Shownotes:
Join us for an eye-opening chat with Marc Brackett, where we unravel the secrets behind emotional intelligence and bust some major myths about our feelings. Marc takes us on a journey through the emotional landscape, showing us why there’s no such thing as a "bad" emotion and how understanding our feelings can transform our lives. With a mix of personal stories, science-backed insights, and actionable strategies, this episode is your guide to dealing with feelings. Don’t miss out on this engaging exploration that’s sure to shift your perspective on feelings and emotional intelligence!
About Our Guest:
As the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, Dr. Marc Brackett is professor in the Child Study Center at Yale, and author of the best-selling book, Permission to Feel , which has been translated into 25 languages.
An award-winning researcher for 25 years, Marc has raised over $100 million in grant funding and published 175 scholarly articles on the role of emotional intelligence in learning, decision making, creativity, relationships, physical and mental health, and workplace performance.
Marc is the lead developer of RULER, an evidence-based approach to social and emotional learning (SEL) that has been adopted by over 5,000 schools across the globe, improving the lives of millions of children and adults. RULER infuses the principles and skills of emotional intelligence into school systems, enhancing how administrators lead, educators teach, students learn, and families parent. It has been proven to boost academic performance, decrease school problems like bullying, enrich classroom climates, reduce teacher stress and burnout, and enhance teacher instructional practices.
Thrive Global Article:
From Theory to Practice: Marc Brackett on Dealing with Feelings
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About Lainie:
Lainie Rowell is a bestselling author, award-winning educator, and TEDx speaker. She is dedicated to human flourishing, focusing on community building, social-emotional learning, and honoring what makes each of us unique and dynamic through learner-driven design. She earned her degree in psychology and went on to earn both a post-graduate credential and a master's degree in education. An international keynote speaker, Lainie has presented in 41 states as well as in dozens of countries across 4 continents. As a consultant, Lainie’s client list ranges from Fortune 100 companies like Apple and Google to school districts and independent schools. Learn more at linktr.ee/lainierowell.
Website - LainieRowell.com
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Transcript:
Lainie Rowell: Well, hello, Marc. Thank you so much for being with me today.
Marc Brackett: My pleasure to see you again.
Lainie Rowell: So I'm going to say, and I'm not trying to embarrass you, but years and years ago, the first time I met you in person, you were keynoting an event and You absolutely crushed it. It was the first time I'd heard you speak.
You just completely wowed the room, me, and then the organizers happened to sit me at the table. I was a speaker there as well, and you ended up sitting right next to me after your speech, and I didn't even know what to say. I was so like, oh my gosh, this guy is like really smart. I don't know what to say to him, but you are the most nice, genuine, brilliant person.
And I just, I just had to get that out there.
Marc Brackett: I appreciate you saying it. And it's been a lot of fun watching your career as well.
Lainie Rowell: You've been very supportive and I appreciate that. Had to get a little bit of gratitude out there. And I'm so excited to talk about your work.
One of the things that I really appreciate that you share through your books, through the web series, the webcast, all of it, is you say there's no such thing as bad emotions. And I think this is really important because I think a lot of us get it wrong thinking things like anger and stress and anxiety are bad.
But, You like to use the word unpleasant instead of negative emotions, if I've caught that correctly. Can you tell us a little bit more about why you feel like that's an important distinction?
Marc Brackett: Yeah, I think it's mostly because the way it's interpreted. So in psychology, you know, people talk about negative and positive emotions.
Happiness is a positive emotion. Sadness is a negative emotion. You know, people figure that out pretty quickly. But I think then the problem with that language is that it, it makes us think that we don't, like nobody wants to be negative. And so that means that the goal is to get rid of the negative to be positive.
And I wish it were that easy to just like get rid of the negative to be positive. Now that also makes an assumption that being positive all the time is a good thing. And it's not a good thing. Actually I did research on this that was published recently, that when people are overly positive, you know, they make sometimes worse decisions even about their health.
So, going back to the pandemic, people who are happier took more risks and didn't wear masks as much, which is interesting. They didn't engage in social distancing as much as others. And so you know, when you, you know, think about it, like even when you're spending money, right, it's like you're in a good mood.
You're like, yeah, I'm going to buy that outfit or that piece of furniture that might be more expensive than you want to spend. And so again, assumption is that positive emotions are the ones you want to grab and have all the time and negative ones, the ones you want to dump and get rid of. And so when you go to the negative emotions, which I call unpleasant feelings or emotions, Anger, right?
It's a real feeling, you know, and certainly we've seen in our own society very legitimate reasons for different groups of people to feel angry and to say that that's a bad emotion just makes no sense because it's a signal that there was an injustice that needs to be dealt with. And so I hope that kind of makes it clear.
Lainie Rowell: Yeah, I think it does. And if I'm understanding correctly, I feel like we first of all want to have the full human experience. It just wouldn't be...
Marc Brackett: even if you didn't want to have it, you're going to have it.
I mean, like, let's face it, the pandemic hit, you know, we're spraying our groceries with Windex. It's not the most pleasant feeling.
Lainie Rowell: Yeah.
Marc Brackett: And so life is, you know, couple of years ago, I lost one of my close friends to cancer, you know, not a pleasant feeling, but a feeling that I had to deal with, you know, of loss and sadness.
And so to deny people, you know, those feelings, it's to deny people what it means to be human.
Lainie Rowell: And I do think that's one of the things that's really challenging, is finding that point of, okay, how can we help people live their best life, to flourish, if you will, without overly imposing, like, this is what you need to feel, because maybe it makes me feel uncomfortable if you don't look happy or it's like, I want to take care of the people around me, but to me it feels like a difficult needle to thread.
Marc Brackett: Well, it's also, there's assumptions in there, which are that, when we're angry, we're irrational, that when we're sad, we can't be good friends or we can't be present.
It's like, these are kind of stereotypes that we've created around emotions. And I think we have to move beyond the idea that, for example, like, in the parenting world, you know, it's like, it's gotten to a place where sometimes people feel like, well, my kid is sad, so he can't be in school and learn.
It's like, well, you can be sad and still be in class and still learn. You know, sadness is part of reality. We're just going to give you strategies to manage that sadness, because that's what people are missing, are the strategies to help them deal with their emotions. And dealing with your emotions also doesn't mean getting rid of them, you know?
So for example, there's good research to show that just the sound of, of someone you love is a healthy strategy. And think about that for a minute. So just having someone with a soothing, loving voice can help make you feel less activated or unpleasant. And you know, my point of saying this is that, a child, for example, who's in school, who has a parent who may be ill or who is going to be away at work for a few months, you know, and they're feeling lonely or sad. You know, the assumption is that that has to be solved in order for them to be good learners. They have no control over the fact that the parent has to go travel for work or that their parent might be ill.
And so what we have to do is help kids understand their feelings better and have good strategies so that they can have their feelings and also function helpfully too.
Lainie Rowell: That's helpful.
Marc Brackett: I mean, it's a lot.
Lainie Rowell: It's a lot.
Marc Brackett: That's why this is so interesting. It's a lot, but it's just, this is life.
And you know, life is not simple.
Lainie Rowell: Yeah.
Marc Brackett: It's like achieving your dreams in life. You know, it doesn't just happen. You got to work for it.
Lainie Rowell: It's a lot of work. And there's nuance. And I appreciate that. And, with that idea of the nuance and kind of how messy and complicated us as humans are, you have worked in collaboration with others on the How We Feel app.
This is actually an app I use regularly. My son asks to use it. It's really been helpful. And I wonder if you want to share a little bit about this tool that is available to everyone for free.
Marc Brackett: Yeah. Thank you. So something very kind of pleasant happened to me during the pandemic, which was that the co founder and former CEO of the company Pinterest had read my book, Permission to Feel.
And he said, you know, I'm really interested in these concepts. Maybe we could work together to figure out what we can do in terms of building tools to support people and having greater well being. And so we decided to take some of the tools that were in my book and some of the principles and other principles and strategies, too.
And we worked together, a team that that he created and a team that I created. So the scientists and the engineers and the designers, we all came together. And just spent a lot of time thinking about how do you display this in a beautiful way? You know, what are the strategies and tools that people need?
And so that's the How We Feel app, and it has a tool that we call the mood meter that's been around for a while that then asks you to describe your feelings and you can tag your feelings. It has amazing beautiful technology to support you doing breathing exercises or cognitively reframing. We've added new tools like seeing your best self.
And then it has tracking abilities so that you can look for patterns over the course of a week or a month. And you can analyze your data like, is it when I'm with my partner that I'm in the red, you know, or is it when I'm at work that I'm in the green? And then kind of just, you know get some meaning out of that.
Lainie Rowell: I love that you can look for the patterns. I definitely feel like it helps with developing emotional granularity, being able to really with accuracy say this is what I'm feeling right now. Because a lot of times I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but we get into just saying, I feel happy.
I feel sad. It's like, well, what are you really feeling? Right.
Marc Brackett: Yeah, and this is my work in schools primarily, which is giving children specific words to describe their feelings and feelings are made up of other feelings, right? There's some complex emotions. You know, I was doing a lesson actually in California just last week with a bunch of fourth graders on the feeling word of regretful, which by the way, I was going into this lesson thinking to myself.
Like, I have to really sit with this. Like, do I even know the definition myself? You know, like,
Lainie Rowell: Am I going to regret going into regretful? Yeah.
Marc Brackett: Exactly. But the kids were incredible. And I asked them to come up with other feelings that are associated with regretful. Like some kids said, well, sometimes you might feel shame because, you know, when you're regretful, sometimes you might feel guilt.
Sometimes you might feel trapped. Like these were fourth graders having this conversation with me, which, you know, I give the school a lot of credit because they've been working with RULER, which is our program now for 10 years. And so these kids grew up with a lot of emotion talk. But like they understood that concept extraordinarily well.
And they understood the difference between feeling regretful and just feeling sorry or feeling regretful and feeling guilt. And that's what this work is about.
Lainie Rowell: And I love how when you identify where you are. it asks you, do you want to shift? Do you want to move somewhere else?
Marc Brackett: Do you want to not? You must.
Lainie Rowell: Exactly, which is, is very important. And then, like you said, it's, we want to be able to, to identify the emotions and then have strategies if we do want to move. So I think that's really helpful. And I also love the idea of the patterns, which when I share this app with people, I do encourage them to use it to look for the patterns to see, is there something going on that maybe is, is there that we didn't see before.
And so, this is all connected to your book, your best selling book, Permission to Feel, and can you tell us a little bit about that? I know it's a wide question, but you talk about being an emotional scientist, not judgmental, why is that important?
Marc Brackett: Well, you know, I think, the term permission to feel sometimes, you know, throws people off, right? They're like, who are you to give me permission to feel? I've always had the permission. And I question people when they say that too, you know, some people have, you know, so for example, I recently interviewed a professor friend of mine, Ethan Kross, who studies cognitive strategies.
And he's like, you know, I really did grow up with a family that gave me permission to feel. And he's one of the rare people that have. It doesn't mean he still didn't struggle with his feelings, but he always felt like he could be his true, full feeling self and talk about his feelings. I didn't have that.
You know, he was like, I want to interview you, because when he was sharing his experience with me, I'm like, that sounds like a really different childhood. And I had good parents. They loved me a lot. But they didn't really know a lot about feelings, neither their own feelings, and they certainly didn't have to support me with mine.
And I don't blame, you know, now that I'm a 54 year old psychologist, I think back, like they really did the best they could because they had no education in emotional intelligence. They didn't know what to do. And so the Permission to Feel is a longer story, but it's just, it's about my own journey.
In terms of feeling trapped with my emotions as a kid because of abuse and bullying, and then having an uncle who was a teacher who came into my life at just the right time and asked me that question, which was, how are you feeling? And he didn't want to leave me with those feelings. He wanted to make sure I was able to do something with them that was going to be helpful.
And you know, you fast forward, that was 11 or 12 years old kind of completely put me on a different trajectory. And then I went to college decided that emotional intelligence was the thing I wanted to know more about. And then I took my uncle out of retirement and we started writing a curriculum together that then became my whole career.
And so I argue just in a very little piece of the book, it's the opening chapter, the whole book is much more skill based, but that we need feelings mentors. We need people who are deliberately in support of our healthy emotional development and who are making efforts to help us be more aware and helping us to learn strategies to deal with our feelings.
And I, by the way, have now, since my book has come out, launched a whole research project on this where tens of thousands of people have completed my research and people who report having had someone who gave them the permission to feel versus not having had someone, have different lives.
They're much more satisfied in their life, they have more purpose and meaning in their life they have better mental health, better physical health, they sleep better at night, and so there's something to this feelings mentor.
Lainie Rowell: I feel like we live in a time where no matter how amazing the work is, no matter how important the work is, you're gonna get people that push back.
And I'm just curious, what are maybe some of the misconceptions or pushback, if you will, about really encouraging the development of the emotional intelligence, becoming an emotional scientist, what have you experienced there?
Marc Brackett: Yeah, I think there's a lot of misconceptions, firstly, the one misconception is that the field of social and emotional learning, Emotional intelligence is just trying to get people to talk about their feelings all the time.
And I'm the first person to say, like, I don't want to talk about my feelings all the time, and nobody wants to listen to me talking about my feelings all the time. That would not be productive, right? I have a friend who is an oceanographer. I can tolerate maybe 15 minutes of a conversation about oceanography, and I'm like, you gotta go talk to somebody else about it.
And so, we're going to have feelings throughout the day. We want to be aware of our feelings, want to know if our feelings are helping us or hurting us achieve our goals. And then we want to have strategies to deal with our feelings. And so even research would show that it's not productive to just endlessly talk about feelings.
And, you know, we get pushed back on this in the field because some people are like, I just want to vent. And it's like, I know that's what you feel like doing, but actually it's not that productive.
Lainie Rowell: Right.
Marc Brackett: What's more productive is having someone like me or a friend. Listen to you and then say, you know, like, I hear you.
But let's think about what might be helpful for you right now. You don't want to perseverate. That's not helpful. You don't want to ruminate.
A friend of mine posted something online about something that was unpleasant that happened and then everybody commented on that person comments on top of that.
And I was like, Oh, you know, it's just like, that's not helpful in general. We think it is because we want to just get it out. We want to tell everybody what happened, but it tends to not be great for us to do that. What tends to be helpful is getting perspective and kind of managing it effectively, which doesn't mean denying the feeling.
Lainie Rowell: Right. That's where there's nuance.
Marc Brackett: Yeah. Yeah. It's a nuance, but it's a really important piece for people to know. Firstly, I mean, that's just the core that people have feelings. Those feelings need to be expressed. Otherwise, they're controlled or repressed or denied or ignored, they show up in other places like ulcers, like aggression like not living the life you want to live because you feel emotionally stuck, not helpful either.
I think really importantly for your audience, is that it's very, very clear now through multiple which are studies of studies. So recently, my colleague, Chris Cipriano published a paper with a bunch of other friends and colleagues showing very clear effects on the impact of teaching social and emotional learning.
It's like incontrovertible evidence, that you teach these skills and not only do you get better physical and mental health and better relationships, but you do better academically in literature and math and other subject areas. So when people start saying, well, this is taking away from academics, or it's not good for kids.
I always just say, how much have you looked at the research? And by the way, I'm biased because I am, I'm both a program developer, I'm a writer, a researcher, speaker on this stuff. So maybe you don't want to listen to me, even though everything I say is based in science, I don't make stuff up. But if you don't want to believe me, look at the larger studies of studies, and you'll see that it's very clear that these skills are helpful in achieving some of the most important things in life.
Lainie Rowell: You and I both spend a lot of time in education and knowing how, yes, it is going to help us physically, emotionally, also the activating the learning and, That's all really, really important and I wonder what you've seen, because your book is for everyone, it's not specific to education, although you give examples of education, what have you seen in the workplace regarding Permission to Feel?
I'm just kind of curious.
Marc Brackett: Yeah, interestingly enough, so I've done some research, and I also have a company that does training and consulting for big companies, specifically emotional intelligence in the workforce. A.. People are hungry for it. And B, believe it or not, more people feel like they have someone to talk about their feelings with at work than they do at home, which is interesting.
And I've questioned people about this and I think the rationale behind it is that, like, you're a mom or dad or whatever, you have kids and you are, like, you're kind of, you're stuck in a relationship. Right? Meaning that, like, the feelings never go, they're always there, you know, in the morning to the evening to the night, whereas, like, if I have a friend at work who's going through some difficulty and they want to chat about it, we go out for lunch, we talk about it, but then they go home, I go home, and we kind of move away from it.
And I think there's something to that in terms of why it's easier at work than it is at home. But I have found that workplaces are hungry for this. As a matter of fact, I just got off the call. I just literally, as I was taking a walk about an hour and a half ago, I had a phone call.
I can't mention who it was with, but it was with a university department that is falling apart because of the lack of emotional intelligence in the leadership and among the adults. And so they're like, can you come in? This is the best of like, can you come in for a 30 minute workshop to teach everyone how to regulate?
And like, we have to talk about this way. This is a little bit more complex than the 30 minute workshop. But so here that's another one of the challenges, something I'm writing about at present, which is that I think we've identified that people need strategies and skills, but we are a quick fix society, and some people, of course, need to take medication to support their mental health, and I'm a firm believer that that's important for a lot of people.
The question is, for how long do you need to take that? That's one big question. The second is, is it helpful? The third is either way you still have to relate to people in the real world and you need real cognitive and relational strategies to support you in dealing with your feelings because, you know, every time someone triggers you at work, you can't just pop a pill, right?
You've gotta like have a workmate, you've got a boss, you're gonna be in team meetings. Yeah. And we need to help people learn strategies on how to, A, be more emotionally intelligent in the way they interact. And I just published another study in schools, actually, I dunno if you saw this paper just recent.
Schools where there are leaders with higher emotional intelligence, there are teachers who are happier and healthier, more productive. And we even showed that during the pandemic it mattered, that it was actually more important. So if you were an educator who was, impacted, strongly by the pandemic, whether it would be that you got COVID or someone died in your family, something, you know, heavy.
If you worked in a school where the leader demonstrated higher emotional intelligence, you were less burn out, you were more satisfied with your job and you were less likely to wanna leave your job.
Lainie Rowell: Is part of that modeling, is it emotional contagion? Is it both? How is that transferring?
Marc Brackett: Yeah, that's a good question. So there's two ways to think about it. More than two, but I'm just gonna give you two right now. One is the interpersonal piece of it, right? That like, do you ever like, have you been around people who really can't regulate?
Lainie Rowell: Never. Yes, I have.
Marc Brackett: Even for themselves, right? They're, they're just for self regulators.
Like you watch them, you know, just not do a great job at dealing with their emotions. Either they, you know, whatever they do. And then sort of like that, that kind of like, you might lose some trust in that person as your leader, right? Like, my goodness, my boss is falling apart. They can't handle the stress, so how are they going to be helpful for me?
So that's one piece of it. And then the other piece of it is that the interpersonal aspects of emotional intelligence are really important. Meaning that you have to know how to talk to people. You have to know how to say, like, if I come to you as my boss Lainie, and I say, you know, Lainie, I'm just like overwhelmed, you know, and if you say to me, like, Marc, get over it.
Not helpful. If you say, let's talk about it for the next three hours,
you know, you're not going to get anything done. I'm not getting anything done. But if you have ways of kind of supporting me and saying, I hear you, why don't you try this? Or, let's try this.
Or even if it's in a team meeting, like for school, if a principal is hiring an emotional child, there's a pandemic, right? The principal can walk into that meeting and say, I'm just letting you know, like, I'm, I'm freaked out. The world's coming to an end. And like, I don't know what's happening with anything.
And everybody's like, oh shit, you know, like versus someone who comes in and says, you know. These are really weird times and none of us can make the predictions about what's going to happen. There's a lot of unknowns. A couple of things I want to share. One is we're in this together. I got you. I'm going to be here for you.
We're going to find ways for us to get together, have conversations around it, to help each other, to co regulate, maybe not using those terms, but to be supportive of each other. Totally, same exact feeling of anxiety. One is expressed that activates everybody and makes everybody freak out. The other does it in a way that is helpful and supportive and makes people feel held.
Lainie Rowell: Yes, and that reminds me of, I don't know who came up with this saying and let me know if you don't agree with it, but that concept of be a thermostat, not a thermometer, because that thermometer is just saying, it's hot in here. But that thermostat is regulating the temperature and trying to make a difference.
And so when you gave that example of someone like a principal coming in, that's anxiety I'm feeling because now I'm like, Oh, I don't, I don't know what's coming.
Marc Brackett: Yeah,
Lainie Rowell: it's contagious. I might have walked into that meeting totally fine, or, at least, better than when I walk out of it, right?
It is really contagious, so. Ooh. Now, moving into the webcast. Am I saying that right? You call it a webcast?
Marc Brackett: I do. It's not the most probably popular term, but it's all I could think of,
Lainie Rowell: No, it's fine because you know, podcast is like saturated. So I like that it's something different to say.
So in Dealing with Feelings, you have a focus on emotion regulation tips. And you're bringing in these thought leaders and you're interviewing them and you're really asking for them to share what are the evidence based strategies that you use. So tell us a little bit more about the webcast which just started. Ethan Kross came out today and I haven't had a chance to listen to it but I'm very excited to because I really love his work, but I listened to Jewel and I listened to Angela Duckworth, so tell us more.
Marc Brackett: Yeah, so I decided to do this project because for two reasons.
One is that I use social media and I was getting really annoyed with what I was seeing celebrities or influencers just saying stuff like, you know, throw your anxiety out the door and I'm like, really? Like that's your advice? You know, it just, it was really irritating for me.
And I noticed that a lot of the YouTubers. that were doing the work, or Instagrammers, TikTokers. It was all like big personalities, kind of know it alls. And it just, it really was offensive to me, you know, as a neurotic introvert, who's also a scientist, and I'm like, not working for me and not really sure it's working for anybody because it's not actual thoughtful content.
And so I said, I know that people don't love long form content. But I wanted to show people what the research shows is helpful, and I also want to do it with interesting people. And so Jewel I've known for many years, and she had a very serious mental health crisis growing up, and she's dedicated a significant aspect of her life to healing and also helping.
And so what I wanted to do was interview her to see and learn what she had learned and then pull what I heard from her and then for other people show that that actually is a research based strategy. And so like the way she was using self talk or the way she was reframing or the way she was doing breathing exercises well, you know, she's not a licensed psychologist.
She's learned from many people. And so like Let's pull and show people that what she's doing is actually research based and helpful, and how do you do it? It's the how that people want to learn. And with Angela Duckworth, interestingly enough as the person who studied grit and wrote a book on it she basically said, that she kind of lost her grit when she was working on her next book, and like, confidence was really low, and I was like, what's your strategy?
And her number one strategy was social support and perspective taking, not. Just staying up three to four o'clock in the morning and trying to write when she was kind of losing it. She kind of took a step back and just sort of like talking with people about what was going on and hearing what they had to say.
And I appreciated that. And there's a lot of research that shows, that getting some distance from whatever is bothering you can help you deal with it better later on. Ethan is going to be talking about distancing. I have James Gross coming on in a couple of weeks.
And then I have also some really interesting people, one, her name is Dr. Alfie Berlin Nolan, who studies Black mental health, and Dr. Jenny Wang, who studies Asian mental health. So really getting a cross cultural perspective on this and how different identities may require different approaches to dealing with emotions.
Lainie Rowell: I'm hooked already. I'm going to listen to every episode. Thank you, very much. Thank you. I, I really do think it's very empowering and it was really helpful to me to hear that even someone like Angela Duckworth can have struggles because, you know, she's a best selling author, she's brilliant, U Penn, all this stuff, and so when you get to hear that it's not sunshine and rainbow and chasing bunnies through the field for everyone and that there are times that we all go through.
That was really, really helpful for me. And I love, I won't say it correctly, but I love when she talks about, the thing about perspective taking is you don't always know when you need help getting a perspective. And so I'm,
Marc Brackett: yeah, when you're in it, when you're deep in it, you don't know that you need it.
It's just like when you're yelling and screaming at someone, you don't realize in that moment that your emotions are driving your behavior, right? Otherwise you'd be like, well, why am I doing this?
Lainie Rowell: Exactly. Marc, what is something that you just cannot say enough? I mean, you would stand on rooftops and yell it. You just can't tell people enough. You really want them to understand this message.
Marc Brackett: I think, you know, again, this varies by day, by week, by month for me, because I have so many things that I think are important. Right now, what I'm thinking about is that it's not on the individual to develop emotional intelligence.
It's on the community and that to do this work, it has to be done, across communities. So that means homes, schools, workplaces. We think of a skill development as like, I'm going to go learn how to do the skill. This is different. You need to be developing these skills on your own when no one else is developing them is not as helpful.
Lainie Rowell: It needs to be contextual, right? You need to be in those experiences to develop and practice. Is that fair to say?
Marc Brackett: That's the second piece of it. Actually, it's a little slightly different, which is also really important. What I'm saying is that, a kid who's being bullied in school can't go to emotional intelligence training only by themselves to figure out how to deal with the crappy environment, right?
That we've got to create emotionally intelligent environments, which means that the other kids in the classroom have to be learning this stuff, the teachers have to be learning this stuff, the bus drivers have to learn it, you know, the community members need to learn it because we want to create emotionally intelligent communities, not just emotionally intelligent individuals.
Lainie Rowell: So Marc, I get the sense with the Dealing with Feelings that maybe there's more to come and you know this already, 'cause I've told you this, I've read your book twice.
Permission to Feel, I've read twice, so I'm very much anticipating I've heard you say there's another book coming. Any, any little hints you wanna give us about that?
Marc Brackett: Yeah, so Permission to Feel was my first kind of book for the real world. I've done a lot of academic stuff, but I wanted to put out something that would help people understand why emotions matter and why we need to give each other permission to feel and learn the basics of emotional intelligence. And that's been around for a couple of years now. It's still doing well. I'm grateful for that. But what I learned throughout the pandemic was that people want more around the regulation and I wanted more around the regulation.
And, you know, for me one of the things I always say is that I don't really think I know something until I can write about it. And so until I can explain it well, that other people can understand what's going on in my head and what I know and what I read about it doesn't feel real to me. And so that's when I decided to write a second book called Dealing with Feelings.
Which will be out in about a year from now, meaning like March or April of 2025. And one way to do that was to start my webcast so I could interview really smart people and learn from them because I don't know everything for sure and I wanted to kind of meet smart people and, and ask them questions that would help me think more critically about my own work.
Lainie Rowell: It's so great. I will be eagle eye for the pre order link when that comes. I know we've got some time, but I'm eagerly anticipating it. And I know that people are going to want to connect more with you and your work. So Permission to Feel the book, I will put the link in the show notes. I will also put a link to the webcast for Dealing with Feelings.
And how else would you suggest people connect with you?
Marc Brackett: I think, you know, my website, which is, I've just redone, which is just Marc with a C, Brackett, B R A C K E T T dot com. It has links to everything from our school based programming, which is RULER, to the How We Feel app, to my work in organization, which is called Oji LifeLab, to the webcast.
If you want to read recent articles that I've written it's all there, so just MarcBrackett.com, and then you can follow me on socials from there as well.
Lainie Rowell: Marc, I know I mentioned this at the front side, that you have been not only an inspiration from afar and watching all the great work you're doing, but you have been very generous to me, dare I say, as a friend.
And so I am very grateful to you and the work that you're doing for me and for others. So thank you for this time.
Marc Brackett: You're welcome. I appreciate the work you're doing.
Lainie Rowell: Thank you.