Neuroscientist: How To REWIRE Your Mind To Heal Emotional Pain | Dr. Marc Brackett

Here's the deal. 90% of us report never having had any emotion education. You can't just bury your emotions because they're what make you human. The number one thing that students said to me was that they felt manufactured. They really weren't sure who they were because someone else prescribed. Parents. Yeah.

Professor of psychology at Yale University and the director of the Yale center for Emotional Intelligence. A guest today is Dr. Mark Brackett. There seems to be this trend that I'm noticing where parents are too much in their feelings with their kids. Tell me more about your feelings. It's okay. Cry.

That's not emotional intelligence. That's emotional indulgence. Why is everybody depressed? Everybody's not depressed. They're just using the word depressed. We can't allow that. We've got to get people to understand. You're disappointed, you're discouraged. What we want to do is help people understand that granularity, it's called. I'm pretty convinced at this point in my career that most of us have been gaslighted in childhood.

How does someone who's experienced that as a child break the cycle?

Yeah. Well, firstly.

Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness. Excited about our guest. We have the inspiring Mark Brackett in the house. And the first question I want to ask you, Mark, is about emotional regulation. Because many neuroscientists that I've brought on this show before, brain surgeons that I've brought on, elite athletes, billionaires, and people that have harmony in their. Their life. When I ask them, what is the number one skill that you should master, they say emotional regulation. And I lacked emotional regulation for probably most of my life until I hit about 30, when I had all the outward success. I had money, I had followers, I had beautiful girlfriends, all these different things, but I could not manage my emotions. And. And anytime I felt, like, under attack or anytime I felt abused in any way psychologically, physically, financially, emotionally, whatever it might be, it was like a bear came out of me. Emotions that I could not contain. And these emotions would ruin relationships. They would ruin moments in my life. They would rob me of joy. They would rob me of peace and harmony inside of myself. And it wasn't until I hit around 30 years old, where I started to understand and study what emotional intelligence was. I didn't even understand the concept. I just thought, if you have a goal, you should do anything in your power to go achieve that goal and be successful. You know, whatever it takes. Win at all costs. Be number one, be the best. I didn't understand the concept of Having harmony and peace along the journey. And every time I would accomplish anything, it was almost like I felt more and more frustrated with my life.

Interesting.

I felt more and more not enough. I felt like I had to go for something bigger. And I didn't feel like anyone ever understood me. And I'm assuming a lot of people watching or listening can relate to that feeling of not feeling understood, not knowing how to manage their emotions. And it's been a 12 year journey of learning how to process my emotions, learning how to regulate my emotions, learning how to name them, learning how to meditate, learning how to breathe, learning how to sleep better, learning how to have the courage to actually use my voice and create boundaries in my life without screaming at someone. All these different things. And you've been teaching this, and you're leading the research center at Yale around emotional intelligence for a long time now. And you've been teaching this and you have this book dealing with feeling. Use your emotions to create the like you want. And I guess my first question is, why do so many people struggle with understanding how to navigate their emotions to create peace, harmony, and accomplish their goals in life?

Well, during the pandemic, which was eye opening for me about how dysregulated people were, I had written my first book called Permission to Feel. And then people were saying things like, well, thank you for giving me permission to feel, but like, what the hell do I do with all these feelings?

I don't know what to do with them.

Yeah, yeah. Like people in the grocery stores were like spraying their grocery. I was like, people were out of their minds.

Oh, yeah.

And so, and I was going crazy myself. I was not used to working from home. I was not used to my mother in law living with me. And it became, you know, pretty chaotic.

But you were the expert in this. You were studying it and teaching this.

Well, I can write the papers, you.

Can do the research.

Yeah, solving it is hard. And so I've done a lot of research in this space, obviously. And here's the deal. 90% of us report never having had any emotion education.

It's probably more.

Yeah, I mean, and 7% say we got it in school. So there's just no formalized way of teaching it, which is what I want to change. I think that this is as important as reading, writing and arithmetic.

I believe this is the only skill. You know, I learned how to set goals, how to accomplish goals, how to work hard from sports. Like sports was my playground for learning life skills. I learned how to be coachable, how to get Feedback, how to learn, communicate all these different things and work together in teams. I learned all these things in sports, but I didn't learn how to navigate emotions.

Yeah.

So I could work really hard. I could show up early and stay late and do whatever was required of me physically, but. But mentally and emotionally, when something got under my skin, when someone like, cheap shotted me, it was like I felt under attack. I felt like my life was under attack, even though it wasn't. And I didn't understand how to navigate those emotions. So most of the time I was fine. But sometimes they would get the best of me and I would do stuff that I was, like, not proud of. I'm like, oh, why did I react that way? Why did I scream? Why did I blow up? Why did I get into this fight? I got in multiple fights just reacting to my emotions. Cause I didn't know how to navigate and process them. And thank goodness I never did anything like that. I can't, you know, come back from, you know, it's like it was all okay, but man, so many people, their emotions get the best of them and they ruin their relationships, their marriages, their careers, their health.

That's right.

And they do things to harm themselves and others because they don't know how to understand emotions.

You're speaking my language, buddy.

I mean, and so when you. When Covid hit for you, even though you'd been researching and teaching this for a long time, you had to face your emotions at a different level.

Totally.

How did you learn how to process it as the expert? Now that you were faced with this real world experience, how did you learn how to deal with it and not blow up your life?

Well, the one thing I did, I learned every single park in the town that I live in. And it's a pretty big town. I mean, I literally would go every day for a walk because I needed the space. I was not a person who went for walks. But because of being trapped in the house, I'm like, I gotta get out of here. I don't want to look at you, and I want to look at you. So it's like I need, like, just downtime to myself. And I'm an introvert. So it just. I needed quiet time. That really helped a lot. But I think for me, you know, I had spent 25 years of my life teaching this, writing about it. You know, I have curriculum in schools around the world and 5,000 schools. And here I was, you know, like secretly crying in my room, you know, eating really unhealthy foods. I Was, you know, just takeout. And I was, I'm a martial artist by training. And so I was, I stopped doing that. I stopped going to yoga classes. There's no hot yoga during the pandemic. And I can imagine breathing.

So all the tools that you were.

Used to were taken away from me.

Yeah.

And so I had to invent new tools. And the night, there was one night. This is the story of the opening of my book, where my mother in law had come to visit us from Panama for two weeks on March 5th of 2020.

Right before, right before, right before. Two weeks turned into two years, it.

Turned into eight months.

Yeah, yeah.

And so 81 year old woman doesn't speak English. I'm lucky I speak Spanish, but we weren't used to cohabitating for that long. And just so many things came up in terms of meals and like making coffee and time, like spending time with someone who's in your house. You know, I'm not used to that. I'm used to like, you know, I go to work and then I, you know, I go to the gym and then I do other things.

You have your routine.

Yeah, yeah. And I'm very, I like routine. Anyhow, one night she looked at me and she says, are you really the director of the center for Emotional Intelligence? And I just looked at her, I'm like, you know, not tonight I'm not. And it's like I, I thought that night like the dogs peed on the rugs. I mean, it was just sort of like the house was nuts. But I share this story a. Because the best of us or the, the most wisest emotionally of us fail. And I went to bed that night and I said, you know, Mark, you actually are the director of the center for Emotional Intelligence and you do teach this stuff. Like, why are you not applying it? Like what, what has happened to you? And I started reflecting on all this about like, well, my time and my space and you're in, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there's a piece of my work and actually the end of my book, I talk about how we regulate to become the best versions of ourselves. And so I had not actually paused in the few months before the blow up to think about, well, Mark, you know, here's this woman who is like displaced from her house in Panama. She wants to go home, she doesn't want to be with you, and how do you show up tomorrow morning when you come down for breakfast as the best version of yourself? Like, what do you need to think about and what do you need to do differently to be that person for your mother in law? But just that literally, that two minute pause and reflection and reminding myself about the work I do, it transformed everything. Just transformed everything. I'm like, mark, you're a narcissist. Like you don't care about anybody else, except you're not. This 81 year old lady is sitting here depressed and wanting to go home and you're worrying about that you want to drink coffee by yourself.

And so the year routine is displaced because someone's here when she's out of the country and it's not in her home.

She's got a dog and a parrot we had to deal with. It was nuts. And I think for me, something that was a wake up call was having an other orientation.

What does that mean?

It's not just about me. Emotions are not just my emotions. Everybody's got emotions. And yes, I can regulate my own emotions, but guess what? CO regulation is a huge piece of emotional intelligence.

What is CO regulation?

So think about it. In a baby, you're working with your baby and they're crying and you're holding the baby and you're giving them warmth and you're doing a little cooing. You're talking in a very soft voice to kind of deactivate their nervous system and that makes you feel calm. It's this kind of symbiotic back and forth as adults. It's me asking you good questions. It's me showing up with empathy, with compassion, with good listening skills and saying, hey, hey, Louis, I heard, you know, I heard the news, you know, I'm really sorry about that. What can I do to be supportive? Let's think about it. Let's go for a walk, let's go play a game. Let's do something to just get your mind off of it or to problem solve about it. But I'm here for you. That's CO regulation.

I guess the challenge is when someone's, you know, if your coffee routine is displaced, you know, for months in a row, and you just like, I can't take this anymore. And your nervous system is on high alert, or even something more extreme, whatever it might be for someone and their nervous system is not calm and they feel like they're in chronic stress because they haven't regulated their own nervous system. How does someone co regulate with someone else's heightened emotions or irrational emotions that might seem irrational in a context of setting? How do you co regulate when you can't even get your own nervous system to relax? And you think the other person you're with is already irrational.

Well, two over activated nervous systems is a nightmare. It's a nightmare. And so you got to be the first. And you know, it is our responsibility, your responsibility as a father to be to deactivate. You're the role model, you have to be. And so the self regulation piece comes before the co regulation piece. And ultimately if you're talking about parent child, you're the role model for like daddy can take handle this. Daddy has, you know, Daddy talks to himself in a self compassionate way. Daddy takes care of his body, Daddy breathes properly. And daddy's modeling that for you because daddy eventually wants you to be able to do that for yourself. Yeah.

What about in a partnership though, with two grown adults?

Someone's got to take responsibility. I mean this is, this is the thing. It's, you know, it's a, oftentimes, you know, in my relationship it's like the battle of who's the strongest person never works. And so sometimes it's like, Mark, remember you're the director of the center for Emotional impellence. Because Mark me is like, I hate you right now. Like I don't want to be with you anymore. And this is very impulsive crazy stuff. We all say this to ourselves. When you're triggered and activated, the worst of ourselves comes out our automatic, habitual, kind of really poor habits. Just like they come out like there's no tomorrow. And in those moments we have to build the space and no one's going to build the space for you. You've got to learn to again take the breath back up. Maybe you say, you know what, I'm sorry, I cannot do this right now. I've got to go out for a minute. But if you build the space, the distance, you can deactivate the nervous system and then you can access all that cognition that you can use to then have a conversation.

Space is key. I love this quote in your book that says success in virtually every aspect of life, career, friendship, love and family is determined mainly by one thing. And that's how you deal with your feelings.

That's correct.

Now how dangerous is it then to suppress and numb your true emotions?

Well, I mean they gotta go somewhere. So they go into stomach problems, they go into physical health problems, they go into depression, anxiety, losing a spouse. I mean you can't just bury your emotions because they're what make you human. And that's why I think it should be required to teach people the skills of emotional intelligence. It's so critical And I make this claim and I stand by it, which is that as someone who teaches at a very powerful university, I always joke like, all of my students have higher SAT scores than I had, higher grade point average than I had. They play instruments I didn't even know existed. They've traveled to countries to do internships. They've done everything they can to get into a place like Yale. But the question I've always had is how many of these students are successful? How many reach and attain their desired goals in life? And what I've seen over and over again is that the students with the greatest kind of academic skills are not the ones who succeed the most.

Really? Why is that?

Because they can't deal with their emotions.

Interesting. And so they can study and get.

Good grades, but then they get anxious. 90, I mean, upwards of 80% of the students report having anxiety right now. So if our definition of success is getting into a high powered university and being anxious all the time, I don't know, that makes no sense to me. Yeah, I know what it's like to be anxious. I've lived with anxiety. That's not something you want to live with. Or depression or imposter syndrome, which is a big deal where I work.

Really?

Yeah.

Everyone in Yale thinks they're an imposter because everyone else is smarter than that.

Exactly. You know, they have their real valedictorian. It was harder to get an A in their school.

Right.

They can study for less hours and get better grades than I do. They have a father who's connected at Wall Street. They have a mother who's a Hollywood producer. I mean, it's everyone's, you know, focusing on what everyone else has, except for, know, having some gratitude. Like, I'm actually doing pretty well here. I'm at Yale University. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wow.

But the thing I'm. The real key here about success is that over and over and again and again, there are. We know for some good and bad reasons that people who are not so emotionally intelligent can reach high positions, usually because they're bullies. However, if we define success as having the skills of emotional intelligence, meaning that I am, well, you know, I am a person who has the strategies to deal with life's ups and downs. And I'm good at helping other people and I'm lifting them up, I think it would change the way we would view people in terms of life, success, and again, just going back to even attaining our goals. I don't know about your career, but in my career, like I teach emotions a Lot of dudes aren't interested in my work. A lot of like Fortune 100 CEOs who are mostly men, I go give speeches at their organizations.

They're like, just tell me how to make money.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm going to get my people to like do what I want them to do. And like, totally.

I mean, I have one favorite memory where I'm at this very famous hedge fund and the CEO looks at me like, look at my office. You know, you think I need emotional intelligence. And the joke behind that is I had interviewed the people who report to him like, yeah, because your employees hate you.

Yeah.

And so I don't think people realize that when you're a poor role model for emotion regulation, people don't want to be around you.

No. Or they're afraid of you. Or just it's not a healthy relationship. You know, it's interesting because the more I've studied emotional intelligence and correct me if I'm wrong, the greatest way that an individual can become a true leader is not just understanding their own emotions, but like you said, learning to co regulate all types of unique personalities in the world. When you're in an environment with them and understanding their emotions 100%. Being able to be with your emotions and the discomfort or the messiness of the moment, whatever's happening in life, being able to regulate your own emotions, being able to see the other person in front of you, what they're experiencing and almost have a snapshot of their life and of where they could have came from, what they might have gone through, why they're dysregulated, almost seeing it without knowing who they are.

That's right.

And trying to flex and navigate emotionally how to co regulate with that human being. You're not going to do skin to skin bonding with an adult, but learning how to just be present, how to breathe, how to relax, how to say, tell me more how you feel.

Exactly.

I think that is true leadership. When you can understand emotional intelligence more than just calming yourself, but learning how to calm the entire room and the environment around you.

Well, you just summarized this big study I did during the pandemic. So we studied leaders across five time periods during the pandemic. And what we looked at was their employees perceptions of the leaders, skill at dealing with their own emotions but co regulated.

Interesting.

So being kind of like my, you know, Mark, let's use me as an example. Like Mark can, like, he remains calm, he's not freaking out. He can, you know, self regulate or Mark, you know, when we're Having our team meetings is really helpful to the group and understands where they're coming from and creates the conditions where people feel held, where people feel supported, emotionally, et cetera.

So it's intra inter, intra, inter regulation.

Exactly.

Wow.

Yeah. And then we tracked that across five time periods and looked at culture and climate in companies. We looked at it in terms of how the employees felt on average, burnout, intentions to leave their jobs. And of course, everything went in the direction we had predicted. That leaders who were both skilled at dealing with their own emotions but helpful at co regulating had employees were healthier, happier, actually employees who slept better at night.

Interesting.

I mean, think about that. The skill of a leader is predicting the sleep quality of an employee.

That first sip feeling. You know, one of my favorite parts of the morning is setting the tone for the day. And I'll start my day with gratitude. Always. I like to move my body and then I like to get something that fuels my focus and energy for what's ahead in my day. And lately that's included the new Starbucks protein lattes. It fits right into my routine and it helps me hit my protein goals. I'm drinking the Starbucks vanilla protein latte right now, and it takes the same smooth, balanced flavor you already love, and it adds a protein boost. And if you already have your favorite Starbucks order, you can just swap the milk for their protein boosted milk. It's amazing. And on this show, we talk a lot about building habits that also support performance and wellness. And for me, this is one of those small, steady upgrades, something that makes my morning a little stronger without changing the flow of my day. So try the new lineup of high protein beverages at Starbucks or add protein to your favorite drink. The challenge is it's really hard for most people to learn the skill of emotional regulation in themselves, let alone in themselves. And with 10, 20, 50, 100 employees or their team or their family. And I'm assuming you grew up with dysfunctional parents like I did and like most, like most of us did.

Yeah.

Where we, we mirrored and modeled behaviors that were not healthy. From the, the, the dysregulation of fighting, of screaming, of silent treatments, of feeling fear coming in, you know, the house. Lots of times, at least that's how I grew up. You know, I left home when I was 13 because I was like, get me out of here. You know, I knew my parents loved me, but they didn't know how to love themselves.

Yeah.

And it didn't feel emotionally safe. My brother went to prison when I was 8 for selling drugs to an Undercover cop. My older sisters were going through their own struggles as well. And I was just like, I don't feel emotionally safe. I knew they loved me. You know, it's like they. They showed up at sports practices, they tucked me in a bed. They told me they loved me. But when you feel like your parents are not in an emotionally loving environment and they don't regulate their emotions, it's a scary world. When you're a five, seven, it's scary. And you don't. They don't teach you how to regulate your own emotions when they're not really theirs.

100%. I mean, we different families, same experience, right? So I had two parents who loved me a lot. My mom had terrible anxiety, and I'm having a nervous breakdown. I'm like, wait, I'm the one being bullied? Yeah.

I'm seven. What do I do with this?

Exactly. And my father was, we call it today, the toxically masculine tough guy. So his mantra to me was, son, you got. Toughen up.

Stop crying, stop crying.

I joke about this, but even when I was in middle school, my father had the nerve to say something like, you know, son, I used to beat kids up like you. And I'm like, okay, you know, like, guess what, dad? We have very different, you know, personalities. And. And it was nuts. Now, again, I think my father's belief system was, that's how I'm going to get my son to be tough. Like, I have to, like, scare him into being tough.

He didn't have the tools either.

You're looking at me right now like I do have a fifth degree black belt.

Yeah.

I'm still not a tough guy. It's like, also, what is. That's a hole. Like, that's a whole nother podcast.

Yeah.

But anyway. And unfortunately, I also had abuse in my childhood while my parents were dealing with two older brothers of mine who had their own challenges. The person who care who took care of me, unfortunately, was a pedophile.

Yeah.

And so for about five years, I was abused, man, and didn't say anything about it.

Oh, yeah, that happened to me as well when I was five. Father, babysitter's son. And I've talked about it many times, openly, but it's. For 25 years, I didn't tell a soul. And that's where I felt someone was always abusing me. In every environment in my life, if someone was taking advantage of me, it was like, I'm being abused. And for 25 years, I never told anyone. And it felt like if anyone knew this about me. No one would ever love me. No one would ever like me, love me. People would make fun of me forever. I would not have any friends. And so I stuffed this frustration, this anger, until I learned to process emotions around 12 years ago.

Wow.

And it set me emotionally free. The journey it took, you know, it took some time, but it set me emotionally free to have a level of peace that I've never felt in my life.

That's amazing.

And I think one of the biggest. And not to. Not to cut you off. I want to share more about it, but also I want you to share based on your research and experience. If we don't fully own our emotions and our traumas and we keep it stuck inside of us, how is that going to hold us back from accomplishing a life we want?

Well, like we said earlier, in terms of emotional suppression, that's a form of suppression or repression or denial. And it's hard to live a full life when you can't be your true self. I've done a lot of research in this area, too. This is a new line of research that I can just share with you. And I think what we're both talking about here, about our childhoods, is that we needed adults who gave us, as I call it, permission to feel, who created the conditions where we could talk about feelings, where we can get support, where we didn't have to secretly be our heads against the wall or drink alcohol or whatever it was. And I found in my research there are three characteristics of these people. Do you want to guess what they are?

Three characteristics of adults.

The adults who create the conditions for us to talk about feelings and be.

Our true selves of like a healthy versions or. The three.

No, no, the. The people who give us permission to feel. What do you think are their top three traits?

Well, they have. They've created kind of a healthy relationship with themselves. They feel whole, they feel healthy. They feel healed. You know, they've created healing journey. You know, maybe it's not fully healed, but they've created safety within themselves. They. They probably are in a healthy relationship. I would say, you know, they're probably in a healthy relationship with someone else.

Think about someone, you know, who just is. Is that kind of person. How would you. What would be their attributes, their characteristics?

Very loving, very kind, Very calm.

Calm. Yeah.

Peaceful present.

Yeah.

Very connected.

Like they're exactly all the things that we learn how to develop in school.

Yeah, yeah. None of that.

Yeah. The top three, which you're. You're kind of bringing them all together. The number one is non judgmental.

Oh, okay.

We're just dying to be around people, accepting. Yeah. Just like, can I just be me? Like, why are you trying to make me into somebody else? The second is listener, just listen, stop talking. And the third is compassionate. That just let me know you care. What I think is so fascinating about that is that never do people say brilliant, wise, talented or talented fixer, problem solver. We don't want that. We want the presence. And what I've done in my research is I've asked, you know, tens of thousands of people. Well, only a third of people, by the way, a third of adults running around the United States at least. And I've done this cross culturally, it's the same stuff. Only a third of us say we had someone like that growing up. Two thirds of us.

I mean, shoes.

Yeah, it's tough. And the barrier that when I talk to parents or even business leaders, well, I don't have time. Like you don't have time to be non judgmental. Like, I'm not sure how to get that one. The second is fear.

Fear of what?

That they're afraid of. Like if I ask you how you're feeling, you're going to say, like, I'm feeling this way and I'm not going to know what to do about it. So they're afraid to ask the question because they don't know how to kind of work with the person.

They don't know how to deal with the emotions of a person.

Exactly. But remember, no one is looking for you to problem solve or fix. They just want you to listen and ask maybe some questions to show that you care. And also we want to help kids build resilience. And so if we just constantly tell our kids, like, do this and do this, they're not learning anything and they don't want that anyway. What they want is someone who shows they care and gets them to think critically so they can come up with their own solutions, which I think should pull away the fear that people have because they. You actually have to do that much other than be present and ask good questions.

Yeah.

And so it's time. Fear and feeling like you don't have the skills which most people. We got to build the time, take away the fear and teach people.

Most people don't have the skills at least, but they could have the time for sure. The fear of not knowing how to deal with someone else's emotions I think could be real. Because, you know, even, you know, my wife Martha, she's, you know, due here with our twins in less than two weeks. And she's having a range of. More range of emotions than she normally has.

Right.

And she's really good at self regulation. Like, she's done a lot of healing work. She has a therapist and speaks to her family and friends, and she's processing a lot before she brings me the big emotions. So I'm not getting big emotions every single day from her.

Right.

It's like once in a while, and I feel like I can handle it. Like, okay. Yes, it's okay. If it was every day, I'd be like, this is kind of exhausting too, for me. Right. It's all hard for you and hard for me. But it's. It's more now. It has been more. It's still not that much, but. And a lot of times I'm like, I don't know how to solve this because I don't know how you truly feel. I don't have two kids inside of my belly growing and my pain everywhere. So it's like, I can try to empathize and be compassionate, obviously, but I don't know how to fix. And I think that's one of the key things you said is don't try to fix it.

She doesn't want to, believe me. I. I'm telling you, she does not want you to fix her.

Exactly. And so what I have learned is just rubbing her and listening to her is the best thing I can do. And me learning how to be with.

The emotions or how about saying, what do you need right now?

Yeah, yeah. What do you need? How can I support you? I'm here for you.

What would help right now?

Yeah, exactly.

Again, that's that other orientation mindset.

Yeah. But it's hard for a lot of. And I'm in this work consistently, and it's still I have to be reminding myself to be patient, to listen, to know that this may be two minutes, it may be 20 minutes, and I get to sit with it. And even though it's uncomfortable, it's still.

Discomfort is fine.

Yeah. So when you. I mean, going through the sexual abuse that you experienced for many years as a kid, how do you feel like that shaped your nervous system as an adult? And when did you feel like you were able to start processing the shame or guilt or fear or insecurity around that, to feel like you had a healthier nervous system and a better relationship with all the parts of you?

Yeah, well, it was tough because I was a precocious kid. And at 11, when I disclosed it, like Any parents? My mother, you know, had a breakdown. She could not believe that her friend was doing this to me. And my father got a bat and went to kill the man.

Oh, my gosh.

And luckily, he didn't do that. Oh, he was arrested. And it was a long case. Unfortunately, it was back, you know, in the 1980s, and unfortunately, we find that he had abused thousands of people. Yeah, but. And then, stupidly, my parents had a friend who was a psychiatrist, and he was writing a book on pedophilia. And I went on television with him, which was the worst decision anybody could have made, because I became, you know, the pariah of people. Meaning that my school found out about it and the teachers found out about it, and parents would say, things don't play with Mark. You know, he's kind of like damaged goods.

Oh, man.

And so more bullying happened. It was bad. But Uncle Marvin, who is the man who was my hero in life, who happened to be a teacher in the Catskill Mountains of New York State and a trumpet player by night and a curriculum writer kind of in other hours, he was writing a curriculum to teach kids about emotions. Wow. And he stayed with us one summer, and. And he was the first person who asked me questions like, hey, Mark, how you feeling? And then he'd practice his lessons with me with these feeling words, and he'd say, tell me a time when you felt elated. And I'd be like, I can't think of any of those. How about when you felt alienated? I'm like, I could talk about that all day long. And we started having all these rich conversations just about emotions. What was the cause of that feeling? Was that really the right word? And how did you deal with that emotion? Let's think together about the strategies. So I tell you that because I went to college, life got better for me. And then I'm in college, I'm graduating. I'm still like, what am I going to do with my life? I'm in therapy, and all of a sudden, it's 1995, and this book comes out called Emotional Intelligence. And I see it on the COVID of Time magazine, and I'm like, emotional toe. Like, I don't know what that is, but that's exactly. That's my uncle and me. That's everything I learned when I was a kid. And so I look, I read the book, and I call my uncle, and I'm like, he's retired now in Florida. And I'm like, uncle Marvin, I think, like, this is stuff that you were doing 20 years before this book came out. Let's work together and write a curriculum. And so I pulled my uncle out of retirement. We sat in Dunkin Donuts and Fort Lauderdale drinking our decaf and muffins and starting to think about how could I translate what he was working on in his classroom into a real curriculum. Which then led me to get a PhD in psychology. Because in that book, that book was originally written by a journalist, not the scientists. And so I found the two scientists who were the real authors and theorists. And I called them both. They both agreed to meet with me. One was at Yale, one at the University of New Hampshire. Joke about that one is I got rejected from Yale, where I'm now a professor, and I went to the University of New Hampshire to study with the other professor. And I, I share that kind of story because that really was my healing journey. It started with my uncle and then I started studying it and really understanding it. And then obviously, you know, other things like my martial arts training, you know, having a fifth degree black belt and hapkido, which is a Korean martial art, just the principles and the mindsets in the martial arts. I studied Zen, meditation.

Yeah.

So between psychology and the martial arts and Uncle Marvin, it was really my healing journey. Wow. And I, you know, it's funny, I just gave a speech last night and you know, it was a lot of people and people give you an applause at the end, somebody came up to me and said, you know, gosh, Mark, you know, with all your story, look at you, you're like, you're the one on stage presenting. And I always say, thank you for that. And then I go back and I say, but remember I had Uncle Morphin, Remember I have a PhD in psychology, remember I got a fifth degree black belt in martial arts. I spent 30 years of my life researching, studying, teaching, writing books. I have a lot of time and effort put into my own emotional health and well being. And so while I appreciate that, my big question is, is how many kids are going to have that journey. How many kids in our country are getting the emotion education they need to achieve their dreams in life? And far too few.

Well, I think a lot of people struggle accomplishing their dreams because they deal with a lot of inner suffering. And I was the ultimate accomplisher for many years, high school, college, my 20s was goal setting, accomplishing, but again, I could accomplish my goals and dreams, but I still didn't feel enough. And if you go make a lot of money and accomplish your dreams and you still feel less than I don't think that's success. I think it's like suffering. You're just suffering because you haven't learned how to appreciate life and be at ease with who you are. At this season of life, how many, what percentage of the people in the USA or in the world do you think would associate with a level of inner suffering? Like on a day to day basis, like they're going through some type of suffering?

It's higher than it's ever been.

Really?

Yeah, it's. I mean, I'll just in among college students where I work, it's increased 10 to 15% a year over the last 20 years. Every year more.

What is the language like? They just say like I'm suffering or I feel like it stressed out.

Depends where you're at in life. I mean, here's an interesting thing about. You were talking about naming emotions.

So.

So one of my favorite kind of things that I did in my own courses, I asked people if you take my course. It's also a research project. So you're filling out surveys every class and you're introspective, blah, blah, blah. And so 80% of my students said they were stressed. Now they say they're stressed. I can't tell you're lying to me, but there was something deep inside me that's like, I don't get it.

What does that mean?

Yeah, exactly. So I had them journal about all their feelings and why they were stressed. What do you think the top emotion was? The real emotion?

Not enough.

I don't know.

They're not. They felt not enough.

Or you're getting close comparison or not good enough or it was envy.

Jealous and envy.

Yeah, well, they're different too. We'll talk about that.

They're feeling envy of other their peers.

What they're doing is they're sitting in my class, they're like this, oh my gosh, you're richer. Oh my gosh, you can study for less hours. Oh my gosh, you have more connections. Oh my gosh, you got better hips, you got better lips. I mean, it's just endless. Everyone else is better than I.

Not even in the classroom. But also scrolling on the phone, seeing everything on Instagram and social media.

And so the joke I have about this is I went to the counseling center and I said, what's our university's envy reduction program? And you know, everybody's looking at me like, what are you talking about? Because we're doing breathing exercises or yoga and you know, respectfully, I love mindfulness and breathing exercises. I write about them. They're evidence based. I love yoga too, but it's not going to solve the envy problem. You know, the envy is a cognitive thing that has to be reworked.

Interesting.

You've got to shift the way you're thinking about yourself and other people. If you don't do that, you can breathe, you're going to go for the walk and you can go back, feel envy, you're going to do your breathing exercise and you're going to feel envious again. You've got to shift your thinking.

It's a perspective.

The antidote from my perspective is gratitude. Yeah. Can we just stop thinking about what everybody else has and let's take a minute and look around us. We're doing pretty good. Can you think about a couple of things each day for which you're grateful and that will shift the envy? Yeah.

I mean, your students are in the top 1% of 1% of students in the world at Yale, and yet they're still not happy.

100% that interesting.

But I think that's probably most of the USA of people who are watching or following accounts that make them feel more envious when they see lack, they see separation, they see lack, they see, oh, this person has this. I don't have it yet. Now I want that thing. There's a separation of a physical space or a lack of not having something or accomplishing something or having a certain amount of followers, whatever it might be. So how do we. So if stress is one of the number one things that I have to tell you.

One more thing, though.

Tell me.

You just made me think about it, which is in the research that I did, I asked them more about their experiences, about their development. And the thing that made me the most disheartened was that the number one thing that students said to me was that they felt manufactured.

What does that mean?

It means that they felt like they had to figure out this formula to get into this place called Yale. But then they really weren't sure who they were.

Interesting.

Because someone else prescribed.

Yeah. Parents push them, prescribe them.

And, you know, it's so funny because I was not an Ivy League student. I went to public schools. I went to public universities. And, and I just think so many people think like the, the, the only way my kid is going to be successful is that they go to this top university. And I just think that's so misguided.

Because it's interesting because most people want to create a beautiful life for themselves.

Yes. Right.

Most people want to become something greater. They want to Master their talents, develop themselves. They want to try things, they want to explore and they want to have some sense of accomplishment in their life. They don't want to be broke, poor and sleeping on their parents basement forever. So it's like they want to get out into the world and make something of themselves. But how do we feel? How do people learn how to feel enough even if they're sleeping in their parents basement and don't have any skills or anything to show for it? And how do we continue to feel enough when we have all the success, money and fame in the world?

Well, a couple of things about that going back to my other research about like the uncle, I call it the Uncle Marvin's or the Amarillas or whoever. The person who gives you permission to feel. So my research shows that people who grew up in those conditions, 15 to 20% greater purpose and meaning in life.

Who have the ability to feel. The permission to feel.

Yes.

By someone in their life.

Anyone? Anyone. By the way, the research is pretty unfortunate. The findings for guys. Only 3% of people say it was their father.

Oh man.

So you got something to look forward to.

And I got two girls. So I gotta, you know, so I gotta.

Again, you don't have to just show up. Listen, show your love. Non judgment, non judgment.

Now here's an interesting. I have to. I have to ask you this as somebody I was thinking about sooner, earlier. There seems to be this trend that I'm noticing where parents are too much in their feelings with their kids who are 4, 7, 8 and they say tell me more, tell me more about your feelings. It's okay. Cry. Keep talking about your feelings all day. Yeah, that person stole that toy from you. Keep telling me more.

Out of my mind.

Extreme. It seems like so extreme of like it's okay to talk about your feelings and almost encouraging it so much to stay in the feeling of why you feel sad, hurt, whatever. So there can be. I don't think that's a healthy thing either.

That's not emotional intelligence.

What is that?

When a parent is emotional indulgence.

Ah, so when a parent is indulging in their kids emotions, allowing them to express it over and over again, what does that do to the child?

It makes them incapable of learning how to deal with their own feelings. It's the worst thing we can do for our kids. And that kind of stuff drives me crazy because it's a misinterpretation of the feelings work. The work in emotional intelligence just to go through the skills for a minute. Yes, it's about recognizing our own and other emotions, understanding their causes and consequences, labeling them with precise words, knowing how and when to express them, and having the strategies to regulate them. But it always finishes with regulation.

Always. Yeah. Not just keep talking about it.

No, no, no, you don't want to be in it. What you actually, the research shows that venting and talking about emotions can cause more rumination, which is what we don't want. Louis, I know you're going through a lot right now, and I see that you're really sad. I'm imagining you're my kid. I know that you really wanted to go to your friend's house today, but unfortunately we got a flat tire. Daddy, I hate you, Daddy. No, honey, I wanted to go see your friend too, but we got a flat tire. I'm really sorry. Let's think about. Take a minute and go in the car for a minute and just think about what else we might do today together. I'm redirecting. Redirecting. But what I'm trying to do is teach you problem solving skills not to wallow.

And you're not giving the child the solution. You say, go think about what is something else we could do today that could be fun.

Imagine, Louis, that this happened to your best friend. Imagine your best friend just called you or you're on your phone and he said, I was supposed to go play with you, but I couldn't do it. What advice would you give them? You're going to be really good at giving advice to your friend. And then I'm going to say, as your dad, honey, gosh, you came up with these amazing ideas. Which one do you want to try today?

That's cool.

That's emotion regulation.

Teaching. Yeah. The first step of it is recognizing the emotion.

First.

Is that within yourself or if you're looking at someone else's emotions? Either one.

Both. I mean, it's always all these skills are self and other. So if you're the one. If you're my son and you're screaming, daddy, I hate you, Daddy, you made it. So I can't go to my friend's house. I'm going to get triggered by that.

Yeah.

So it's Mark. Take a breath. Mark.

Yeah.

Your kid is reacting. Your job is to figure out how to co regulate, downregulate and reach your kid to help them problem solve. That's got to be the mindset.

Okay, so recognize first. What was the second step?

Understand.

Understand the emotion.

For example, if I. If you're like, I hate you and I want to go Home. And I can't stand this. If I do that to you. Let's, let's switch roles for a minute. So I'm your child. I hate you. How do I feel?

Angry. Frustrated.

Why?

I'd have to ask you to understand it, right? Yeah.

Because what you're doing is what 99% of people do.

Assuming.

Right. You're the emotion judge. You're assuming how I'm feeling based on my behavior.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your reaction.

Behavior is not feeling. I've been socialized to be aggressive because that's what boys do to get attention. That is nothing. I may be feeling shame, disappointment, overwhelmed. You have no idea. Until you can bring me down and find out what happened, you're not going to know what I'm really feeling. And if you don't know what I'm really feeling, you are going to be incapable of providing or supporting me and regulating.

If someone, let's say it's a child or a friend or an intimate partner. If someone in your life is bringing what looks like frustration and anger emotion, what is something that you can do to understand what is beneath that anger? To know exactly what it is?

Yeah. I mean the first is you don't want to ask them when they're in that place.

It's like, why are you so angry right now?

Exactly. Like that doesn't work because that'll just, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

But I would say it's, it looks like you might be angry or frustrated, but I'm not sure what's happening right now. Just, can you tell me what's going on?

So ask a question.

Just ask the open ended question. Yeah, just tell me more what happened and then you start hearing the theme. See, part of the core of emotional intelligence is that you, we adults have to understand what we call these core themes of emotion. So anxiety. The theme is uncertainty, fear. The theme is danger, frustration, blocked goals, anger, injustice, disappointment, unmet expectation. I'm giving you the kind of unpleasant feelings.

Interesting.

And until you as a father, as a friend, as a partner, as a boss, understand that you're not going to be able to help people.

Is there a graph or a chart that you have that explains what the root foundation is under every emotion there is. What's it called?

It's the app that I co created with the co founder of Pinterest called How We Feel.

Okay.

And it's free and you can Download it on iOS or Android.

What's it called?

How We Feel.

How we feel. Okay.

144 emotions including their definitions.

Wow.

And Ability to track your emotions over time. Okay. And once you get that, because here's the thing. Once I understand that what you're feeling is disappointment and not anger, because anger is an injustice. Anger is, for example, someone treating me unfairly. So if you think about, if your wife tells you, like, comes in like, looks like she's pissed and you think, or comes in like, you know, I can't believe this happened. Oh, why are you so disappointed? Well, the disappointment is, oh, well, you thought this was going to happen, it didn't happen. Let's, let's think together about what you could do differently next time.

Yeah.

If it's someone treats her unfairly, yikes. Now she might have to have a really difficult conversation with someone and say, listen, you can't treat me that way. Your support in helping her find that solution is based on knowing what the actual emotion and experience is.

In your book Dealing with feeling, on page 109, you say labeling is the link that connects our internal lives, our feelings to our outward actions, how we react to those feelings. I'm not exaggerating when I say that mastering this skill is what ultimately gives us the power to control our own fates. It's a pretty important thing.

Yeah.

And so when we can learn to understand, I think, the root underneath each one of these emotions, we're going to have better awareness around what, why we're feeling that way, why someone else is feeling a certain way. So we can co regulate or inter regulate the things we were talking about. And the key to having a rich life is having beautiful relationships first with yourself. So you're not suffering, stressed and overwhelmed or envious or jealous constantly. Because then you're just in a suffering state of being. You're not in a rich, abundant, beautiful, grateful state, peaceful state. So it's getting into that relationship with self and understanding our own emotions and then learning how to navigate those in others is what I'm hearing you say.

It's correct and it is a caveat, which is that understanding emotions doesn't mean you know exactly the reason why and that we each feel the same emotion for the same reasons.

Right?

Yeah. And that's important because we tend to think other people feel emotions because of the way we feel those emotions.

No, it's different.

And so like the things that, for example, with anger, you know, the things that I see as an injustice, you may not relate to and I may not be able to relate to the things that you see as an injustice because of our childhoods, our upbringing, our culture, our religion, our gender Race, whatever it is. And so the goal of emotional intelligence is not to be right. The goal is to be curious. The goal is to. Hey, Lewis, tell me more. Oh, you know, it's hard for me to really be empathic because I don't get it. But I hear you and I believe you and I want to support you.

It's like my wife and her emotions right now, just being pregnant. I'm like, I don't know exactly. But I can be compassionate. I can be non judgmental. I got questions.

It doesn't matter. What matters is what she's feeling and why she's feeling it and that you care.

Yeah. And you said so. Number one is to recognize emotions. Number two is to understand what was the next three.

Then there's L. Labeling.

Labeling.

So that's, you know, within an emotion there are many degrees. Am I angry or am I just peeved or am I enraged? That's important because the smaller the emotion, the easier it is to regulate. It's a lot easier to manage peeved than it is enraged. It's a lot easier to manage disappointment than it is despair. And so. But if we don't have that granularity, which a lot of people don't. This is. I was talking with someone recently and why. He goes, why is everybody depressed? I'm like, everybody's not depressed. They're just using the word depressed. And this is. We can't allow that. We've got to get people to understand. Like, I used to work at Bellevue Hospital. I'll show you depression.

You saw it. Yeah.

Catatonic depression is real depression. You're disappointed, you're discouraged. You know, we don't want to say you're that, but the point is that what we want to do is help people understand that granularity. It's called.

Okay, so labeling. Number four.

Expressing.

Expressing.

So it's knowing how and when to express emotions with different people across context and culture.

Yep. And then the last one is the.

R, which is this. My whole book on regulation.

Regulation. Yeah. At the end. Okay.

It always culminates in regulation. Now, importantly, regulation doesn't mean you have to change your feeling. Regulation can just mean acknowledging it and being with it.

Yeah. It doesn't mean you have to like remove the feeling right away. I mean, you might still be let down or.

I remember.

Yeah. You might be let down or frustrated or sad or hurt or whatever it might be, but allowing that feeling to dictate your joy and rob you of your joy or presence or ability to connect to other people. Then you're, you're kind of in a powerless state. Something else has power over you. An emotion has power over you. Rather, you taking back control of your life, which is what you talk about in the book.

There are five in my work. I have my, like, I call it my money slide when I give my presentations because there's so many naysayers that like emotions, like, they roll their eyes or like, we leave our feelings at the door. We don't have time for this. We're high achieving, high power. And I'm like, all right, if you.

Want to make more money, yeah, do this.

But there are, you know, I, I say, how much of the signs have you read about emotional intelligence and leadership and management and productivity? None. Okay, well, let me show you. What, Let me show it to you because you may think differently. Now, there are five reasons why everybody should care about emotional intelligence.

What are those?

One, you're a better learner, period. Two, you're a better decision maker. Three, you're way better at building and maintaining healthy relationships. Four, you have better physical and mental health. And five, you can achieve your goals. That's pretty convincing to me.

Yeah, exactly. But what would a naysayer say to that then of like, wow, it just seems like woo woo or fluff or therapy, and I don't have time for that. So how can I learn to master my emotions better or have a better relationship with them without having to go through all this woo woo stuff?

Yeah, well, firstly, I mean, that's a trigger for me that you're calling it woo woo.

I understand. This is what other people would say.

Yeah.

I'm not saying yeah, I'm all in this. I'm all, give it all to me, you know?

Yeah. What I would say is tell me more about why you think it's woo woo.

Wow.

I just want to hear because I'm looking for results.

I just want to, I need, you know, I've got pressure from my boss. I'm trying to accomplish these goals. I've got responsibilities. I got kids that need me and I don't have the time for these things. Seems like too much, you know, soft work and I need hard results.

Yeah. Well, what if I were to tell you that organizations that have managers with higher emotional intelligence have less attrition? What do you think about that?

I just think, you know, most employees are weak minded and if we got to go through them and just find new people, then we just gotta find new people. But we need people that have strong, you know, strong will, not weak emotions.

Yeah. And I agree. This is why I think it's important to develop the emotional intelligence of your employees, because they're gonna have difficult clients. You know, I stay at some really nice hotels, and my decision to go back to a hotel is about the customer service. If I come in early and there's not a room available and the person at the desk says, like, you know, sir, this is no room, I'm like, okay, great, I'll go someplace else. Thank you very much. If they were trained in emotional intelligence, do you realize how much more business you would have? Because how I feel when I enter that hotel and how I'm greeted and the way I'm treated is a determinant of my wanting to return. Right.

I get it. I'm just trying to find. I'm trying to find the devil's app.

I love it. I mean, like, this is my favorite test of emotional.

Yeah.

But I think that's what people need to hear.

Sure. And if I'm in that archetype that's combating you, I would say, well, gosh, we just don't have this extra money for these type of training or these budgets. And how long is this going to take to have someone heal their, like, inner child wounds? You know, it's going to take decades for these.

Yeah.

And 25 year olds who have had no training and are already complaining and already show up late and already don't do a good job. How am I to get them to understand this in the next three to six months? I don't have time to train them.

Well, you can use our app number one. But I think more importantly, Louis, what I'm hearing from you is that you're confusing skill building with like, therapy and counseling. And some people do need therapy and counseling because of whatever they've experienced in life. I'm talking about really serious skills. I'm talking about collaborations on your team. I'm talking about having people in your workplace inspire other people. I'm talking about people being able to give and receive feedback without creating chaos. Do you think that your organization might do better if people were better at giving and receiving feedback and inspiring teams and collaborative?

100%?

Well, there you go.

And a side note on this, something I learned when I started my emotional intelligence training was I was good at being coachable in sports, but I wasn't good at receiving feedback of my person.

Of what I was. It's a huge issue.

And I was very.

It's like you're. It's like an attack on your head.

It's an attack on me as a person. And I was like, ah, don't give me feedback. I couldn't take it and it was so hard for me. And once I understood the incredible power of receiving feedback, even if you don't like it, it's a gift. It is the greatest gift. And it doesn't mean every. All feedback is accurate. It doesn't mean you have to receive all feedback.

Got a sift.

You got to sift it. You have to know where it's coming from, the context, setting, who you know. If you're getting the same feedback from multiple people, maybe that's something to listen to. But why is receiving feedback such a crucial part to achieving more success in life?

Because when you're getting feedback, I'll give you an example of this. So early in my career, I think I was just overcompensating, you know, I had like, I knew how to do complex statistical analyses and I would, I had this tendency, like when I would do a presentation, say, like, this is very complicated. And one person, a woman once came up to me at the end of my talk, she's like, you know, I think you're a great presenter, but the way you're framing things about, like how complicated your ideas are and your work is, it's, it's insulting. It's kind of diminishing the strength of your presentation. Now my immediate reaction was like, oh my gosh. Like, this is the worst thing that could ever happen. Oh my gosh. And then I just sat with it. I'm like, thank you. Because the last thing I want to do is come across as an arrogant professor. Or the last thing I want to do is have people in my audience not receive the information because of the language that I'm using to teach it. But that's a mindset. That's a big mindset shift. And if your eye is on attaining your goals, then being open to that feedback is just critically important. And managing the feelings.

Yeah, manage it well. Here's. So what would you say then to anyone, you know, in their late teens or twenties in the Gen Z range on who maybe don't receive feedback?

Well, yeah.

Why they should be open to receiving feedback, whether in their career or relationships or friendship circles. Like why, why is feedback important for anyone who's Gen Z?

Because if you want to achieve your goals in life, oftentimes you're going to have to change some of your behavior because you're having an impact and some of you want to be conscious of your impact. And if you're not conscious of it, you might be going down a path that's not going to be the best for you.

Why does it seem like most younger people don't like hearing that? They're like, I mean, accept me for who I am and just receive me. Why do I have to change who I am? My personality?

Yeah, well, I don't want, I never want you to change your personality, but I want you to understand your impact of your behavior. Yes. I think, you know, this goes back to this kind of that everybody gets a trophy stuff that was going on for many years and still goes on. Whereas people have been raised with not having any resilience because. Oh my gosh, don't cry, honey. Oh my gosh. I would have parents call me and say, you've now made it impossible for my kid to go to law school. I'm like, I didn't take the test. They took the test. It's like, really? And you know, I stand firm on this kind of stuff. I mean, my true belief about this is that, you know, being someone who's out in the world a lot and teaching a lot and you know, doing webinars and workshops and classes is that there's so much, there is variability even within. I mean, a lot of people love to talk about this generation, that generation. I'm okay with that. But I really think there is a distribution within every generation course of people who are going to understand the nuance and work hard and take the feedback because they want to achieve their goals in life. And my belief is that if you really want to have your goals realized, you have to be highly self aware. Highly self aware. And you got to be willing to.

Shift and change, adapt, shift, change.

It's not that you have to be someone else.

No.

But you just have to be aware of your impact.

What does self awareness look like for anyone in any generation? What does that even mean, being self aware?

Well, that goes back to the R and ruler, which is being aware in my work about your emotions. Like what emotions am I experiencing right now? Am I even aware of it? And most people are not self aware, but it's socially aware too. For example, I love this because when I do public speaking, I tell people right away I'm an introvert. Like I'm, I'm pretty good on stage but like afterwards I'm gonna want it, like kind of do my own chill. I'm not going to go to the big party and like celebrate and like drink alcohol and watch TVs and like, you know, I'm gonna go to a wine bar by myself, maybe. Yeah, yeah, but. And then I say this out loud. And I'm always so curious about the people who come to talk to me at the end, and they want to tell me their entire life story within, like. And it's like. And I'm sitting there, like, trying to be polite.

You're like, I really want to leave right now. Yeah, yeah.

And so people aren't listening. And that's just kind of a easy example. But in general, we're just not paying attention. And like, people who, you know, in meetings, like, I do this little joke, you know, when I do trainings is, you got 30 seconds. Introduce yourself. And there's always somebody that's like, on their fifth minute.

Yeah.

You know, you're like, all right. But that kind of self awareness is really important. Like, just be aware of your presence. Be aware of how you're dealing with your own feelings. Are you eye rolling? Years ago, there was someone in my office who was unconscious of the fact that when someone said something that they disagreed with, they would do this. They'd have this, like, stern, kind of weird facial expression, which was kind of like a little bit of contempt, actually, or kind of disgust or anger. And it was really hard for me to give that person feedback.

Why?

Because again, it was like an attack on her facial expression, attack on her presence. And so. But I felt it was super important for this person to be aware of it because it was scaring employees. And so people didn't want to work with this person because they were afraid of that person. This person was a wonderful human being. It just was unconscious of her automatic reactions to things that she disagreed with. And it was a gift to give her that feedback about her facial expressions. I have the same problem, by the way, because I'm always thinking, I'm a scientist. Even right now, I'm like, I got to do a study on this idea. And when I get in that Mark Bracket scientist mode, I'm like, I get these weird facial expressions. Oftentimes people come up to me and say, is everything okay? And I'm like, what do you mean? Like, you know. And they say, well, you look really upset about something. And I'll have to say, gosh, you know, like, I'm just thinking about something that's really kind of I'm being critical. And when I make. I have my critical face on, I share that also, because I think we can also be outwardly kind of acknowledging our own kind of nuances. And because I'm an introvert who's a scientist. I kind of be. People think of me as sometimes being aloof. I'm very friendly. I just, it's not like my, it's not like my first go to.

Yeah.

And then the extrovert who is a narcissist is, is difficult, at least for me. Sure, sure. Yeah.

You're. It's like emotionally draining probably for you.

Very draining.

Yeah. What would you say is the number one emotion that is holding the most people back in the world or in the usa? Like what's the number one go to emotion that blocks most people from true abundance in their life?

You know, because I'm a scientist, I can't answer that question so easily. It's very different for a lot of people. I think the envy right now is a serious issue and I think it's not. People are not aware that it's envy, I think and fear. The fear family.

What does envy and fear block for a human being when they're constantly in that emotion?

Well, the envy, because envy can go in multiple directions. Envy can be admiration or envy can mean resentment. And I've seen so many people unfortunately resent other people's success. They start hating people for reaching certain goals or hating people who have a certain way of being in the world that they don't feel like they can ever attain. Which I find sad that people go down that route of, of resentment because it just paralyzes you. It doesn't. It's not a place of growth when.

Someone is resenting or frustrated with someone else's success, whether they know the person. They don't. What happens in the brain or the body that blocks them.

I mean it's all the self defeating self talk. It's. They become their own self critic and self saboteur. It's I'm not enough, I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough. This will never happen for me. You know, everyone else can do it, but I can't do it. It's all that negative spiral.

What is the science or research that you've discovered say or share when we say to ourselves we're not enough or envying someone else or self deprecating or whatever. These not enough thoughts or saying it out loud to ourselves or other people. What does the research or science say about how that hurts you or helps you in accomplishing your goals or living a better life when you're constantly in that state?

It's a roadblock. You just, you're basically creating your own barrier to your own success. Because if you're always second guessing yourself. If you're always thinking I'm not enough, if you're always thinking, you know, I'm not smart enough and by the way, I have a strong stance on this. I'm pretty convinced at this point in my career that most of us have been gaslighted in childhood. We've been told we're too fat, we're too skinny, we're too tall, we're too short, our nose is too big, our nose is too small, we're too dark, we're too light, we're too masculine, we're not masculine enough. We're too feminine, we're not feminine enough. And what happens is that our own self talk is not defined by us, is defined by other people trying to create a reality for us. And what happens is that because there's no intervention, there's no training, there's no teaching, we believe it. Maybe I am too sensitive. Maybe I do have my nose. Maybe I am too feminine. Maybe I'm too masculine. I mean I can't tell you how much of that I had internalized as a kid.

Really?

Oh yeah, everything I was believing. Everyone's what everyone, what everyone else said about me became my reality.

No pressure to parents.

No pressure to parents or teachers or anyone. Coaches.

Yeah, yeah, coaches. So what would you say are the three most important things a parent can do for their kids?

One is you got to be the role model. So monitor your own self talk. Yeah, you know, what are you saying to yourself when you make a mistake? Are you out loud saying I'm such an idiot, I'm a. And mommy's, mommy's dumb, daddy's whatever, that's a big deal. You got to monitor what comes out of your mouth because kids are listening and kids are watching. The second for parents is they gotta deactivate before they can co regulate. They've gotta learn how to pause, take that breath, bring the nervous system down so they can be more present and show up with compassion, non judgment and good listening. The third is they've gotta help their kid label those feelings and help them to co regulate. They have to kind of validate, not indulge and do that search finding to see what the experience is and then work with their kid for solutions on managing it. And that's by the way, that's for couples. It's for bosses with employees who are upset. This is not just parent kid, this is life.

This is life. What's your thoughts on inside out and how that's helped or hurt people by.

Consuming That I think it's helpful. I think it just gets the word out. It gets that emotions are out there and the more we can do to show people that how people feel matters, but importantly how people deal with their feelings matters even more.

That's true.

Because it's not just the.

Yeah, it's interesting.

You gotta show the skill.

How people feel matters, but how people deal with their feelings matter even more. Yes, that should be on a bumper sticker. It's like that should be on the back of every car in LA traffic.

There you go. Yeah, exactly.

Because you could be like, ah, I'm angry about this, but. But it's like how you respond with your feelings.

That's the answer is one of the.

Greatest skills to develop if you can respond well with them.

I, you know, I'm in favor of a quote that is attributed to Victor Frankl. I live by it.

The space between.

That's right, between stimulus and response, there is space in that space. In that space lies our power to choose our response and our response lies our growth and freedom. Mm. And a lot of the work that I do is built on how do you fill that space? I think right now in society with between, you know, climate change problems, between political polarization, between wars, injustices, shootings. I mean, people are just chronically overwhelmed. They're stressed out and that space is getting shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter and they can't build the space. But we have to do it. We just have to do it. We have to. It's. If we want well being, if we want good relationships, if we want to make good decisions, if we want to achieve our goals in life, we've got to take care of ourselves and other people. And I think that, you know, today we spoke a lot about the mindsets and that permission to feel the labeling of emotions. But there are strategies, the breathing work that is so important. Learning how to go from being a self critic to having some self compassion, knowing that it's okay to get help, have an emotional ally, I call it not someone who's going to tell you what to do, but someone that you have that psychological safety with, to just have a conversation.

Not indulge, but have a conversation.

Not indulge, but have the conversation. And the good emotional ally, what they're doing is they're providing support, but they're also helping you think through things through another lens. They're helping you reappraise or helping you shift your self talk.

Yes.

And then we gotta take care of Our bodies. I think people fail to understand the biology of regulation in terms of sleep, nutrition, and physical activity.

Yes. I mean, if you didn't work out consistently or do your martial arts or the movement that you enjoyed, if you got 20% less sleep than you normally get, and if you ate poorly, do you think you would have the ability to regulate your emotions?

No, 100% not.

And most of America is sick or obese or chronic stress or chronic illness.

Or have sleep deprivation. Yeah. A lot of parents going back to parenting for a minute. A lot of parents in my work and in my book, we talk about what does it mean to be the best version of yourself through emotion regulation. And people set goals. We help people set goals. Like, how do you want to be seen and talked about as a parent, as a leader, as a friend? I want to be more empathetic to my child. I want to be more patient with my child. And that parents set these goals and they're like, I got my patient's goal. And I'm like, how's it going for you? Well, this morning the kid was crying and screaming and I lost it. And I yelled at them and I sent him to their room. I'm like, you set the goal. What happened? And they say, well, this best self stuff doesn't work. I'm like, I promise you it works. I've taught it to millions of people. But let's look at the barrier to being your best self. Tell me about the night before. Tell me about the morning. Oh, I only got three hours sleep.

Yeah. Good luck. Good luck being your best self.

Exactly. You can't be. And so this is one. It's very interesting that we're talking about this because so many people come to me, like, just to not be stereotypical here, but I give this speech to about 1500 police officers who were not patient with me, and they're like, dude, what's the best strategy? And I'm like, I don't know, like self talk, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

I got, you know, under pressure. That's not the way it works. All of the strategies of emotion regulation work together.

Yeah.

And in certain context, with certain emotions, you know, with different people, you're going to use these strategies in different ways. And you got to be aware that you need strategies for your. For the barriers.

Yes.

And so that parent, like, you get more sleep, Guess what? Your fuse is going to be longer in the morning.

You have more space.

Exactly.

But if you're having sugar all day, you're going to be like, crashing and high and crashing and you have less space.

Exactly.

Get less sleep if you do all these. If you're not moving your body and you're just stuck all day in one place, you're not processing your emotions and processing your body also. So all these tools combined allow you to have more space to then see the emotions in yourself, see the emotions in another, and hopefully respond with curiosity, compassion, listening, asking questions, self and other, self and other and trying to find some type of resolution with the emotions rather than overindulgence, overreaction or stuffing of the emotions.

I mean, this is like you're going to come on the road with me.

Let's do it. Let's do it. I'm curious about co regulation.

Yeah.

If, if we grew up, if someone watching or listening grew up with a narcissistic parent, how do they learn to break the cycle when they've been gaslit most of their life as a child and regulate and co regulate with another? I mean, what do you, I mean obviously you shared a lot of this already, but how does someone who's experienced that as a child break the cycle? And it's like a, you have to make such a conscious decision. You have to say, I'm gonna, even though this wasn't fair and this probably happened in this parent and this parent, I need to be the one who's gonna break this cycle. Right. Is it at first of the decision of like I'm gonna be the one even though I. It's not fair.

I mean, I think you're getting to a really good point here. And this is a lot of people in our culture. One of my favorite stories of all time was a 94 year old man wrote me after reading my book and he said to me, you know, I'm a lawyer, I was successful, but I really was not a great parent, I was not a great husband, I worked all the time. And after reading your work, I realized how much better my life would have been and how much better of a parent I would have been. And I was blown away by this 94 year old guy writing me this email. And I wrote him back and I said, you know, thank you so much for writing me. And I'm just blown away that you're thinking about this. And he wrote me back and he goes, you know Mark, thank you for being my Uncle Marvin because tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life and I'm going to start using these skills now.

That's cool.

That was pretty cool.

That's really cool.

Yeah. A 94 year old, like stoic, you know, lawyer is saying, like, tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life that I can apply these skills. That was pretty mind blowing to me. And so if that person can do it, any of us can.

That's cool.

And awareness is the first step, just being aware. Like, and I, I ask people to be emotion scientists about their life.

Yes.

Like, that's my vision. Is everyone becomes an emotion scientist because that curiosity is my life working for me or is my life working against me? And if it's working against you, it doesn't have to because these are all learnable skills.

That's beautiful, Mark. Dealing with feeling. Use your emotions to create the life you want. I truly believe that everyone should get this book because I don't know a better skill than learning the art of emotional regulation, learning the tools of emotional intelligence. And like you said, like being a scientist of your own emotions. And then once you can learn yours, learning how to regulate with other people to navigate in the world. The key to success in life is relationships. And if you don't have a good relationship with yourself, you will not ultimately live a happy, successful life. And if you don't learn how to have relationships with others and understand their emotions, you will also struggle in life. But when you can learn to navigate and master these tools, which takes your whole life, it's not like you learn it and you're done.

You're going to live anyway.

You get to practice it constantly. You will only see your life get better and improve. So I want to acknowledge you, Mark, for having the curiosity as a young boy to reach out to your uncle and go down the journey of studying and trying to understand emotional intelligence when there really wasn't a lot of information, when therapy wasn't cool back then, when you were made fun of and kicked out of social circles because of choices you made. All these different things like knowledge, for staying in the emotion and allowing yourself to process and teach others because you've helped your own life. But now you've helped millions of people around the world with a lot of your work, your books, your students and I acknowledge you for the journey you're on of trying to make people understand it better. Which is probably the most complicated thing to understand is our own emotions and feelings. And learning how to heal and integrate the healing lessons is probably one of the most courageous things that any person can do for their own life. One of the hardest but most courageous things they can do. So I acknowledge you for everything you're doing. You're on instagram mark bracket mark.bracket mark brackett.com We've got the app how We Feel app, which is an award winning app that's helped millions of people improve their well being. And we've got the book dealing with feeling which is out right now that people can grab. Get a copy for a friend, a sibling, you know, whoever it may be, give a copy to your child, whatever it might be, and learn these tools and help someone else as well. I've got two final questions for you.

Okay.

This one is called the three Truths Hypothetical question. Imagine you get to live as long as you want, but it's the last day on earth for you, many years away. You've accomplished all of your dreams, you have all the relationships you want to experience, memories, fun, joy. But for whatever reason, on the last day, you have to take all of your work with you and we don't have access to your content anymore. This interview is gone, the books are gone, the app, we don't have access. But you get to leave behind three lessons to the world. That's all you get to leave behind or three Truths. What would those three truths be for you?

I have to say my first response is the world's chaos will worse than expect my return. But I stole that from my martial arts master. But I think the first is it goes back to permission to feel. Just give yourself and give everyone else permission to feel. I feel like that's at the heart of the work. I think the second is, is being other oriented, that life is about supporting other people and achieving their dreams. Yes. And the third, I think is, I don't know. My guess is. It's around freedom. It's just that. Life is about moving forward, not staying in the past. And while we're in dark places in our lives, those moments are impermanent. And relish the fear of impermanence because we don't have to be stuck, we can move forward.

That's beautiful. And final question, what's your definition of greatness?

I think my definition of greatness goes back to what I said, which is having an other orientation. I feel. I mean, and this is developmental for me, but I feel like my job now is to support other people in achieving their dreams. Yeah.

Mark, thanks for being here.

Appreciate you.

Amazing.

Our emotions have evolved with us as a human species to actually help us.

To communicate with others, but more importantly.

To help us to communicate with ourselves.

Yeah.

So we don't tend to feel strong.

Emotions about things we don't care about. You know, if you feel rage when.

You watch the news, it might be a.