you'll do anything to avoid work because literally you're predicting you know how you're gonna feel and if you think you're gonna feel disrespected and you know unappreciated you're not gonna give your best and actually we did a big study this year with 15,000 people across the workplace workforce and what we found was that the emotional intelligence of supervisors actually was highly correlated with how people felt with their intentions to leave their job with their burnout rates with their creativity so I think that our CEOs and managers are naive if they don't think that how people feel matters so I agree a hundred thousand percent with this actually when I talk about gender issues in the workplace I always say it's got to start with a CEO because they need to understand that they're the ones who change the culture it's not they're the ones who create and can transform the culture and you mention that about the workplace you mentioned this about parents about teachers but let's talk about if you're not that person right you have someone who's not emotionally intelligent who is the parent or the boss and you are the student or the child what strategies can you suggest to help those people deal with that situation you know it's funny I was a couple months ago I was in a parking lot with a mom who was like a lunatic you know with her kid and I just saw what was happening and I was like do I approach the you know hi I'm the director of the Center for emotions I really wanted to and then I thought but like I just listened to this whole dialogue as they were going in to the store and I thought to myself what can I do to support this kid and truthfully I was thinking of writing it out like run away now because I couldn't imagine you know like having that craziness every single day you know stop doing it stop doing it you know and so I really think that it's gonna take some time in our nation to get the adults to understand these things putting that aside children deserve to be supported that's just the way it is like you can't tell a five-year-old here's an example I was in a school recently and the teacher said well I just leave my feelings at the door it's like I'm not sure that's really possible another teacher here in Connecticut said well I'm just gonna you know this is not really a training for me so I'm just gonna stare at the clock all day I was like are you kidding me so now to imagine now a real experience I was in New York City a preschooler I was in a preschool he came into school hysterical crying and what I learned from the school psychologist was that what's that boy experienced that morning was the following parents are going through a divorce the father went into the son's room and said your mommy loves someone else and you're gonna have a different daddy that was the reality of this four-year-old he's being dropped off at school by the nanny and all of a sudden now am I supposed to tell this little four-year-old like put your feelings in a box outside the door you know stare at the clock all day so well the parents in the situation you know are doing harm in my opinion the good news is the brain is plastic it is you know it can be you know developed through other caring adults and why we spend so much of our work in schools right because if we can train teachers on how to do this work and have a mood meter and have other tools to support children and learning the words and developing the strategies feel like they have a caring and loving adult at least it will help a little bit until we get to all those parents so let me give you a situation this may or may not be hypothetical and it may or may not have happened to me with a one of my children so what do you do if a child has and I'd like this from both sides a child not a four-year-old but you know like a teenager or a college student it's just had just a just a dreadful day just a really horrible day and they come back they're totally stressed and they want to scream and yell and talk about it and they do want to talk about it but they're there they are kind of hysterical in venting about it and the parent is the parent you're not you're trying to calm them right so now this is I think is probably very common other people right so what's how does that both the the parent and the child regulate themselves so that they recognize what the emotions are and so that it doesn't escalate yeah well one of the things that we have in our Center is a tool that we call the meta moment and it's one of our you know besides the mood meter the meta moment is a tool to help you build the space between that trigger and that typical kind of ineffective or unhelpful response and in that space what we say is you have to do a number of things one is you've got it just doesn't matter if you know how you feel like you may be just completely overwhelmed you got a pause and you got to take that breath because if you're highly activated nor chemicals like cortisol get released which make it very hard to problem-solve and hard to think and hard to ask the right questions so we've got to figure out a way to deactivate the second which is a really cool piece of our work is seeing your best self so if I were to ask you right now I'm putting you on the spot as a mom my best self has these qualities what would those qualities be and you don't have to answer right now I'll give you time to think about it but all of us could do that right as a husband as a wife as a partner as a mom dad like my best self has these qualities and maybe you would say things like loving caring compassionate and what we find is that when you pause and think about Oh Joanne is the loving empathic compassionate person what happens that you start supporting your child through that lens of those emotion terms and it's quite helpful so for him for me like whenever I get I'm easily triggered and activated sometimes you know a student here actually when I first took my class they labeled me the feelings master and it was you know at first I was like a little barren I was like you know what I am the freakin feelings master so when I'm activated by a particular student and I'm like the true self is like you entitled whatever and I went wait a minute how are the feelings master respond and you can see all of a sudden all the anger that's directed at the person who triggered me is now redirected back to my best self as the feelings master feelings master would be a wizard with this child they'd make this into a project does that resonate what about it what if it's the student or the child same thing applies everyone can have their best selves so they need to think about their best self also everybody needs to think about their best selves there's another strategy and I do want to leave time for Q&A here but there was another strategy that you mentioned in the book that I thought was pretty revelatory which was self talk yep and particularly using your name your name can you can you explain that yeah well one thing about self talk that I think is so important let me just ask the audience for a moment does anyone here ever say negative things to themselves about themselves yeah I mean like unfortunately for all of us I think we are programmed from early childhood to be meaningful to ourselves I will argue that often comes from the adults who are raising us in our peers so if you're overweight or if you're too tall or your nose is too big or if you're a different color like people start making fun of you and saying cruel things to you without proper intervention you start believing it and then it becomes your self-talk I think how much time we have spent in Our Lives rehearsing all the things that we hate about ourselves or don't like about ourselves and how little time we spend challenging those thoughts and shifting them to more positive talk so the trick for positive self-talk is distancing what that means specifically is oftentimes when you're in that negative view you're very self-focused and it's hard to get out of it so instead of saying get over this you say something like mark you can do this and for me because I have the tendency to be overwhelmed go figure and ruminate often times before I go to bed I can testifies things like if I'm eating doesn't go well Mike they're never gonna do our program it's over and then I'm take my breath and I'm like mark you're making this story up like you're just making this up and literally by doing that it tell it takes all the feeling and it kind of distances the feeling from the self and it allows me to just deactivate but I love the concept also of putting your own name in which I never would have thought of but but it's very interesting it's like putting yourself in the third person exactly yes exactly which is really interesting because in my work with gender I will often talk with women who are afraid to raise their hand for a promotion or a reason I will always say to them think of yourself in the third person if you were in the third person how would you describe that person and it's much easier to do that cuz much easier to advocate for somebody else and so it is so you put yourself in the third person and advocate for yourself well and interestingly so one is that self talk which is Mark take the high road mark you're making this up very helpful to help you manage your feelings or stop the rumination but something else that's quite interesting is that another way to do or have positive self-talk is to just think about how you would support a close friend or a loved one so if you heard something negative that happened like you failed the test the karate test right what would you say to yourself I don't know well if you find out your best friend fail the karate test what would you say Oh okay we're gonna work together we're gonna get through this I'm gonna practice with you like you'd have all these great strategies to offer your friend that you don't offer yourself so maybe take a moment and just think about how you would talk to a friend about this and then apply those same principles to yourself fantastic are there any other because I do want to leave room for questions is there any other strategies that you want to briefly mention before we go to question I mean I think that the big ones in terms of the cognitive ones to help us manage our feelings are the self-talk strategy the other one I just mentioned is what we call positive reappraisal it's just can you tell yourself a different story and it really is remarkably helpful to just say wait a minute there's got to be another way to look at this and just it's a creative process that actually gives you that space to help you manage that feeling okay we have time for some questions and we have two folks with microphones I see questions over here and over here one over here one over there hello feelings master my name is Devin I'm a graduate student here and I'm asking about when you look more deeply into how Yale students were feeling stressed I wonder why you ascribed envy to it which i think is a more active word you know people are envious as opposed to you know self-doubt or insecure which is more of a passive feeling how did you pick envy over insecurity because again it's about understanding the nuance of what feelings are about so for example jealousy we always play around with in my book and then our work we talk about jealousy and envy some people confuse those two a lot jealousy is a relationship driven emotion right someone looks at your significant other and your significant other that gives them a little twinkle right you're feeling jealous you know that you may lose your significance to that person envious is really wanting when someone else has and what I found in my research here is that a lot of our students unfortunately are just making these endless social comparisons they're wanting you know if only I had a father who was a politician so I can get the job in DC if only my parent were a zillionaire then I would have to worry about as an only this so it's that social comparison that really helps us understand that its enemy hi MA and I just was wondering if you could maybe elaborate on you talked about that situation with the CEO who kind of felt like emotional intelligence was just not something that he needed in his life as an emotionally intelligent person how do you encourage people who are a bit cynical about this whole concept to maybe think that there is some benefit to their life you know that's why you know we have a center here called the Center for emotional intelligence and we do research to make the claims because honestly you know nobody really cares about mark Brackett's opinion I mean I'm glad that people are interested in me and what I do but this is evidence-based right the science shows that leaders who are higher and lower in emotional intelligence create different workplaces and CEOs and managers don't know that information they don't know that emotions drive how people attend to things they don't understand that emotions affect the decision-making process that they affect relationships and mental health and creativity and I think once people really understand it and it's no longer the professor's opinion but it's hard fact we're gonna get people you know to to get on our bus I thank you for your talk I love the idea of thinking through the lens of your best self but is there a danger of over-regulating oh this is how I should behave so yeah the danger of that it's a great it's a really important thing to distinguish which is and my colleague Robin who's not here today would talk about this in terms of being gaslighted right well you start changing your behavior to acquiesce that's you know you have to be a scientist around your strategies so if your reappraisal czar let's say you're in a relationship and someone says you know you're kind of sensitive and you don't really believe you are but then you start reappraising saying well maybe I am too sensitive that's being the self saboteur right you're not really objectively looking at the situation saying actually I'm not too sensitive like you're being you're not being kind so with all of our work it's not just about using the strategy you have to evaluate those strategies to make sure that they're actually helpful to you and and supporting you in terms of dealing with your feelings effectively hello thank you my name is Chris really enjoyed the talk and looking forward to reading the book so my question I have two questions first question is what safeguards do you imagine implementing to prevent this from turning into a therapy let's say you're trying to help others in this type of way of thinking this structure this framework is there how much training is required to make sure that you're doing this correctly and are there safeguards from coming construed as therapy that's the first question the second question is you mentioned a few times there in the talk about how you were kind of predisposed to certain emotions I wonder is that a tribute to of certain personalities that do you believe that personality is also kind of on top of this this grid and some people are predisposed certain aspects of the grid thank you sure I'll answer the second question first which is yes there there is a relationship between emotion and person so if you take our mood meter tool the two factors that that would be looking at are things like emotional stability and extraversion and introversion and but the point I think is this is a language issue and I cover this also on my book which is that I'm a neurotic individual I worry about everything I worry about why worry I even worry about why I worry about why I worry and like I don't really have that much to worry about but nevertheless that's like my default thank you whoever up there and thank you mom and dad and for years I thought my personality was my emotional intelligence and I realized it's completely different one is your proclivity towards experiencing strong emotions and what emotional intelligence is is what you do with those feelings now yes given that my personality is more neurotic I may have a greater tendency on a daily basis to experience you know fear or anxiety or worry but I really think it's critically important for people to recognize that personality does not drive or is it's not even correlated with emotional intelligence like you have to learn the skills if I heard you're it's hard to hear up here actually but your first question was about when do you teach this and how do you differentiate it from therapy yeah if I had it my way we would start in the womb just to be truthful truth you know it's like let's start people as early as possible and that because what we know from research is that how parents feel during the process of pregnancy actually it does influence the fetus that's why we need to make sure parents have these skills and understand them our work in schools begins in preschool kind of language where language can take place so we start with three-year-olds and we go all the way up until high school and now in collaboration with Kim and our Dean we're looking at offering these tools and strategies to our undergraduate population obviously the workplace I think what's really important to know about emotional intelligence that's very different from cognitive intelligence is that you know most of our lives in academia have a criterion of correctness you know you have to get the the a means you got the answer correct meaning three plus three equals six or whatever calculation with emotions it doesn't work that way there's no correct feeling and there's no correct strategy it's what strategy works for me given my background given my gender given my culture to support me and having greater well-being better relationships and whatever goals and dreams I have for myself and so that means that as educators we have to be scientists that are helping children explore and practice strategies to find which one's work best for them and then you know refine those over time and sometimes they'll work and then you say there's a gosh my positive self-talk didn't work today well maybe you need to call a friend or maybe you need a break or maybe you need to just go to the movies so there's a lot more flexibility with emotion regulation and a lot more exploration that needs to take place hi thank you so much for this talk I really enjoyed it I think the part that I found most striking that you mentioned which just totally like surprised me was the fact that Yale students said that they hope to feel loved and that was the number one desire out of Community College and in a place where so much of our self-worth is based on our accolades and it seems like it's worth with qualification and so many things required for acceptance what do you think needs to change for that envy to kind of be for an antidote to envy yeah I think that's a whole other presentation that we do here but I think briefly is we need to train people early on you know about what envy is and you know the deleterious effects of having that for too long that's one piece of it but also it's what we value we have to shift a little bit of our values in our culture and that's something that is beyond you know emotional intelligence really that's really taking it a step back and saying you know what are the values of this institution what are the values you know in our society right now that are creating you know this enemy that are creating this stress this overwhelm and one of the things that I say in our in our work is that we are so focused on the individual like self-control and having perseverance and we don't focus enough on the classrooms on the families on the institution's and when we think about what does it mean to create an emotionally intelligent institution right maybe that will change the way parents talk to their kids about what it means to be successful and in turn you know we'll have less enemy I think there was a question back there following up on that short of changing the world what kinds of strategies have you come up with for addressing this tendency towards in vain I didn't hear that last piece the tendency towards tendency towards envy what kind of strategies towards what I think you know most of it is that self talk you know if you catch yourself constantly saying to yourself something like I'm never gonna be a successful that person and that person is gonna you know have more opportunities than I am you've got to monitor yourself talk and say wait a minute how is that supporting me and having well-being how is that supporting me in achieving my goals so again a lot of it is just monitoring the things that you're saying to yourself trying to find sometimes if you can like where does that come from and then just really practicing you know greater self compassion and shifting that negative talk to more positive talk and it's effortful and it just is something that we have to spend more time doing and we know from research that it makes a difference one of the things that I gleaned from reading your book actually was about it's related to self-talk but it is about appreciation of what you actually have the things that you do have the the fact that you maybe have you know a terrific family children's supports the story the things that you do have that you know as opposed to focusing on well that person has more money but you know I have that's exactly and you know there is also a rich literature on gratitude right thinking about one of the things that I'm grateful for and so when you get lost in your specific envy you may just take a breath and step back and said about wait a minute I'm grateful I'm a student here I'm grateful that I get to have this amazing education I'm grateful that I have a loving brother and that's another way to help support you and experiencing more pleasant than unpleasant feelings right up front here thank you so just bending out the question that you raised which is what does it mean to create an emotionally intelligent institution I'm curious to know is there anything in the works at Yale particularly for staff students and faculty so that's a question for Kim there you know we are working on this and I feel blessed and I'm on the yeah.well committee and we are thinking continuously about how do we infuse these principles you know into the university I can tell you as a professor of the medical school there is a tremendous amount of interest both of the hospital and among different departments in training people and doctors and new doctors in these skills so I think that we are in a good place to create what we like to call an emotion revolution both in our society and even here at Yale I think we see one more question oh the mic up if you don't mind oh I think my questions are follow-ups on some of the things you've just mentioned first of all I want to tell you something you'll be happy about given the last statement and at a neighboring University they've just started a program for undergrads who are in management reading president salaries book on emotional intelligence and the title of the course is mindful leadership to become more aware of these types of things to lead better in case they didn't get it when they were growing up but my question is really this recently I made the mistake of saying to someone young man who obviously I didn't know well but I could tell immediately had immense mathematical ability and my question to him well I didn't say I made common and an educator was nearby and he was very upset by my comment to the child so I'd like to know how I should have phrased it because this young man had exceptional mathematical ability exceptional and I said well you're going to do well on the SATs and the educator got very upset that I had said the wrong thing that I was now setting up expectations but instead what I was trying to do was show that I could recognize his ability and that he could use this ability however he wanted so what what would have been the correct thing to say so I'm not gonna be like you're you know the president tells you the correct thing to say but what I will tell you is that the way we phrase things to children and our friends and colleagues can have what you might call a fixed mindset or a growth mindset a fixed mindset way of saying thing is it you're gonna be fine you know you're perfect great job whereas when you praise or when you give feedback that rebut that focus is on learning goals as opposed to performance goals oftentimes people will work harder just try for that so what I would say is that you want to stay away from fix things like you're gonna do great and say you know I really am blown away by how much effort you've put in to studying and practicing for this and what we find is that that makes a difference so now you mentioned that the program really starts with kids that are as young as three years old but I'm wondering are there any strategies for kids that may be younger or for parents of children that are younger than through you souls things that we can do or think about as our kids are growing up yeah so when I said that we start early doesn't mean that we only start early ruler which is our evidence-based approach to social-emotional learning is a preschool to high school approach and there are some schools that start in high school and some districts as there are in middle or elementary school you can start anywhere because right this is these are a set of skills that anybody can learn at any age and that's important to know so that's just something critical what I want to also say is that what we've learned over the years just to go back to our way of doing this work my uncle and I failed pretty badly because we wanted to put a program in a school and what we now realize is that it's not about putting a program into a school it's about literally infusing the principles of emotional intelligence and to the way leaders lead the way teachers teach the way students learn and the way parents parent and so the question is as a parent like what is your role and responsibility to support your child's healthy emotional development you know and you know that's what I write about in my book and that's what we have in our families program approach for schools step one and maybe this can be our last point which is you have to just be the role model you've got to monitor as a mom like what is your self-talk sound like to your child remember your kids are listening to you your kids are watching you and they're learning from you are you that role model are you taking that breath are you using that positive self-talk the second is does your child believe that you have given them the permission to feel do they believe in their heart that you really believe that all their feelings are valuable and that you're not judging them for being shameful or fearful rings that anxious or whatever the case is and then the third piece is do you work as an emotion scientists you know with your child do you help them really understand their feelings their causes do you validate those it's and then you work with them to help them think about solutions and they're gonna try those strategies and some will work some won't work and it doesn't mean you're a loser or a failure when your strategy doesn't work it just means you either have to try it more or you need to try a different one it's fine way to end would you join me in thanking our [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: YaleUniversity

Views: 10,084

Rating: 4.8947368 out of 5

Keywords: Permission to Feel, emotional intelligence, Marc Brackett, Joanne Lipman, Yale, kids, society, thrive, thriving, unlocking the power of emotions, parent resource, educator resource, teacher resource, Yale Well, Kim Goff-Crews

Id: qs3ohqmKito

Length: 56min 29sec (3389 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 14 2019