The Science of Emotional Intelligence: How to Heal Trauma and Master Your Emotions

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And conditions apply here's the deal ninety percent of us report never having had any emotion education and 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 yeah.

Professor of psychology at yale university and the director of the yale center for emotional intelligence a guest today is doctor 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 guests 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 brought on elite athletes billionaires and people that have harmony in 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 thirty 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 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 thirty 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 twelve 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 it was like people were out of their minds oh yeah and so and i was going crazy myself really 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 it's hard and so i've done a lot of research in this space obviously and here's the deal ninety percent of us report never having had any emotion education it's probably more yeah i mean and seven percent 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 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 you 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 i don't 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 twenty five years of my life teaching this writing about it you know i have curriculum in schools around the world and five thousand schools and here i was you know like secretly crying in my room you know eating really unhealthy foods i was you know just take out 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 fifth of twenty twenty right before right before right before two weeks.

Turned into two years it turned into.

Eight months yeah yeah and so eighty one 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 making coffee and spending time with someone who's in your 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 every 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 look at her i'm like you know not tonight i'm not and it's like 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 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 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 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 blowup 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 yeah 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 like you're not this eighty one year old lady is sitting here like 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 she's not in her.

Home she's got a dog and a parrot we had to deal with it was nuts and and i think for me something that was a wake up call was having an other orientation what does that mean just it's not just about me yeah you know emotions are not just my emotions everybody's got emotions and i could 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 lewis i heard heard the news 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 if your coffee routine is displaced 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 or 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 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 intelligence 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 the.

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 got to 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.

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And what i've seen over and over again is that the students with the greatest kind of you know 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 ninety i mean upwards of eighty percent 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 at 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 you know having some gratitude like i'm actually doing pretty well here i'm at yale university yeah yeah yeah wow but the thing 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 yes usually because they're bullies however if we define success as having these 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 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 one hundred ceo's 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 getting 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 he's like look at my office you know you think i need emotional intelligence and the 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 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 it's 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 one hundred percent 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 correct and almost have a snapshot of their life 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 summarize 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 leader's skill at dealing with their own emotions but co regulating 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 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 are 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.

But 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 ten twenty fifty one hundred 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 thirteen 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 eight 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 year old scary it's scary and you don't they don't teach you how to to to regulate your own emotions when they're not regulating.

Theirs one hundred percent i mean we different family 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 so.

Yeah yeah i'm seven what do i.

Do with this exactly and my father was you know we call it today the toxically masculine tough guy so his mantra to me was son you go toughen up stop crying stop crying you know 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 personalities 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 scare him into being tough he didn't have the tools either you're looking at me right now i do have a fifth degree black belt i'm still not a tough guy it's like also what is that's a whole that's a whole nother podcast 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 took care of me unfortunately was a pedophile yeah and so for about five years i was abused and didn't say anything about it oh.

Yeah that happened to me as well when i was five father babysitter son and i've talked about it many times openly but it's for twenty five years i didn't tell a soul and that's where i felt someone was always abusing me you know in every environment in my life like if someone was taking advantage of me it was like i'm being abused yeah and for twenty five 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 twelve 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 you 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 bang 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 three no no.

The people who give us permission to feel what do you think are their top three traits.

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

Think about someone you know who just is that kind of person 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 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 just let me know you care what i think is so fascinating about that is that never do people say brilliant wise talented 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 i'm not sure how to get that one the second is fear fear of what that they're afraid of if i ask you how you're feeling you're going to say 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 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 you actually don't have to do that much other than be present and ask good questions 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.

The skills 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's 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 you know 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 kind of exhausting too for me right it's all hard for you and hard for me but it's more now it has been more it's still not that much 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 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.

Don'T try to fix it she doesn't want to believe me 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 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 twenty 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.

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It was tough because i was a precocious kid and at eleven 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 nineteen eighties and unfortunately we find that he had abused dozens of children 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 you know of 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 he was the first person who asked me questions like hey mark you know how you feeling and then he practiced 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 gonna do with my life i'm in therapy and all of a sudden it's nineteen ninety five and this book comes out called emotional intelligence and i see it on the COVID of time magazine and i'm like emotional intelligence i don't know what that is but that's exact 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 twenty 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 in 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 you know 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 marvin remember i have a phd in psychology remember i got a fifth degree black belt on the martial arts i spent thirty 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 you know 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 yeah 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 twenties was like 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 the 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 just in among college students where i work it's increased ten to fifteen percent a year over the last twenty years.

Every year more they just what is the language like they just say like i'm suffering or i feel like it's.

Stressed out depends where you're at in life i mean here's an interesting thing about you were talking about naming emotions so one of my favorite kind of things that i did in in my own courses you know i asked people when if you take my course it's also a research project yeah so you're filling out surveys every class and you're introspective blah blah blah and so eighty percent of my students said they were stressed now i they say they're stressed what am 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 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 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 get 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 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're going to 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 yes can you think about a couple of things each day you know for what you're grateful and that.

Will shift the envy yeah i mean your students are in the top one percent of one percent of students in the world at yale and yet they're still not happy one hundred percent isn't 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 or 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 pushed them prescribed them and it's.

So funny because i was not an ivy league student i went to public schools i went to public universities and i just think so many people think the only way my kid is going to be successful is to 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 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 you know have some sense of accomplishment in their life right yeah they don't want to be broke poor and sleeping on their parents you know 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 marvins or the aunt marias or whoever the person who gives you permission to feel so my research shows that people who grew up in those conditions fifteen to twenty percent 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 three percent 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 you love them non judgment non judgment.

Now here's an interesting i have to ask you this as something 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 four seven eight 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.

It seems like 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.

Doing 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 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 you know 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 you know 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 want you 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 you know i was supposed to go play with you but i couldn't do it what advice would you give him 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.

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 you made it so i can't go to my friend's house like i'm gonna 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 down regulate 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 emotions for example.

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 yeah because.

What you're doing is what ninety nine percent of people do assuming right you're 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 overwhelm 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 you know that old saying it's not what you say it's how you say it i think that goes for how we live too it's not just what we do it's the energy the intention the presence we bring and that's exactly what the range rover sport brings to the road the range rover sport is built to take on roads anywhere without any unnecessary details it combines a dynamic sporting personality with elegance and agility and delivers an instinctive drive its assertive stance hints at an equally refined driving performance defining true modern luxury the range rover sport features the latest innovations in comfort and convenience the cabin air purification system alongside the active noise cancellation creates a new level of quality comfort and control terrain response two offers seven terrain models to choose from fine tuning the vehicle for any challenging roads ahead a force inside and out the range rover sport is available with a choice of powerful engines including a plug in hybrid with an estimated range of forty eight miles build your range rover sport at range rover dot com ussport this show is sponsored by betterhelp you know the holidays can feel a lot like balancing family expectations travel work and trying to make everything perfect it's easy to forget to take care of yourself in the middle of it all i've been there and what i've learned is that when you don't make space to slow down it's hard to actually enjoy the moments that matter most that's why betterhelp is encouraging you to rewrite your traditions this season by making time for you incorporating therapy into your routine can help you pause reflect stay grounded during what can be joyful but sometimes hectic or even lonely time of the year the holidays look different for everyone maybe it's baking your great aunt's sweet potato pie or maybe it's starting something new like a quiet night with friends therapy can be one of those new traditions too better help matches you with a licensed therapist based on your goals and preferences and if it's not the right fit you can switch anytime this december start a new tradition by taking care of you our listeners get ten percent off at betterhelp dot com louis that's better h e l p dot com louis 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 exactly 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 one.

Hundred forty four 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 right anger is for example someone treating me unfairly so if you think of it 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 one hundred and nine 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 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 that relationship with self and understanding our own emotions and then learning how to navigate those in others that's 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 louis 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 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 remove the feeling right away i mean you might still be let down 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 achieving high power and i'm.

Like all right if you want to make more money yeah yeah do this.

Yeah but there are you know i i say how much of the science 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'm not 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 i agree this is why i think it's important to develop the emotional intelligence of your employees because right 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 there's just 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.

No 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 twenty five 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 going to get them to understand this in the next three to six months 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 one hundred percent well there you go.

And a side note on this something that 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 who i was it's a huge issue and i was very it's like an attack on yourself it's an.

Attack on me as a person 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 gotta sift you gotta 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 feed 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 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 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 you know that old saying it's not what you say it's how you say it i think that goes for how we live too it's not just what we do it's the energy the intention the presence we bring and that's exactly what the range rover sport brings to the road the range rover sport is built to take on roads anywhere without any unnecessary details it combines a dynamic sporting personality with elegance and agility and delivers an instinctive drive its assertive stance hints at an equally refined driving performance defining true modern luxury the range rover sport features the latest innovations in comfort and convenience the cabin air purification system alongside the active noise cancellation creates a new level of quality comfort and control terrain response two offers seven terrain models to choose from fine tuning the vehicle for any challenging roads ahead a forced inside and out the range rover sport is available with a choice of powerful engines including a plug in hybrid with an estimated range of forty eight miles build your range rover sport at range rover dot com ussport the holidays are back at starbucks so.

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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 you know 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 you're don't cry honey oh my gosh you know you know i would have parents call me and say like you're you're you've 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 right you know 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 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 of 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 i'm pretty good on stage but afterwards i'm going to want to do my own chill i'm not going to go to the big party and celebrate and drink alcohol and watch tv's and 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 a kind of an 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 thirty seconds to 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 is 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 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 so 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 then and when i get in that mark brackett 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 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 yeah yeah of course 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 you know that people go down that route of you know 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 maybe i'm 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 else said about me became my reality no pressure to parents no pressure to parents or teachers.

Or anyone peers 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 moron mommy's dumb you know daddy's whatever that's a big deal you gotta 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 you know 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 it's you got to 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 you know 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 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.

It'S i live by it the space.

Between that's right between stimulus and response there is space and that space in that space lies our power to choose our response and our response lies our growth and freedom 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 got to 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 twenty percent less sleep than you normally get and if you ate poorly do you think you would have the ability to regulate your emotions.

No one hundred percent 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 the 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 part that's just 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 fifteen hundred police officers who were not patient with me right right 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 contexts 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 you 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 in 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 you this is like you're gonna come on the road with me.

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 and 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 ninety four 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 ninety four 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 ninety four year old stoic lawyer is saying 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 do that's cool and awareness is the first step just being aware and i ask people to be emotion scientists about their life 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 acknowledge you 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 dot bracket mark brackett dot 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 to 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 worsen 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 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 i have a brand new book called make money easy and if you are looking to create more financial freedom in your life you want abundance in your life and you want to stop making money hard in your life but you want to make it easier you want to make it flow you want to feel abundant then make sure to go to make moneyeasybook dot com right now and get yourself a copy i really think this is going to help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward i hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links and if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally as well as ad free listening then make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel exclusively on apple podcasts share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on apple podcasts as well let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review i really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward and i want to remind you of no one has told you lately that you are loved you are worthy and you matter and now now it's time to go out there and do something great.

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