Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I made a huberman and on my professor of neurobiology and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine. My guests today is doctor mark bracket.

dr. Mark bracket is a professor of psychology at yale university and the director of the yale center for emotional intelligence. He is one of the world's foremost experts on emotions, meaning what emotions are and how they regulate our relationship to our self and others.

Today's discussion gets heavily into how we should think about our emotions and the emotional expressions of others, and when and how we should regulate those emotions. This is a very important aspect of our life, because, as we all know, emotions are present with us from the moment we are born until the moment we die. So much like having a body, we need to learn how to work with our emotions in order to have the best quality of life.

We all know that we are supposed to pay attention to our emotions, but at the same time, we are often told that we shouldn't take all live r emotion seriously, nor should we react all of our emotions with behaviors. And indeed, that is true. What's been lacking, however, and what dr.

Mark packet finally delivers to us is a road map to think about our emotions in a very structured way, and thereby to engage with our emotions, sometimes shift our emotions, and certainly to understand the emotional expressions of others in ways that best serve our quality of life. So today's discussion centers very heavily on scientific data that plays out in the real world that that we can all use. We talk about conflict resolution.

We talk about how to think about and work with emotions. We talk about bullying, both in children and in adults, how to deal with that sort of thing effectively. And we talk about emotional intelligence, which IT turns out can be increased at any stage of life.

So by the end of today's discussion, you will be armed with a tremendous amount of new knowledge and many new tools, many new protocols that you can immediately apply in your life in order to improve your relationship to yourself and to others. Before you begin, i'd like emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers at stanford. IT is, however, a part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

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I've been doing weekly therapy for well over thirty years. I consider doing regular therapy just as important as getting regular exercise. Now there essentially three things that great therapy provides. First of all, IT provides good report with somebody that you can trust and talk to about the issues that are most critical to you. Second of all, I can provide support in the form of emotional support or directed guidance.

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Edmonton as an in person event that offers science back tools, life fitness classes in a range of treatments and protocols to optimize your physical and your mental health. I'll be giving a keynote talk with no other than doctor Gabriel line on saturday. Some of you may know she's a former guest on the huberman lab podcast. And as a terrific podcast of her own, that's going to be on november second. And we will discuss all things neuroscience and neuroplasticity will talk about some of the benefits and protocols related to cognition and mood and much more.

Also presenting you demonic are other excEllent scientist and clinton who have appeared on the huberman lab podcast, including doctors say are godfried doctors at every night and doctor Robin carhart Harris, along with nearly seventy other experts, to see the full lineup of speakers and topics and to register, visit ude Monica dot net, spelled E U D E M O N I A dot net. It's sure to be a horrific gathering, and I hope to see you there. And now for my discussion with doctor mark bracket. Doctor mark bracket.

welcome. Thank you. Great to be here.

I'm excited to talk you today about many things related to emotions. We hear the word emotions, and we have all sorts of ideas about what they are, what they aren't. We also hear about emotional intelligence quite a lot these days.

And I have a feeling that the way it's discussed is often not the way IT really is. So they just kick things off. Could you clarify for me, for everyone, what is emotional intelligence? What is IT pretend to? And then maybe we can use that as a way to drill into the deeper question of what are emotions? sure.

I think at the simplest level is how we reason with and about our emotions and feelings. That's like the simple definition. The way I talk about IT is as a set of skills, and we use the acronym ruler to describe those skills.

The first is recognizing emotions. I'm trying to read your facial expression right now. Are you interested? Are you bored already? And trying to understand emotions where they coming from? Like, why am I feeling this way? What's the consequence of that feeling? The third is labelling emotions.

So being precise with the words that we use to describe our feelings. The fourth is expressing emotions, knowing how, and went to express emotions with different people across context and culture. And then the big one is the final r, which is regulating emotions. What of the strategies we use to help us deal with everyday emotions?

So if I were to take an emotional intelligence test, would you have me looking at pictures of facial expressions? Would you have me reading paragraphs about emotional exchanges, engaging who felt what and why and how that sort of thing?

If you were to take a test from, like, twenty years ago, yes, we try to be a little bit more innovative now in our measures of the skills. So for example, I just finished with the band colleagues publishing a test of emotion perception but is not static images. It's video clips um Better around three to four seconds that show subtle emotions. Uh it's about vocal tone, it's about body language. And we're trying to get people to um accurately kind of label these emotions in bases badin voice.

When I think about most uses of the words emotional intelligence, IT seems to corporate again in a very nonscientific way, seems to collate with one's ability to tolerate others emotions and make sense of the emotions of others.

For instance, i've heard IT said before not about me that so and so has high emotional intelligence, because in the presence of their child or someone else is kid reacting in a certain way they were able to see oh they just feel blank and therefore they are screaming as opposed to the falling to a um you know a broad binning of what they were observing and saying, oh gonna say kid is a bad for instance, you're describing emotional intelligence as a self perception as well. yes. And so is our task. Therefore, what to do the equivalent of what, in my little anecdote, this other person was doing to be able to parse one's own emotions in a fine enough way to understand the experience and kind of a third person way that one can regulate their behavior, what they say, how they act um how much is recognition of others emotions and understanding of those, as opposed to what is recognition and understanding of their own emotions factory into this thing that we call emotional intelligence .

so the whole service skills are intra and into personnel that's really important is about self and others always. For example, right now we are correct late each other's emotions, right? Our facial expressions are vocal tones.

We're influencing how we each other, how we will um when you think about the recognition peace, it'll just start there where there is self awareness like mark, how are you feeling right now? And i'm having mixed emotions, right? This is a great podcast.

I wanted be articular. You know, i'm excited, but i'm a little overwhelmed because I got so much I want to share, but I know how much I want to share. So there's like all that awareness of my emotion.

Sometimes I have a language for that. Sometimes I don't like any of us. And that's why IT starts off with kind of just a general awareness.

Like, am I pleasant? Am I unpleasant? Do I have a lot of energy? Or do I feel depleted? And we call that in your core effect? And then I could start asking myself questions like, well, what he is doing right now? I'm mark.

Well, i'm sitting across from Andrew. Being interviewed. okay.

Well, how is that? What comes up for you with that? And then I try to label that feeling.

So that's like the r the u and the l of emotional intelligence for the self. And i'm doing the same thing for you. I'm looking at your facial expression, your body language of listening to you. I'm trying to understand if I say something that you shift and i'm trying to put language to IT so .

itself and other. So given that we're both scientists interested in emotions, um you're the expert also just the student today, I think it's worth pointing out to people that there isn't one location in the brain that govern this complex process that you just described as a network wide phenomenon. But you did mention the body, you you mention feeling.

You know how is one feeling both in brain and body? To what extent does somebody who has high emotional intelligence have more or less body awareness or synthetic awareness, as opposed to somebody who's cloning in their head? Put differently, can somebody who is very much in their head, you, as very poor body awareness, have high emotional intelligence?

Well, I think another big deal about a most intelligence that we'd like to think of IT as or people think of IT as this construct. I don't think that's the best way to look at that. I think it's much more interesting to look at IT as a set of discrete skills that come together.

They're not that highly correlated. And so you know it's I really like to think of them as emotional skills and that within the r, the u the L E and the r that I described, there are sub skills. And so part of what you're talking about is the body awareness.

Some people are more cognitive, you know, they're just very language oriented. Some people, you know, a lot of therapist talking about some ata sensory things, all good. I think at the end of, you know, this is why I teach the stuff, is that we have to know how we feel. We've got to know, we want to do with those feelings, and we have to know how the people we live with and love and work with, and teach how they feel to. And so we need language in the end.

some years ago, I went to this course, was broadly could be described as a personal development. IT was interesting. He was grounded in science and psychology.

And each day would start with going around. The circle is typically has done with these things. And you'd have to say how you feel, but you couldn't use evaluation.

You couldn't say good or bad or so. So and I found IT very difficult. I found IT difficult for a number of reasons.

First of all, I don't think I was ever trained to use specific language for my feelings. In fact, I don't think I was ever trained to understand what feelings were. In fact, I know neuroscientists and psychologists are still trying to figure out what feelings and emotions really are.

So couple of questions. When IT comes to using language to describe our emotions, how important you feel IT is to have a broad buffet of options. A previous guest on this podcast list film, berta, I talked about this a bit, and SHE mentioned that in some cultures there's a very specific language for specific emotions. In fact, there's even a word to describe the feeling of sadness one has in a particular culture after getting a really bad haircut. Yeah, which is incredible when one thinks about.

we all know what that feels like.

We know what that feels like, right? But there isn't, to my knowledge, work word for that in the english language. I mean, i'm sure there's a curse word word in the language not necessary for that specific feeling um or unique to that specific feeling.

So what is the relationship between language labels and emotion? And I asked that as a way to kind of wedge into the ruler approach. Well, because as you pointed out, the one recognizes understand labels and but the label is central literally to the a ruler approach.

IT is, yeah. So I like i'm very similar to this in terms of there are emotion concepts or categories. Well, let's use the anger category.

If you only have one word for anger, that means all you know is there's one form of of anger. But if you start teaching people, well, there are others words that we can do is like peeved, irritated, angry, enraged, livid. And you have rich conversations, which is what I do in schools with kids and teachers themselves.

Like what is when you're feeling paved? Like what? What are the things that make you feel peeved versus the things that make you feel enraged?

What does IT feel like in your body when you're feeling that way? Granted that everybody feels things differently in their bodies, that really doesn't matter. What matters is that we have a common language and a common understanding of what these emotions are because othe wise, we can communicate.

You know, a i'm really like this is a big deal for me in terms of uh, having a common language within a community to talk about emotion because you right now, right where in a crisis of anxiety, i'm not one hundred percent bought into that. I think that people use the word anxiety um improperly. Um anxiety is about uncertainty about the future.

If we're going to define IT, it's different than stress. You know there's different forms to stress as you know. But the distress right is usually when you have too many demands and not love resources, which is different than when you're overwhelmed, right, which is my emotion of the year, which is on just saturday ated.

Like what's kind of been figured, what's going anymore, which is also different from fear, and that we call that emotion differentiation, or granularity people called, they are slightly different. The different tian is like between emotions, and the granular might be within the emotion but from my work um just go on about this for a moment. The best example have they do a lot of corporate training.

And so i'm in a room filled with lawyers or executives and i'm you asked them how they feeling. Nobody y's really sure how they are feeling like you were saying. And then i'll do these little kind of guises with them.

Tell me the difference. You got three minutes in a group, anxiety, stress, pressure, fear and they come back and the the number one responses, they are all the same. And I like really taking on a few minutes, like try to, like just try to define them.

They can't even define them. They say things like, you know, one is internal, one is external. One is, you know, what is higher energy and lower energy? And like, I I get that, but how do what what do this concept mean to you? What that mean to anyhow? Um finally we get to like the definitions and then I say, you know who cares? Like why am I asking you to like understand these differences?

Go back to your groups and talk about and then after like this is like a forty five minute, like I thought this going to be like a two minute activity IT turns into like a forty five minutes to an hour exercise because they finally realized, oh yeah. So if i'm anxious, because i'm worrying about the future, you know maybe the breathing exercise is not going to be as helpful um because maybe I need a cogging of strategy to say, you know mark, stop worrying about the stock market. Mark, stop worrying about that.

The university closed down because they depend them. You got no control over the university y's decisions. And so helping people make connections between the feeling and the reason for the feeling, from my perspective, has been very helpful to help them learn how to regulate the emotion.

So connecting the feeling and the reason for the feeling correct as supposed to just labelling the .

year yeah you need to know why it's why the why that you really have to deal with.

How do you feel about genes from everything you're saying? They seem like more than benign to me. Yeah I mean, I could imagine that the emotion fiction of culture as I refer to IT, I don't think that's a real word, sorry, is now set up a wake pedia of age tomorrow.

And modification um is a serious problem because it's what we call in science, too much lumping in size lumbers and split ters, right? Both can have fabulous careers. But if you lump too much or split too much, you create more confusion than you often create problems. And I just see emerging as lumping this incredible set of different continuations within us that we call emotions is to literally small icon, and I can imagine, would lead to all sorts of problems, not just in communication, but in understanding our own emotions. Put differently, do you think that the use of emogene has degraded our level of emotional intelligence in processing?

I'm going haven't done the research, but from my perspective it's not helpful because the goal is to get granular. Think about the difference. You know, i'm going to quiz you right now, but anger and disappointment, do you know ninety five percent of the people that I asked to find those .

two things cannot do IT. Ah I mean, after say you are familiar with both of those feelings, I know they're different sense they're difference. I but the disappointment peace um yet could be directed out order in where i'd have to watch systematically through until I found a violation of one or the other. So where an example applied to one enough the other and would take me a few minutes long longer than .

I want this audience staff to yes, so but you have a growth .

minds so you're looking .

but the you know so disappointment i'm in expections everything is like IT IT just didn't work out anger, perceived injustice. And that's a really important distinction because if you're a parent or someone at work and someone is like yelling and screaming, versely be grossly make mistakes in terms of labelling emotion from behavior. We got to to throw that out.

There is no correlation really between behavior and emotion. I can stop my feet, you know, as a boy, because i'm feeling sad just because it's more culturally acceptable for me to stop them to cry. And so why you so angry? Maybe i'm feeling shame, which is my experience.

And I was yelling and screaming as a kid because I was being bullied so much. And then my mother would be like, you know, who do you think you are talking to me that way? And then my father was say, I got to your room.

And I feel like, is anybody reading my, you know, emotions probably asking me how i'm feeling because you would know that i'm acting out because of fear and shame never happened, because of variety of reasons of triggers. My parents and I didn't have such high emotional intelligence. They love me, just didn't have high emotional intelligence.

And so going back to the anger, disappointment, one unexpecting tions versus perceived injustice. And so when you think about IT in terms of the strategy, like for example, um my other career just seen that was as a martial large teacher. So have a fifteen black belt in a korean morning called hopkinton o so this podcast doesn't go so well.

Um anyhow the um you know I was a awkward kid handle you know very insecure low of the steam got into the martial arts. I thought i'm going to get my yellow bet and i'm going to feel tough and proud filled my freak in ella about test I mean, thirteen years old he couldn't imagine like is nothing worse for a thirteen year old kid who is feeling shame in being bully to failed a yellow about test. So what do I do? I go home.

I hate kari. I'm never going back to kari. Everybody's and abroad.

I'm getting yelled and i'm paying for your kari. You're going back in whatever. And the truth was like, let's think about that for minute.

So I go to take a test and i've got to do my blocks and my kicks, you know, my punches, I know this five kicks, five punches. And let's say I do them the best I can. But the same say, just says, you know, mark, just not good enough and you're not ready yet.

That's legitimate disappointment. I expected to pass. I didn't pass. I feel very disappointed. So this strategy for that is what like twitter, help show me what I have to do Better. On the other hand, let's say, which was true for me, that some of the kids who were the bullies in my middle school also took quality and let's imagine they're watching me take my test and they are giving me some dirty looks because they're onna threaten me in which happened, you know you know, getting changed going, you know, wait to see what is going to be like for you tomorrow the way to school now how my feeling terrorized, fearful and I thought my test because of that so you can see how I can show up with a particular behavior um people are attributing emotion to me. They're labelling my emotions for me because they don't have the skill to deactivate as a parent or a teacher or partner to be present to help me understand my experience, to then label my experience understand where it's coming from and then strategy accordingly.

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You said that disappointment is when one does everything essentially correctly meaning gave the as much effort as they could have said, and IT didn't work out versus anger, which is perceived injustice yeah would you say that your response to not getting your yellow belt then because as a first Green, yes, black belt now clearly you got that yellow belt eventually I want to hear that part of the stories too um that you are experiencing anger in this case. Could we even call IT inappropriate anger simply inappropriate? Because what you really needed to understand was this notion of disappointment. But no one had taught IT to you.

I think what you're getting IT though, is this like not knowing how you're feeling because I was never taught language right and a cabinet experience that is now could be many feelings at once which is could be disappointment, could be anger, could be embarrassment um but you got unpack the situation, you know what was the real event that happened? What really happened in that moment.

And so if I were legitimate like legitimate test, and I just know I blocked the punch and I just didn't have the strength of blocked, like to really stand firm, it's disappointment. It's like it's sun. You know, like you thought your blocks were strong.

Unfortunately, you need some work. Let's practice every day after school together, we're going to get these blocks down so you can get that yellow about test. There's no other reason if it's because the bullies are staring at me and i'm not capable of dealing with those piercy eyes that are at me and i'm feeling so anxious over well, I can't block because i'm just break out.

That's a whole other story. Do you see how like a parent or a teacher would have to really differently their support, but you have to really get at the experience, which means we have to have relationships that are trustworthy, loving, caring with all people because otherwise we don't build that connections to really understand how people think. We just take the kind of behavior like why you're behaving that way, you know, go to your room or you know just practice now like i've been bullied at school, another bully is threatened me like that serious stuff that need to be taken care .

of yeah online eo, js and you downward facing thumbs verses upward facing thumbs and kind of thing and vit emerging and things like that, a mind blown that i'm starting to realize that these may be doing far more harm than we realize. Um yeah I think it's fun.

you know and maybe it's just if going to just use IT for fun, not a problem if we're going to use that to really communicate not so grain. I'm thinking .

of instances where people are just using these with the intention of expressing their like dislike of something, but that the people on the receiving end experiences a lot of self self criticism is a consequence. Mostly kids, but adults too. And I know some adults that really can't handle somebody commenting on their instagram post like big l or yeah like it's devastating .

for the .

pope for that is kind of thing. It's also interesting because I see IT even in the academic community, especially on twitter x yeah where I know that um sure people reject each other other's papers, critick each other other's papers, but they do that with a degree of um intellectual nuance that um transmitted a sense of care, right?

If scientists really care, they're going to do a careful review as much as we would all love that this is a perfect paper that's IT. When somebody critique something that we do with um with an attention to detail provided, it's fair. We we feel cared for. They care for the work and we care for the work. And so there there's a relationship there, even if it's an anonymous review.

But i'm shocked to see how sciences c colleagues i've known for decades really how they can put themselves online like it's they'll swear they're come out, you know they won't bother to punctuate things that they're just a behave in in a very what seems to be a very activated way, not all of them, of course, but it's been very interesting the words that come to mind, or I feel like online, especially on social media, the kids are acting like adults and the adults are acting like children. And so there seems to be a kind of regression toward what i'm calling the a modification or the kind of high amplitude expression with um with blunt tools. I don't know what that is because I know these people the reason i'm using the academic community as an example, by the way, to cost some of these people their jobs, chairs of departments not it's dana, unfortunately but it's kind of striking to me the way that when we remove the face to face connection, when um people will behave that way.

And I use the parallel example of anonymous review because they are its anonymous. So in theory, they could behave however they want. But there's an adequate so IT seems like online adequate is very deprived of many of the important features that were starting to you're starting to lay .

out for us here an animated, you know, causes chAllenges. It's funny because I give a speech at twitter now known as x about five years ago and um and had analyzed quite a lot of data. IT was actually the year that Mariah, Harry saying and I got messed up and I just I was like the week before I was going in january, he was like, new year.

And I just was curious, and because I really was a mess up and I said, what how are people going to respond? And IT was ninety nine point nine nine percent ripping. This 还没 diver to shreds。

So I don't recall this incident. So she's obviously phenomenally .

talented but he made him an error there and SHE just basically like the mike wasn't working the way he wanted IT to work and she's like i'm at here just like i'm not singing and you should have seen how people just I mean, millions and millions and millions of of comments again, people, IT was really disgusting.

And i've got really curious, like, what about things like gossip, like one fifteen gram awards, like this bus, really thing for you, maybe one post like that. And so he does make you wonder about a the type of person who is interested in commenting. Like we may have a bias there.

I do. I do think we have a bias there. You know, people who you know, they feel protected by, you know something. If it's you a more famous person in politics, obviously people are very clear how they feel.

Politicians sort of open themselves up .

to public facing .

people in general. I've heard open themselves yeah. But politicians in particular, I think we give we sort give the general public capacity to say almost anything about them. But it's it's not pretty.

It's not pretty and it's not emotional intelligence to go back to the concept, right? It's like what you're goal here. I have just asked people that like, like, what are you getting out of being nasty?

I perceive IT as evacuated. I I look at that and I think. Cash, what they must feel inside to be able to say those things can't be good, but maybe IT feels good to them. I don't know. I I don't think i've ever made a negative comment. If I have um someone can call me out on IT, I hopefully IT was in sarcasm with a friend yeah as the target um and they were okay with that are happy with IT. But I don't know what internal emotional or psychological state IT would take to go say something cool to .

somebody online in my earlier research um with facebook we we analyze millions and millions of posts and you know people can be intentionally mean herself, just people want to read people the threads and they want to instill fear um and you it's very hard to disentangle that too, just to be honest.

So like what we found in our research was that I could say, if you like you, Andrews, bring a black shirt, you'll see that I can say like nice shirt and IT might mean nice shirt or might mean i'm making one of your shirt and I just hard like that. That's the problem. You know what social media terms of posts we don't really know, because the person who is receiving IT has a story, right?

That was one chAllenge we found around, like getting post taken down, was that I was hard to have an objective criterion of what was you painful to a person, which is why what we try to do was helped the person who was receiving the content communicate in a way with the person who posted the content to get them to take IT down. And we found was that I actually worked really well. If you taught a teenager, for example, I say, hey, you know, hey, Andrew, like that comment you made really was hurtful.

Would you please take IT down? We were more likely to get people to take you down. And what we found, an experimental research, was that if we just let people go you know on their own devices um intended to be more retaliatory like who I actually think you are, you know you went to fight back, you know and that did not motivate the person to take IT down. So even meeting gross behavior with compassion can be helpful.

Can we provide a counter example for the anger versus disappointment that's on the positive violence a side? Um what's a positive that of feelings that people often conflict like happiness .

and contentment?

Yeah, that's a tough one. I'm getting up. Good thing. I came.

Exec initiated.

Yeah, okay.

yeah, this is, you know, this is why I do what I do. Yeah, so so I am good at this.

Yeah yes.

you are. You know, when you think about happiness, you it's usually about, you know, when you're achieving something, right? You're i'm going be when um you know this will bring me happiness.

Contentment is the opposite. Contentment is everything is just great. As IT is, I feel complete. I have enough.

And part of my argument against the happiness research is that we don't spend enough time helping people strive for contentment and we push people destroy for happiness, which there's research to show, you know, backfires, you know, you're waking up everyday thing, what am I going to be happy? What am I going be happy? Chances are not going to work out a lot. And that kind of backfires to create more despair .

starting to up. But I as soon as you described content in that way, and thank you for passing those too, very useful to me. As soon as you describe contentment that way, I imagine waking up. And rather than thinking about what needs to be done in the things I want to achieve, what I want to achieve, they bring me joy, yeah, thrown on a third where they are just confused myself. This notion of contentment way that you described, I could see, might lead me to pay attention to how good IT feels to have gotten some sleep to um sleep almost night night but what privilege that is um and to you know maybe feel the comfort of the the comforter and in the matters for a moment before barging into the day yeah to chase happiness says that were exactly I .

think you know the idea that we have to be happy all the time is also ridiculous. I mean, i'm an erotic professor like i'm never happy, you know you know it's it's tough and so and also like I don't know about you, but given that my disposition effect term um you know is more on the lower energy, kind of contented with little aniele. Um when i'm around the people who are like high energy and pleasant all the time, I have a difficult time. You know it's like because .

you somehow feel like you're not living up to some time .

and I just feel like overwhelmed and mother by IT, you know, it's like stopping. So happy all this.

Here's where I get to appropriately make a joke about because before we started with time at east coast schools versus west go schools, like maybe you come west for and um and that will change or maybe your right where you belong there at the also phenomenon university that is. But anyway, that's kind of inside the stuff. East coastal versys amazing middleston versys amazing.

West coast human versa is amazing. Different perceived temperament, but for sure. And look at the walking speeds, for instance, not just the weather, but yeah, you raise a very important point.

We have a member of our podcast team that is like always in a great mood. He's always in a great mood. And IT is for me a reminder to be in a Better mood, not somebody that I would say gets i'm not moody.

I don't change moods quickly, but I wouldn't say that my disposition is to be like tiger like and just have the all the time. But his energy around that doesn't drain me. It's IT, but IT makes me wish I was him.

That's that's okay. That's you. You know, I mean, like the part of I mean, part of being emotional, intelligent with colleagues, romantic partners with children, whoever is picking up on that, like now that I know that about you, IT makes me think differently about you in terms of what your needs are.

That's emotional intelligence. And for me, I am like, I wake up every morning like having an accidentially crisis. And like, i'm doing my life.

And you, what am I doing this today for? And I got to publish this paper, got to finish my book. I've got run my team like what I want to do.

And you know that i'm doing IT. And then i'm like what i'm doing one thing. I think I should be doing the other thing, this is just who I am and it's i've tried everything and this is my Operating system. And more aware, like I like when I was, am working on another book and as I was working on a in a chapter and like I think about the next chapter and I started, like mark, give yourself permission to be with this weekend chapter. It's okay like you can focus on one thing and not worry about the future and I had literally kind of do that for myself.

That's that's how I am, you know and so knowing that about myself is useful because um IT helps me find the strategy that work for me and going back to the happiness thing, it's because i'm also introverted and so when i'm around extroverted a lot i'm drained know I just like after something like this is an intense conversation, i'm not going to go to a sports bar, you know like have a beer and like watched the game. I would never do that anyway. But anyway, that's just that. My thing you know, like that would make me, I would like my brain would be bert, like my dream would be to leave here, go take a high yoga class and take a walk of a glass wine, maybe by yourself with a friend. And then in the day.

all those things are readily available. Within one a mile of here, we can point you in the right direction. That sounds lovely.

The introversion extroversion bit is going to break up people's years. That certainly did mine. I like time alone. I also like time alone in the presence of many people. In fact, I get my best work done always, either alone .

in nature .

or in manhattan, where there people around me. But i'm completely isolated.

I love that too.

So um how should we think about introversion and extroversion? These things get thrown around so much in popular culture. Are there some solid scientific studies that support that introversion can best be defined as blank and extroversion as blank? And i'm guessing there's arrange that it's gotto be on a continue IT .

can't be two bins. I mean, for some people it's very clear, you know, they are a clear treated introvert and for some people, they just like endlessly extrovert matter. They wake up wanting to be with people.

They the end of the day, they want to go out with people more. And so what researchers, for example, with creative people is they tend to be both. They tend to be high introverts and high extroverts, which is interesting, right? They're introverts when they're doing their art and they're extroverts when they're out.

They're selling their art, which is hard for some artists, right? Because a lot of artists are kind of introspective and their creative types, but they really struggle with getting out there and being that extravert like, look at my art. And so you're you're the lucky artist if you k are traded in both directions.

Um I think the easiest way to think about IT is just as it's a proclivity, right it's a procurement to um how you want to use your energy. And um the interviewer is more container you know wants a container energy. Um they want to um you know be in small groups.

They want kind of less fanatic environments and extravert es has a propriety for you know more sensation seeking, you know larger social groups. And again, it's a preference. I would say i'm an introvert with pretty good social skills like I can appeared to be extradited and most people think i'm outgoing and I was like, I don't even like people that .

you seen very out .

going yeah i'm not you know it's not it's my my natural like if I am at a party I struggle with like like what what i'm going to do here when you .

say you don't necessarily like people and much, I realized your joking but and I was just going to make sure to ask because I can't presume that doesn't mean that you dislike people. It's just that being in the presence of a lot of people doesn't draw you out to want to be closer to get to know all these people simply because they're there. Where as an extrovert seems to really like forming in um engaging a new new relationships or relationships or relationships relating .

exactly if you're like running a campaign to run for, you know mayor of your town, like you're you want to hire an extravert P R person, right? An extravert person do marketing because they're like going to be out there really banging on the doors, very comfortable talking to people, right? The introvert is going to be Better at doing the accounting, you know, and doing the planning.

And we've done this research actually even fun with my students. I would have them take their um take measures of their valid measures of introversion and introversion. I would score them into groups like that, really extravert group and the really introverted group.

And I have them plan a party, just feel plan a party. And the group of extravert is bonfires. There's beer there, loud music on the beach. And the introverts are like, we have to make sure we have good napkins we wanted we're going to have four people you know, it's onna be quiet music that's just, you know how we're built. Interesting when I .

think of throwing a great party and I throwing a few, when I like to think we're great parties, IT involves inviting a bunch of people over and then being able to stand back from a lot of IT and not have to participate in all of IT. I just like seeing friends that didn't know each other start to interact.

That's cool.

That's fun for me. And then if I have to communicate directly with too many people, the party to definitely feel drained. I'm known to retreat to a room and take an apple.

yes. So maybe you are more interpreted.

Yeah I think so. Rick rubin, whose world renowned for his creative insights and um and creativity and for being rich um I think once said on a podcast perhaps or maybe he said this to me um that tom petty was the sort of person that basically didn't do anything besides write music and read books and interact with the small number people in his inner circle and the idea of leaving the house was just completely overwhelming to him now of course, people are always approaching him.

But like really, really extreme introvert, whether rick as described, I want any named here, other famous people, musicians and otherwise, that go out specifically to try and get the attention of fame. yeah. And if they don't, they feel absolutely isolated. Make sense.

even though they .

have people in their private life is like IT becomes an extra version requirement. I would imagine life as much harder for the extrovert in the long run.

because verse tend to do you know have a little bit more success um because they're more willing to get out there and ask for IT. You know they get higher. They get raises more quickly.

I see and you know in my work in schools, you know I always. Ask teachers to pay attention to the personality of their students, because the introvert has a lot of great ideas that just not dying to raise their hand and get the attention. So don't just call the kids who raise in their hands because you are missing out on getting some great information.

In that case, do you cold call on people? Whenever I am teaching? I I somewhat reluctant to cold call on people because I I recall you can be terrifying when something you're sitting there are taking notes, trying to you organize your thoughts around the material and then suddenly, you know the whole room looking so I mean.

I set expectations you know around that and because i'm really particular about that because you know IT drives me crazy when the talk of extrovert t is always, you know getting there thing said, um I think this ways is good instruction practices that can help with that. One thing i'm thinking about, though, this intersection of personality and emotional intelligence IT just kind of brought that up for me, which is, and people confuse us a lot.

So for example, I even confused that when I was Younger, before I studied IT, because i'm high also in neuroticism, meaning I am more material in terms of I worry about things and i'm fine that I worry again. I just that I am and I just always assumed that someone who is high in narotics m or you know more, if they said kind of volatile emotionally, that was this low emotional intelligence because like, how could you be emotional intelligent if you're emotionally volatile? That is all this research and found this pretty much no correlation between personality traits and emotional intelligence.

And why is that? What will think about IT if you are someone who is more even killed, maybe you don't even have that much of an opportunity to regulate your emotions, right? But then if you get like triggered, you've never had experience.

So you have it's actually harder for you. Someone like me, i'm practicing IT all the time. I almost like i'm in a bad mood.

I got to give a meeting. I'm like ira able like to give a presentation. So i'm like constantly like figure how to deal with my emotions. And um and that's why there is there are separate concepts and in addition to IT, just to build on this, knowing your personality traits can be extraordinary helpful for choosing the best strategies to regulate your emotions.

Why is that? I was traveling in australia recently and I gave this speech to a group of people, the person who was the person in charge of the speech. I was about an hour from melbourne and um I took the train who have preferred to stay in the city to the train that was planning. I had bought my train ticket back the convener said, you know, mark, I just really would love to be with you and can we just can I drive you back to your hotel and i'm thinking to myself like, that is worst thing you could ever ask me.

Then on the wrong side.

the road, yeah. And I had my train ticket. I really IT was a full day of presentations and stuff.

I really wanted that to be myself, to do compress. But I felt bad. And I said, sure, the guy talk to me for the an hour, like you just none stop. Talk to me. I got back tomorrow.

Today I was like, I am going to have a nervous break like, I mean, another data recover because and I just annoyed me about myself not practicing, you know, what I teach, which was mark know myself, your dreamed people like you IT was my insecurity of just saying, you know, I really appreciate you. One is to dry me back. But, you know, I really have a lot to do tomorrow.

I need to rest my voice. I need to decent prep instead. I just SAT there like, you know, shaking and like, not having, like, just when crazy. So do you see what i'm getting up? Like really knowing yourself in terms of, like, what drives you and what you you know, your personal iterate, just introversion extraversion alone and how that relates to, like, your selection of strategies is so important.

super important. And by the way, my joke about driving on the wrong side of the road, I do realized that we drive on the wrong side. Vote for australians and those in the U.

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Text message is an interesting example of communication that now that is um defending on how many people have access your phone number um can either feel like a wonderful source of filling the gaps you know on trains and while in transit and while walking to the car perhaps hope fully not while driving although people seem to do that and yet for the introvert I can imagine that you might feel in on dating I might feel of um overwhelming um how do you feel about text messages because it's just yet another form of communication I access for a very particular reason um I could imagine that extra verts love to text message. They love to receive and send text messages that they can't stand a moment of downtime before boarding a plane. They're excited that there is yet another form of communication at all hours of the day and night.

Where's introverts would be less excited to text message. I also asked this in part um because I want to protect the variable latency to respond to text, the option that i've tried to exercise in my life. But that seems doesn't really seem to work.

I think most people assume, no, I walked up to you and I say hello and you wait ten minutes to say hello bad. I'll first think you're a little bit rude and then think you're a little strange as if I text you hello and I don't hear back right away. I might think you're busy.

There's some you there's some bigger room for interpretation. But I think what i'm really getting at here is do we tend to project the same latency expectation on text that we ourselves embrace? This seems like an important source of um potential missing unica misunderstanding and maybe worse.

Yeah I mean, certainly you could imagine also though that the interviewer might be more comfortable texting because it's less stimulation. So I could work I think I could work in both directions. Um I think the problem with text messaging is that is decreasing emotional intelligence because you really can't communicate the same way through a text message.

Thank you. And yes.

i'm happy to say .

time no because I I mean I feel this wash like relief phenoms looking for the appropriate word because i'm talking to you. So I feel like have to use the exact appropriate word. I feel I feel the mancipation because I also feel that as texting has become more routine and has crossed a number of different lines of formality and and informality, right, not just with family members, but with coworkers and people, we do and don't know and just mad. And you've known for ages you know the jargon that we use with one group is different than the jargon we use with another. Um I feel that testing in general has really degraded our ability to communicate verbally and in writing elsewhere.

There's good research on even like teens right now prefer the tax and to be face to face not helpful to building like good relation.

I forgive me interact. I have no idea what it's like to be a teenager in twenty twenty four so I ve caught myself. I have no place saying weird because there were things that I was doing as a teenager that i'm sure adults were like that. So I take that back.

but about how disconnected and alienated and lonely people feel these days. That's not necessarily gonna help make things Better. I have an example, you, when my father passed away a number of years ago, I I got all these text messages, and so sorry for your laws. I'm so sorry for your laws.

And so from people who I thought were really good friends of mine, like twenty thirty year friends, i'm like you're not going to pick up the phone and like listen to my voice and asked me like, what can I do to support you right now? And as it's so strong and actually one of my closest friends you know didn't even text me, you text with my assistant and said, please go into Marks office and tell him that I love him. And like, this is really weird.

Like we need, like, I picked up the family. Like, what does what is happening right now? And you know, people have preconceived notions.

Maybe he thought I was overwhelmed and devastated and needed space, but at the same time, like make a phone call, leave me a voice message and give me, you know, some options. I have one friend. She's like, mark. I know you going through a lot right now.

I just want you to know, like, if you want to talk anytime you want to call me, call me if you want to text, text if you want me to come out and stay with you for a couple of days on there, that's an awesome friend. Yeah, that was like, that was exactly what I needed to hear. I wanted you know someone to offer, provide options or just do um but where we're so hesitant these days, it's kind of scary to me and IT makes me fearful about the future of our relationships in general.

I think this is such an important topic um I think because texting is so common and has been used to um you know communicate so many different forms of human emotion in this broadband format. Mean, how much can you really put into a text? I I have some friends and good voice to put and you can voice text.

which is like it's like .

right right as long and sometimes all the issues with that too, I feel like it's it's enriched compared to texting unless the text is carefully um right now punctuated I mean we can see the care that people put into certain texts, emails that they tip and most people, including myself down right texting is a short form yeah communication audio notes, voice memos seemed like a step up. I think what this is probably done is that it's made the phone call or the goodness, the hand written card or letter is going to raise that to the pinna of Carrier of expression completely.

And by the way, text messaging, it's fine. I'll become in a little while, you know, like, can you please pick this up, whatever great when the thing wrong in text messaging, but when IT replaces intimacy and when IT replaces building in strong bonds, that's what I see the the largest problem. Yeah.

I didn't alright set this rule in my relationships, but I would say with my co workers, family members and in other kinds of relationships, there's a rule which is that we don't .

argue over text.

yes, but people do IT a lot.

It's easier because you don't have to feel the feelings. That's what IT is. You know, if I can be psychologically distant from that person and say what I want to say, where I have to say, I face to face and then have to face a response, and that response may be very countable for me. And I probably have the strategy to deal with, because never learn.

mean uni are both aware that there is neural real state specifically dedicated to the processing of faces, and specifically to the processing of human faces, and specifically to the processing of the emotions Carried in human facial expressions. So you know, this is a hardwired aspect to our species .

which is diminishing. You know there was a good way I study done about kids in camps and they can only assign them to be with phones, not with the phones and show that after a couple of weeks of camp kids to um had their phones decreased in their emotion perception skills. So IT makes a difference. We need to give children and adults more face to face .

time wild. Could we talk about the energy pleasant ness axis? sure.

And create a mental picture for people of what this is. I found this to be incredibly useful. Listeners of yours have A A penner pencil in paper. You could map this out, but its very easy to imagine in your mind. So maybe you just tell on the vertical access.

yeah. So we have, you know, horizontal will call that pleasant ess. And this is going back to something else that we talked about earlier.

It's called pleasonton. Not goodness or badness is in this moment, and my feeling highly pleasant. Are my feeling unpleasant? Do I feel like approaching my day? My colleagues do.

I feel like avoiding my? Is I feel safe, comfortable? Do I feel uncomfortable? That's the x access.

And the way like to think about IT is that from the moment we wake up in the morning to the time we got a band that is activated or just, you know, yeah, we wake up in the morning in the earth over some of the thought process, like, yes, I want to get out of bed. No, I want to pull the couples out of my head. And the why access is energy or activation.

because of vertical access is energy.

The technical term is a ousel or activation. But I think energy is a Better term. And so it's either you're highly energize or you're deactivated or loan energy that is mental energy.

It's physical energy. So I kind like how much feel you have. And then we cross those two axes to create call in our work, the mood meter.

And there are four questions. We got high, pleasant, high energy, yellow. So think about emotions there.

Happy, excited, related estates, optimistic. We got the Green, that low energy, and pleasant still, that the calm content, tranquil, peaceful. Relax, quade. And then we have the unpleasant side, and I want to repeat myself, it's not the bad emotions or the negative emotions.

We're going to call them unpleasant because it's not generally pleasant to be sad or down or disappointed or hopeless, are feeling despair, which is the blue or that low energy unpleasant. And we got our red coat on the mood meter, which will call the high energy, highly unpleasant emotions, which are feelings of anger and anxiety. So it's very helpful for people because you know when you're like, you have inside this yourself like you not really sure how you're feeling.

And we know our analyzer complex. So to get to have a tool that has four codro where you like, I don't know my pleasant I guess i'm kind of pleasant, but in my energies low are i'm in the Green, are now what are my options there? No, i'm feeling quite energized and pleasant.

Oh, what are my options there is set up. We find that in for both free schools and CEO. Very helpful, extraordinary helpful.

And then, you know, going back to ruler for minute, we might talk about the quadrant as being the r for self awareness, right? Recognizing like, where am I an emotion space? And then you might ask yourself, like, are, well, what's going on? You know what? Why am I thinking that i'm in the yellow or red or blue Green? What just happened? What might be happening?

Oh, i'm about to be on a, oh, i'm about to take a test. Oh, I am about to go into a difficult meeting with a colleague. Oh, i'm about to go home and my partner is going to be mad.

嗯， okay, now I understand why i'm feeling the one feeling. I put a word to IT. I'm more precise.

I'm not enraged. I'm inevitable. I'm not bellisle. I'm just content.

I'm not depressed. I'm just feeling down. I'm not overwhelmed. I'm just feeling a little uneasy. That's helpful because that helps you go into the E N E R A ruler, which is, all right, is this an emotion I need to express?

What do I keep IT to myself? Does this an emotion? Need, need help? Do we need support right now? Or am I OK with what i'm feeling? Have a great story about this.

Actually, you, we're born to be fixed, I think, you know, especially in my role as a teacher, or if you're a parent, you with a kid or teacher partners, right? And so I go to visit this school where my program is, it's called ruler also, and wearing about five thousand schools now across the united states, and advising the school kindergarten. And I do this chicken.

And the little boy says he's in the blue, which means unpleasant loan energy. And of course, I like little by your is in the blue. I feel terrible. And my fixed, or like, I want to fix this kid.

I want and I want this kid to be in the blue and so I I know I can do that because it's part of the like, the rules of ruler. You don't x feelings, you fix people's els. So I just said the boy, i'm just curious, you know, you need a strategy and he goes, no, I am like, no and i'm just curious, you know, why need a strategy? Goes, because I know it's impermanent.

wow. Maybe the next generations coming up are far more emotional intelligence hours, if I may.

if they are, if they get direct instruction. That's my vision for the world is that everyone gets an emotion education um and the boy is no, no I know it's onna go away fine okay dad of this kid like you're my teacher you know I was amazing and to think that that five year old had that insight, that he had an unpleasant feeling that didn't need to be fixed, that IT was okay, that he just knew he was in a little function. But he has already that emotions are a femoral, you know and he could just let her go and he'll be in the Green little later, or the red or whatever else. IT was really kind of my blowing.

I was going to ask, how do we resolve the contradiction between the message to feel our feelings versus to just recognize that the feelings moving through us, as this five .

year old .

he wasn't, is able to do? Because I feel like IT gets to the heart of a lot of what we hear in the psychological and wellness space, which is, feelings are just feelings. They're trenchant.

They represent all sorts of things. And we can get to the biological underpinnings or the the um you know childhood uma r underpinning all sorts of things, genetics for that matter. Should we feel our feelings in order to best recognize them? I would imagine yes.

Is there any value to suppressing our feelings? Or does that tend to just grow the feeling? What is known about this from the research literature? Because you see a lot of different opinions about this.

But I would i'd like to know, have there have been any experiments where people are placed into a negative or positive emotion or are experiencing a negative or positive emotion and then intentionally try to suppress IT? Has there been any brain imaging, the measured of alvan ic skin response? Like does the emotion grow or does the emotion .

trick IT tends to grow? Um there are cultural differences to to be Frank, but in in a western culture, suppression tends not to have great outcomes. Finding ways to reach praise tends to be more helpful. This really gets into, though for me, the core of my work because you for twenty years of my life, I was running a center for emotional intelligence and teaching skills.

And I would go around, and I would see a lot of resistance, a lot of resistance, whether IT was the hedge fund manager or the superintendent of schools, or apparent, you know, i've had fathers come up to me say things like, you know, markers so vulnerable like you shared your whole story about being bully like I would never and my wilding's dream ever share with my own son that I was bully as a kid and i'm like, tell me more, of course. You know, the psychologist, and in the end, you know what, you know, the guy was afraid that his son would think he was weak. And so we have a mindset about feelings that we have to talk about.

People have feelings about their feelings. Sometimes we call those meta emotions or meta feelings. Sometimes it's just that happy as good. Anger is bad that simple my whole um recent research has focused on something I call permission to feel you know you know a little bit about my own story.

I had a pretty rough childhood that included abuse and included a lot of bullying and I had two parents who love me but um you know my mother was a very anxious woman who never had strategies so you know he was always saying i'm having a nervous breakdown and he had lock herself self in her room and SHE won't come up for a few hours. My father was, as we might call today, you know, the tough guy who was kind of toxicity masculine. So when you got tough 呢， he even said to me, once you, he's gone now, and we have a good, we had a good relationship.

But I never forget, he said, you know, so I used to be kids up like you. He said he did, and he didn't. I mean, thought that was the message that I need to hear to touch him up.

That was, he was doing that through love. I mean, IT was not emotionally intelligent parenting but that that was the way he thought and you know he did love me. He just didn't have to be appearing in that way um and so think about that blid shame, fear, abuse, all kinds of stuff going on in my head mom, having nearest public dance.

Father, toughen up. What happens? You suppress, you deny, you ignore, you eat, you do all kinds of weird behaviors because you have nowhere to go with your feelings.

And I fear that way. Too many people feel that way right now. And I have good reason to to show that you know, you've read my book.

You know, I had an uncle Marvin. He was a medical teacher who, you know, by some wave of a magic one, was staying with my family one summer when I was twelve. And he noticed something in my facial expression, my body link, which he knew something was off.

And he was the first adult to SAT with me and set him. Mark, are you feeling? And I don't know, that was his facial expression.

His body language is vocal tune, but that was the opener for me. I'm not doing so well. I don't really like life very much.

I'm scared. And you didn't say i'm not having nurse breakdown or toughen up. He said, we're going to get through this. I got you and with you and it's really interesting to me because, you know, I feel like we're so focused on skill building, which is really important.

But I want to take a step back and say, are we giving ourselves? Are we giving our colleagues, our partners, our children the permission to feel? And I feel like a lot of people don't have that permission.

Now my research shows, with tens of thousands of people across cultures, that only about a third of adults felt that they had someone when they were Young who created the conditions for them to have permission appeal. I mean, seventy percent of the people walking around here right now, in our corporations, in our schools, in our homes, thirty percent felt like they have that. And they wonder, what do you think the characteristics are of these people? The characteristics of the uncle Marvin's or anti dias or the colleague at work? By the way, this also works in the adult workforce.

You can have an emotion mentor or a feelings coach at work. There's three characteristics. Do I say I guess .

i'm guessing impac ally attuned um all of that a for those that no empathy is is involves a bunch of self category so I want to ignore dge that apathy of tuned um i'm guessing that they have themselves some high, high emotional intelligence um and the third is um gosh my hope is that there be A A um high situation awareness yeah right because your uncle needed to see something subtle in your facial expression or maybe not so simple but every else was missing IT but to be able to detect that there were something that really need IT was like a cent cry for help yeah you're getting .

at like you're really new ones which is that why your scientists too? The three broad characteristics, the first one that shows up across culturally non judge mental, like when we think about the people who gave us permission to feel they just had no judgement, let me be who I can be or who I am. The second is empathetic, and kind of coupled with compassionate, which is kind of a different form of empathy.

The third primarily is active listening. People want to be around people who don't judge them, who listen, actively ensure that they care. Is that simple? And i'll tell you, it's really um interesting to me because you I do a lot of public speaking and often my my new strategy as I do surveys where i'm going to be presenting, I can present the audience themselves with their data and i'm giving this speech to a bunch of adult parents, high school parents, and i'm showing the data from that.

They fill out the survey nine judgmental active listening and the the compassion and and I show, just like my national study, a third of you said, yes two third of you said, now so this this mom and she's like, just like impossibly jump s at A C. She's like, i'm having an epiphanius like, okay and she's like, I know i'm certain that my daughter has an a Marvin. I know IT and i'm also certain that my son doesn't and you know something mark, I am leaving your presentation today and I am finding my son, his uncle Marvin and like, lady, you could be you and I .

was interesting is going .

by outside, right? Like there's your credit teacher, there's your feelings. Mentor in is interesting to me, and I push on this in my research.

Now, what is the resistance? Like what are people so afraid of? I mean, they're so afraid of feelings, their own and their childrens or their partners. And so I ask you, I push on this, and it's really interesting and sad to me, is that adults today, the two barriers are not going to push again. What do you think the two things are getting the way of giving other people permission to feel?

This is actually where my next question was going. So i'll just ask the question in the form of an answer, is this like jeopardy and what you do? No, it's the other way round in jeopardy. Sorry, you can see how many episodes party .

have watched um .

that if people don't have adequate bound emotional boundaries and they are maybe even too impatient, attuned that someone they care about experiencing anger, sadness or frustration may be even with them would shift their own emotions and not make them able to be available with the three qualities that you listed off before in particular non judgment ah because now it's personal and so IT would undermine the process.

You you're right there. Um the first one though is just a really interesting went just time people I don't have the time you have the time to be nine judgmental like can you talk to me about that one please?

It's actually the case that we were not the time to be judgmental. It's far too energetically .

cause yeah I agree. The second really goes back to the skills. So i've had parents say things like i'm afraid to ask my child hard feeling because i'm not going to get to handle IT. I mean, think about that minute, i'm not going to be able to handle IT. So you'd rather your son, daughter suppress their fears or their whatever they are feeling because you haven't developed a skill that you need to help co regulator and support them.

You know, this is again, going back to, you know, my mission, vision know is that we need a world where everyone gets an emotion education free school to high school, and is got to continue in college and is got to continue in the workplace and is got to continue in our as we grow older. Because as a fifty four year old person right now, who leads a large group of people, cove IT hits like, I had a complete meltdown, I lead of, I was trying to figure that out, doing zoo meetings, you know, crazy stuff. And then my mother, I got stuck with me and I was a real kind of wake up call in terms of, like, relationship building.

Um I was really rough for me actually. He came for a wedding. One of my colleagues got married on march third of twenty twenty well my mother a is from panama and so just so you know, all flights, the panel I got cancelled by march thirteen s and then in open until september so we the eighty one year old lovely, lovely woman but like you know, it's a lot for your mother n liberty for eight months and one little quick side story for this.

I just I think it's it's relevant. So like I was getting really, you know working from home. My mother and love is there.

He wants me to make her capacity o every morning, which I like to do for the first week, but like after the fourth month. Like learn how to use the machine. And I don't want to do with myself. I'm afraid of the machine. Like.

sorry, i'm not I didn't need to look out that are those kapiti o machines can be scared they can be.

but like growth mindset, right? Like you watch me or help you do IT now I want you going to make IT the coffee. Like you ve got to make your own coffee.

You and I told you, you, I don't like people in the morning. You've got to make your own coffee anyhow. One night we're dinner and SHE looks at me in and said, he speaks spanish. I speak finish and so he said, you know, in spanish, are you really the director of the center for emotional intelligence? And I looked at i'm like, not tonight, not tonight like it's we're going down and IT was a mess sorry.

I didn't mean to laugh. I laugh before you said I was a mess. I just your impression of the question is a may maybe a true to mind some experiences .

yeah I mean and there I was like, yes, my daytime b is i've run a center for emotional intelligence. But like i'm a human being who had strong emotions and I didn't have the strategies and I needed to cultivate a whole new set of regulation strategies to deal with that new aspect of my life.

in thinking about people that can really help us by asking us the right questions, or in thinking about how we can ask people the right questions to really help them in us again, in understanding of what they are experiencing. I'm recalling numerous instances in my life where there seem to be the requirement for an excuse like an activity excuse like I currently have a very good relationship with my father.

But I remember when there was a time where we had to talk about science or watches as an entry point to sure any conversation, let alone about emotions. And he's done a lot of work. I've done a lot of work.

And I like to think much. We are much further down the road. We enjoy a very close relationship as a consequence of that work in part. But I think what you're describing really makes me realized that no matter who anybody is or what they are, age or what their background, that as human beings, we don't just need permission, but we really should think about just having a conversation about how others feel one hundred percent, as opposed to making an activity of prerequisite for that conversation. And as I say this, I realize some people are probably think a boy, okay, so we're just consider around and talk about our feelings.

But my short response, that is, yes, because when you don't do that, then I can say from experience and pretty soon you're not participating in those activities with that exactly and potentially with anybody, you know. I mean, i'm not saying that people become so unpleasant to themselves and others that they don't have any friends. I mean, okay, that's an extreme case.

But what I hear in the backstop of everything you're saying is that it's not just about an education. It's really about a practice of giving ourselves and others permission to simply have a conversation about what one is feeling as an exercise for both people to be able to explore that in the correct way and there is a correct way. And you describe the ruler approach as .

one yeah strategies. You know, correctness is a tRicky term. You know it's it's a game. It's no matter what, it's gonna be a game because you can't predict our people or respond. But I couldn't agree with you more.

Um i'll give another example of my father who like you, we ended up having an excEllent relationship um my mom died um when I was Young and he remarried and um had moved to upset in new york and he had this lovely wife and he called me my about two years after they were married and he was like, mark, I can't take IT anymore your father is driving me out out of my mind. Like what he mean, he's angry all the time. He's just really making me miserable.

And he is like, I think, you know, I might have leave him and i'm thinking of myself going this like, you know, he's older and a SHE reason he's going to want to move with me. So like road trip. And so I went on a road trip.

Take my father out to the local coffee shop. We're sitting down. I can take you anymore.

This what is telling me? I can't take IT anymore. I like that. Like, tell me more, I can't take any. Like that's not enough information dead.

Like what can you take any anymore? In the end, what I learned was that my father has three sons. All of us have doctors.

We're all independent or successful. Her children were having struggles, and he was needing to babysit her grandchildren. My father didn't like that. My sons are all taking care of themselves. You know, I wanted, you know, he's not realizing this, but what he's saying is I not like the idea of you spending so much time with his granted, because I want your attention.

Now, what do I tell that? Because after my father, nice book for about a half hour about this, I said, dad, you know, IT sounds like you're jealous is what I mean, i'm jealous. I said, what? You're upset that jane, your wife wants to spend more time with the grandkids and that's not time with you in my emotion lexicon and use that term.

You know that's jealousy. I can't believe you're tell me i'm jealous and i'm not telling you jealous. You're telling me just us. I'm just giving you the the concept started crying, still a crying, because he had awareness for the first time of his emotional experience.

He was so emotionally illiterate, he just didn't know what he was feeling and he was just acting out once he SAT down and understood the the experience of, like, wife wants to be with child because they need to poor. I am not happy with that because I don't know do with myself when she's spending time with the grandkids. It's jealousy.

All the sudden, we had a pathway to helping him regulate. Now i'll finish the story by saying, about two months later, jane SHE calls me, she's mark, I don't know what you did that coffee shop, but like your father's changed man. And you know, I not take all the credit, take some credit, but IT just shows you the power of emotional self awareness. Like once you really know how you're feeling, IT can be liberating and then you can figure out what you need to do with those feelings.

I'm laying that really thinking because I think these days we hear a lot of about therapy. Fortunately, in my opinion, I think and i'm going to get the numbers only cruel, right? But they're certainly in the right direction and amplitude.

There was a survey done, I believe, at stanford asking students how willing they would be to seek therapy if they were dealing with an emotionally trying time. And this was in the think early in midd nineties and the numbers that came back were very low. Somewhere in the teens are twenty percent of students told um where's nowadays is it's in excess of eighty or ninety percent high yeah and I think that's representative .

of I give another examples. So hearing i'm a professor at you, i'm teaching courses on emotional intelligence now I should just let you know this resistance often times. And my students are fantastic in general, but there's a resistance to wanting to learn about emotional intelligence. What they want to do in general is getting a in my course, but they know and they want to memorize like, oh, so the theory was written thousand nine hundred .

and ninety by mayor .

and sallie supreme SE no that's general .

was A J I love the great I conscious I have stories .

about that too but um and so I say, no, this is this is about you developing the skills like this is going to be you're going to think really critically about part of the essays are going to write are you going to be your action plans for building emotional I don't want to do that. I want to you know get the test and take you know at the eight after a month, I get them bought in.

Um interestingly though, and my because I make my courses into research and I asked them to the surveys how they're feeling every class number one, emotions stressed, everybody stressed. I'm thinking to myself like, stressed that, like, you got a good life here, but nevertheless stressed. You know, I have to have empathy.

I get IT. But I decided that I really had a hard time. Remember, I defined stress as having too many demands and one of resources.

I didn't feel like that was the actual feeling. Now who might a judge? But one way to get Better at IT why is to have my students do journey. When you're stressed right about what's on your mind, what are you thinking about? Take a guess what the number one emotion was after we did the quality of analysis .

of journal about stress.

Yeah, what they were really feeling fear. okay. Envy, interesting envy, envy.

Your father is richer than my father. Your mother is more connected than my mother. You've got Better hips.

You've got Better lips. IT was endless social comparisons, right? And so envy right, is waning. What someone else has exited ties about uncertainty dresses about two many demands, none of resources.

And so here I was you know um having deeper knowledge of what was the underlying feeling or emotion that they were having, which was envy, not stress. And so I had a conversation with accounting department and I made a joke about IT. And I was like, you know, what's our university y's envy reduction program?

You know, IT wasn't, you know, the most popular, you know, conversation. And I just think it's interesting to think about IT in terms of helping people to learn what to do with their emotions. You know, right now, you know, there's a mindfulness crazy, everybody doing mindfulness, and I do mindfulness and appreciate mindfulness.

But let me tell you, you know, when you're feeling chronic envy, you know, doing breathing the exercises is not going to decrease the envy. You're going have to work on your construction in your mind of your relationship with people. And so I just feel so strongly that we help people, paul, a little bit reflect, a little bit think about how they're feeling as a pathway to just having .

well being. Your joke about envy reduction um is something I take very seriously. We did four episode series with dr. Pocono who's a world expert in psychic is a among the very, very best psychiatrists in the world by many accounts and he discussed during that series but also on other podcast he appeared in such as my friend likes freedman and's podcast, that um envy is actually the at the root of much of the evil in the world small scale evil, large scale evil yeah and a lot of the despair that people feel. And I think it's a word that isn't discust enough um because like the sound of IT is it's kind of gross right n VS vy nobody wants to be associated with IT but fortunately doctor count described IT as a you know al human emotion in some cases but I had no idea and I don't know if he knows but maybe he does. There is clinical work but i'll certainly pass along what you just said to him that so much of the stress that have to imagine um good people and the students image people evil very few not catch o logically evil, let's hope um are experiencing envy, the wish to have more of what somebody else has, maybe something specific which of course gets to these um more common phrases of people feeling that they are not enough yeah .

which is going back .

a contentment right? I actually I didn't draw the ero now I I thought I draw the ero between contentment and envy, right? So if one wants to combat envy, you can imagine that a programme to combat envy might be perceived if one didn't understand IT as a calling for people to just be content with less, which is not what we, right?

I mean, we want ambitious people in the world. We want people inspiring. We want people have growth mindset. And yet we don't want you to be stressed and have A A privacy feeling of envy inside either. So how would you make inroads into envy?

Well, I think, again, like all emotions, and v is not about emotion. You know, the way I think about emotions as being, you know, when we need to get help with their emotions is when, if it's an unpleasant one, it's intense in london ation right? Momentary envy.

You know, I get M, V all the time. I get envy. I watched ted talks and like, that timing was amazing. I'm going to try that out, you know. So I I use that envy of someone else's skill, you know, as a way to grow.

How does that defer start to turn your own work back on its on you from admiration or inspiration like wow you know like the yeah .

that's what i'm getting yeah so that's the difference between you know the the envy that leads told admiration versus the envy like what you're referring that leads to resentment, right if if I if I hate you because you have you know what I want now we're talking pathological envy potentially and so that's the self awareness piece know if that's the part of really getting you know that differentiation of emotion that granularity um because again, it's like anger.

It's not a bad emotion. Anger is okay. There's reasons to be angry in the world. When we get treated unfairly, we should be angry. Doesn't mean that we have to be deregulated, right?

There's an assumption that we make that when we experience unpleasant strong emotions like anxiety or or anger, you know that we're gonna be deregulated. I have a whole new relationship of my anxiety, very different relationship. I mean, I spent years working on IT.

I noticed IT, and I like high anxious haydo today. And then I just, it's okay. I can even be giving here with you or giving a speech teaching, have that anxiety come in and not allow IT to have power over me because I can observe IT. I can welcome IT.

And then if it's in the way, I can say, you know, he's are going to go back there for a little while, are you going to work? I mean, sometimes you want to give speeches like it's the same speech, right, that redundant and it's like I can't believe have to talk about this again and then i'll look at the audience and like is their first time. It's like all of like my despair turns into optimism and hope. That's all regulation.

Conflict resolution is something I think a lot about in any situation where emotions are discussed. And IT brings me back to this earlier situation you are talking about where this woman said that he was gone to find her child, somebody to help him to intervene. And thinking about his feelings.

he was going to go by his feelings .

for um and now there's a whole field of feelings, mentors cropping up that .

actually ouldn't be such a bad thing.

I wouldn't be such a bad thing. I like that goal. So when we were talking about that, one of the things that surfaced was this notion that some people have a natural impact thic attachment, or the emotion that the other person is feeling as a negative one.

And it's about us. What about them? And as a consequence, you we're not able to really be present to help the person the way that you helped you're dad like he he was frustrated with his wife.

yes.

Had he been a frustrating with you, IT might be a little bit little bit more chAllenging to say, hey, well, that maybe what you're experiencing in terms of your frustration with me is actually like, yeah because you're now in a tether with them so to what extent is in atha oon um a positive trade?

Are there people who are Better at turning IT off or directing IT in appropriate ways then others in a previous podcast that I did recently um somebody sitting right there in that chair um told me and I believe them that I am codependent the first time anyone's ever called me that codependent SHE defined IT SHE spelled IT out and and in a very parSimonious way explained a huge ray of chAllenges that i've experiences to the point where i've been learning more about code dependence. Okay, not easy for me to say dependent, interdependent um certainly depending on others is important but certain patterns fall well under the umbrella of code of pendency. So I was okay and the even now i'm uncomfortable talking about, which is per the reason i'm trying to desensitized myself to the word itself, let a loan drilling into the process of getting through IT.

So the point being that if our emotions are so strongly other to others, we see that as empathy. We label that typically as positive. But IT really diminishes our ability to be there for people. If there emotions are negative and about us.

I disagree.

Okay, great, great, fantastic.

That's empathy without emotion. Al, intelligence. And so I work with a lot of doctors. I have done quite a bit of work with the cancer hospital at yo called smile. And you a doctors have been taught from early on like leave or empathy at the door.

And I chAllenge you that you know, when you're a patient with cancer, knowing that you may pass, the last thing you want is an uneaten c doctor where you want a relationship with someone who's treating you. And the assumption is that you get lost in your empathy. And people have written about that.

And it's true, there is over zeus empathy. You can have compassion fatigue. E, but again, it's in the absence of, you know, emotional intelligence. What do I mean? Well, part of emotional intelligence gulam. And so if I see my work as a cancer daughter, as you know, helping people have the best last few months of their lives, that's a really interesting way to think about IT.

So as i'm in relationship with my patient, my minds, that is, i've come to understanding that my job, you know, people pass, but I could go down a rabbit hole of despair because everyone potentially may pass or I can see this as i'm giving someone a gift. I'm giving them a gift of my presence. I'm giving them a gift of them you know feeling held and cared for and so to me it's all about the framing you know of empathy um yes, of course you know if you're just you can lose yourself in someone else issues but that's not emotional intelligence emotional intelligence and you know I noticed myself i'm getting lost in your feelings. I need to pull back a little bit.

Do we know where in the brain empathy resides? We hear so much about mir neurons, but I think for those of us that have been in neuroscience and psychology long enough, we knowledge, yes, there appropriate conversations that include the words mirin neurons, but that they've been made out to be much more than perhaps they are in terms of empathy, and become sort of the defauts description for a all forms of empathy and understanding.

And if it's not just that, so what do we know about that? The brain science of of empathy? I don't know .

much about that, to be honest, when I know more about is the kind of psychological experience of empathy and that there are multiple forms of IT. So for example, there is the cogent empathy peace, where I know i've never had your experience, but intellectually, I get that you've suffered, or intellectually, I get your experience. There is the emotional empathy, which is no one of the other survivors of abuse who have felt shame.

I understand what that means, because i've lived there, and not that our experience was the same, but our feeling was the same. We have a shared emotional experience. And then on top of that, that compassionate kind of form of them pathy is what I think is what we need much more in our society, which is we don't just cognitive understand where someone is a relate to their experience, but we feel compelled.

To be in relationship with that person and be supportive. I'm thinking about something else that you spoke about earlier, which is this idea that like, and this is a misconstrue l of my work and others work, that the goal of this is talking about feelings, all they are like, the last thing I wanted do is talking about killings. Also, look like, that is not helpful, actually.

And i've had some experiences in my life, you know, where, like, something just be plant shirt happens, you know. And I called everybody I know, like my best friends, my family. Can you believe this happen? I mean, can take IT anymore.

And then I hap the phone. I do the same thing, and they all listen to me. And then i've spent two hours on the phone telling the same thing over over again, talking about my feelings.

And I feel worse, because I rehearsin fifteen times. That's an emotional intelligence, right? When we are emotionally intelligent, we recognize, and we know that just talking about IT is actually not helpful.

Like we need to be with someone who's that active listener, who is not judgmental, who shows compassion, but when you're compassionate, you actually are bring you back to the person saying, you know, is this you know, the right thing right now for you? You know, what else might you think about? You know, I know when i've had really difficult experiences, you know, the person who says things like, maybe could you just jump in the other balloon for minute mark and looked down at your life in like, besides this one thing that you feel like is the worst thing that ever happened in your whole life, anything else going right? And my partner loves me.

My dogs love me unconditionally. I got great friends. Ah yeah of a setting that little thing that's activating IT was not so big anymore. That emotional intelligence, right, is not getting lost in the empathy, not just endlessly talking about feelings to the point where there's no strategies.

And I think that that's that's really interesting because IT goes back to something important which is the permission of field characteristics of non judgment, active listening um and apathy, compassion never and i'm talking I have tens of thousands of people have done this. Does anyone say fixer problems over? I don't even get smart or wise when we think about the people who create the conditions for us to be r two cells.

We don't think about the wise, smartest fixer problems over. We think about the nine judge mental listener who shows compassion. And I I think that has to be reinforced that some of the fear that we have is that we're going to get lost in all these feelings.

But no one's asking you to get lost in their feelings. What they're asking for is support. They're asking you to just listen and to maybe ask me a few questions to help me clarify my experience and then help me on a path towards feeling Better.

Yeah, I keep hearing that the way to do this properly is to ask questions as opposed to telling people what they need to do. Your friend or this person who was a and effective sources support in that moment, said, you can you get in the hot air balloon and looked down on your life um I noticed that they didn't say get in the hot bloom for a second and then do this as a former partner mindset who are still in great terms with no one likes to be shifted yeah that .

wants to be told.

But today, right? No one wants to be shifted. No one, no matter what state they're in, higher, low, want somebody to come along and try to shift .

them or just tell them like, you know go for a walk okay well, why am you like to do what or meditate?

Yeah that wants to become equally grading when it's probably great thing to do. But perhaps there's A A different way post in the form of a question that would be more effective. I think the hot air balloon example also brings to mind something.

Um i'll try and keep this as a sink as possible for your sake and for the audience at. But you having studies stress a bit in my laboratory and experienced a lot of stress as most people have in their lifetime. It's very clear that when we stress our mental epitome r our visual APP itur, our auditory capture, everything shrinks, write IT contracts.

And we know that getting a different spac perspective gives us a different temporal perspective. We can start talking about our life, been in larger pieces and get that perspective of the things that in life that are going well. Um there's a meditation that I guess it's a meditation I don't want to call IT that I start doing years ago when I was a junior professor because life was so stressful for ten years. And you little know that .

IT just .

continues to get be stressful button pleasure to do the work that involves basically doing a standard type meditation for a few breaths of closing my eyes and focusing on my body and what's going on internally, but then opening my eyes and focusing on something external like my hand or the room, and then going to the pale blue dot is a very you wide appeared. So effectively the the hot air balloon looking .

down is distinction distancing.

right? In making this in a practice, not in a moment of stress, but each morning as I start the day, as a kind of reminder that our brains, our cognition, an and our emotions go through tremendous state differentiation like these complete were kind of different people under these different spacetime references and that when we're in stress, we tend to get locked yeah into one space time reference.

And i'm not trying to be you know, cosmic about this, but the nature of stress is to have us anchor to the dresser and to put up mental walls to break out of that in physical walls. So um sounds like great supporters. And we can help ourselves through um the more unpleasant portions of the emotion scale if we want to, by taking ourselves into the different perspective using spatial tools. Hot air balloon, pale blue dot .

questions yourself, say things like, mark, I mean, I travel a lot and you know, I was just in washington state for some presentations before this light delays and I fly, I cancelled, I missed a dinner and I used to get really worked up about IT. And I would just then I just take a the airport, take a nice ung in hell. I'm like, mark, is this really onna be something that's going to buy you next week?

I'm working a book and like I got into the night and hotel at work, I actually reframed IT as an opportunity that I have some space and right. And so you can use these techniques a lot going back to my dad. So my dad, as he got older, his anger did come back.

And he was kind of, they were, remember this one, you know, time we were at a family dinner and I had already been in my position for a while and there was some a little bit of resentment with my father because, you know, he was A A blucher worker and a very, very talented air conditioning repairman and had a good career. And but all the sons, you know, when to graduate school and got P, H, D, S. And that was, you know, I was A A little bit difficult for my father at some time.

And so when I got a job, but yell in particular, you know, he got a little, there were some emotions about that and I remember we were at this one dinner and basically heve, i'm not going to repeat what he said because it's really gross but he said something like, you know, mark, you think your blank doesn't stink anymore and I was like, eh and then he just kind of went on and on and on, and I had to make a choice, like, I start crying you like dinner because I feel so violated by my father. Do I like time to go blank himself and walk out the room? And I decided to use a distancing technique.

I decided to make him into a movie. I decided that he was now A T V show. And that T V show was something I was observing in that feeling.

And that has proven to be one of the most powerful strategies for me, is when i'm in a position with someone who has a lot of a negative energy and as a kid who was Billy and more affected by these things, I think I create that psychological distance by just putting that picture frame up there. And I just observe IT. And I kind of asked myself questions about IT and like, wow or I say things like, well, that's really interesting.

I want to wear that. I get curious about IT like I went where that's coming from my you know, what was his childhood like that? He's so angry and I really is helpful. So these are very powerful techniques that .

can be used in real time.

as you just very real time. I use them all the time, you know, at the grocery store, you know, not going to get to my issues, but, you know, I have, I like an I T. With I would take lower middle class.

We were very we didn't have a lot of money. Everything was on a budget and you know fortunate to be in a different circumstances, but i'm still cheap. And so my partner were i'm like, I don't understand, like we're not buying that.

Like that is ridiculous. Like we're not spending seven dollars on a bottle of organic omen milk. You i'm not doing IT, we're not doing IT.

And then I have to like move away from the eyes, take a little walk of like mark you is this worthy relationship? The olympic? Like, really, is this what you're going to do? And so like, I don't know, maybe i'm just the only one who needs regulation like three hundred times a day, but I find that I you know different strategies like the picture frame works when i'm angry or someone is angry with me um my anxious, I get into the higher balloon and I looked down. When i'm like irritated with someone, I just take to walk away and I asked myself, is this really that important? And that's what I hope people will learn, is that there are so many amazing strategy out there and that we use them interchangeably with different emotions and different context.

Well, a lot of the stereotypes dating back to the, you know let's to say in thousand and thirties through to the end of the thousand and seventies seem to um couch people as more stoic, less emotionally expressive, especially public with people that they weren't very close with. There was also a tendency, at least in movies about that time, for people who are passionate to be rewarded for expressions of their passion.

So it's kind two ends of the of the spectrum, right we always think of the kind of the the real stoic um both for for male and female pin types right um you look at movies from the like the thirties and forties you see that but you also saw intensive expression, passionate expression. Um and now I suppose we're in a bit of a um new place where I think there's an invitation i'd like to think there's an invitation for a broader range of emotional expressions, fina types, let's call them on my biologist. After all, it's also as safe word to use still, I think you can use the word finot pes um steroid pes, a bit loaded, a lot loaded.

But emotionality and the notion of people being overly emotional has unfortunate, a bit of A A negative IT does not to IT. Where are somebody been passionate? That sounds like a pretty good thing.

What emotional is like historically, like you're historical IT means that you are in nineteen control of your emotions. I don't like to use that term ever. I just find IT a useless term.

And um because that's when open times when people think about emotions, they think of people being emotional. And I just don't even know what that means. IT has like just connotation from the past that I don't think you're helpful.

Maybe that's why my graduate adviser said instead of telling you to be careful, i'll tell you to be mindful because the opposite of mindful is mindless and then you .

will remember yeah and also exactly. But going back, like you'll hear people say why you so emotional and again, that's a place of judgment. What they're saying is that you're experiencing a strong emotion is making me uncomfortable.

I don't know what to do with that feeling. So by me labelling you as emotional, I can only you whether I can lead to not good communication, right? Not healthy relationships.

And yet we reward people still for being passionate, even if it's tinged with some anger. Like if somebody has a cause that they're really passionate about, we don't necessarily say they are being emotional, they're really passionate. There seems to be a suttles different experience that maybe it's rooted in a um kind of a trajectory of like trying to achieve a specific outcome where as just anger, sadness, kind of just you know um guider ing out of us is IT doesn't seem like it's directed to this .

end point but the in the emotional is the judgment when I say you enter your so emotional, right it's also can be a form of gas lighting, right, which is i'm trying to get you to believe something about yourself that I want you to believe, which may not be a reality at all, which is usually problematic in our society. I think most of our low self, the steam, come from gas ating in our childhood .

people each other.

Yes, I think it's the beginning of bullying which is that you marker to skinny, marker to over way mark know is too big market and is too small marker to feminine, mark to masculine and then of a sudden is no um feelings mentors, there's no education and I just start believing in and then IT becomes my reality like a self a filling propac's and it's awful. I mean, he seat all the time. We're not born being self critics.

We're born being experiences dependent. We depend on relationships. And if those relationships are meaning cruel and people are gas letters, what guess what that's going and up being how we think about .

ourselves. In your book, you include a number of really wonderful quotes, but one of them that I ancho de very quickly is the following. All learning has an emotional base, and IT was none other than .

plato that .

said that what is the relationship between emotions and learning and decision making?

Let's think about right now our our interaction right? As a teacher, right? I mean, how many of you have ever been mean your listeners and you like how many of us have ever been in a situation in a classroom where it's like art?

Everybody, let's turn to page fifteen of an are more you're going to read paragraph one and Andrew, you're going to read paragraph two and your brain is immediately gone. So emotions drive our attention. It's so clear, right? If we're not feeling engaged or curious, we're going to be bored.

And again, bored him. Not bad emotion IT just means like what's being presented me and the way it's being presented is not meeting my needs. It's not engaging me of my brain needs to do something.

I'm just going to go doodle, i'm going to go push the kid here, i'm going to get on my phone. It's just where we wanted our brains are wanting to do things. Um when we're in environments where there is a lot of curiosity, where there is high engagement, attention is much Better.

So that's the simplest thing. Think about um in my work you know my whole career has been about building curriculum to help educators integrate emotions into there every day classroom and part of what we help them understand going back to that mooth meter. Think about that minute.

You know a lot of us because of our dispositions, we tend to speak with a certain cats. We tend to present in a certain way. And if you are someone who like lives in the Green, you're just calm and content and tranquil and peaceful.

The sort people, right? Some of the yoga teachers, right? Let's all turn our attention to ourselves. They're great. I love yoga. But my point is, if you are always in the Green quadrant, like for me, even though I am like living there a lot, it's like give me some energy please and then there's like I have a friend who is a principle of A A middle school in 3Francisco and she's a former tennis coach and SHE walks into the school team。

Let's go, go, go every day either come on and then you've got people who might be in that kind of, you know blue watering, you know, it's like we've done some education work in the past, you know and let's be real, how much education reform really matters. You know, you know you make you do all this research, but who's reading IT? Anybody really reading IT downer? Yeah or that person who's always in the red, right that's activated, you like costive, you know.

And so my point here is that yet we're going to be default in many ways of being in one of these quadrants, maybe all day long, maybe part of the day. But as someone who is leading, like because I I consider leadership teaching, uh, someone is managing a team, as a teacher in the classroom, as a parent couple, whatever i've GTA be aware of, kind of where I live emotionally, and i've gotto be aware that not everybody wants to be with me, where I met. And my job is to create an emotional role, coast to ride for people, to bring people on an emotional journey, because that was going to keep them interested and believe IT or not.

From our research and others research, we know that certain emotions are Better for certain things. So for example, if I want my high school students to be like, really brainstorming ideas, i'm not onna put on like a gregorian chant, let's get pumped up. And like everybody, let's get the posted out there and IT was excited in this brainstorming. But then you know which one of like what's going to be the project? You can't be all helped up because then your brain is not in a very kind of a building consensus kind of model mode.

So when we bring our energy level down, it's like let me think about for nothing is more you're more thoughtful, you're more careful, you're more like that or know then like people say, why would blue, why would you unpleasant low energy be helpful? Well, believe in or not, often times we can be much more detail oriented when we're in that low energy and present place. Like writing, I do a lot of grant writing, right? It's like I think it's great.

Not a great idea, mark. Like put on the classical music like zone everybody out get into that place where you are going to look for every ede a dot, every comma that should be asked my colon, every dash that should be this paragraph matching. You can do that when you're really super excited.

Just isn't your brain doesn't Operate that way. And then people say, red, why would red be great? The best story half of that is so I actually did to collaboration with lady gaga and her foundation borne this way foundation many years ago.

And um we did a study of thousands of high school students across amErica and we looked at how do they feel when they are in school and what we found was seventy seven percent of feelings and I repeat that seventy seven percent of their emotions at school were unpleasant, tired, bored and stress with the top three back then. So we did the study. We were working on IT as a big project called the emotion revolution, and we ended going to the White house to present our findings.

I had to make a decision, like I had the secretary education at that time in front of me and presenting this big study on the emotional lives of teenagers. Do I want to go there? Like, you know, i've got an amazing study to share with you. Like, that's a great.

Do I want to go when they are? Like, secretary, lets just take a nice long in hail and the next hail it's not going to go for so well that we want go into the blue like, you know, it's pretty bad out there. Now I decided that red was my codon.

I wanted the people in the education department to be fired up by this research. I wanted to be, I wanted to feel the passion that I had and the anger that I had, that IT isn't IT is injustice for kids to feel that way in our nation schools, we need to figure out what to do to create a more engaging learning environment. And so I decided to really present that in that way.

I in present, the finding, and like, look at the date, like I want you to really take a look at these data, please. Seventy seven percent of the, I mean, I think seventy seven percent of the emotions, tired, bored and stressed. How is that going to a nation filled with people who are innovative and creative and making a difference in the world? Think about we know how emotions drive the way we behave if you're tired, bored and stress all day long, what's the result and so I presented that way and no, I did um and I think that's the magic of understanding emotion that does this resonate, that we're not we're going to be intentional about the emotions that we feel and that the emotions that we create in environments, whether they are at home or at school or in the workplace, because certain emotions work Better for certain things.

Yeah, your examples bring me back to your earlier mention of this brilliant five year old kid who realized that his current emotional state was like the weather yeah, going to change in order to have that perspective. My guess is that he had to have already, at some point, moved from the blue quartz ant, so low energy, low pleasant ss to the Green quadri pleasant, this low energy to the yellow quadrant, perhaps not in this order. Yes, i'm using this to remind people about the quarters higher energy, higher pleasantness and then read um high energy, low pleasant yes .

well because he is checking in delhi right right? So in this school, which we call a ruler school, that's what they do. Kids check in in the morning and other times throughout of the day, and they thought to recognize that I can feel this way at one point of the day, and I can feel this way at another point of the day, and I am feeling this way, and i'm about to do something with that feeling is not great.

I can shift out of that feeling, or I can still feel that feeling and still be a good learner. I mean, that's incredible to me that we can do that. And I see one thousand of schools, and it's done remarket will .

be well and you've developed an APP that's really available that allows people to essentially um press the screen um is that right? Yeah and you do know where they are on this energy versus pleasant male at numerous times throughout the day and night, if they choose, will provide a link to this APP.

It's called how we feel.

Yeah, i've used IT before and a previous version, I need to update and get the new version, and I will. I found IT to be immensely useful just to start thinking about emotions along this energy versus pleasant ness access yeah um after one does this for a few days or weeks you know maybe i'm checking in and and touching the APP I know a couple times a day maybe again in the evening upon waking what sort of data or information does one get back that can be informative toward being a healthier, happier person up excuse me, a healthier er person.

more contented, more content um well, what's really cool about the APP and the reason why we have an APP is that technology can be super helpful in this instance for building self awareness. So if I set reminders what you can do on the APP to check in in the morning, maybe after lunch or right before go home, you know, you pick what IT ever works for you, or you can do IT randomly, and then you aggregate your data across time.

Right now, you have instances of your emotions over time. But what's also cool about IT is that you can disagreed ate your data by things like who you're with, or where you're at, or what you're doing. And then you can analyze that so you get your little mood metres that are all different colors because, oh, I thought I was more in the yellow at work, but i'm actually more in the blue at work. Or I thought when i'm with this person, i'm actually feeling come actually, when I look at my data, I always anxious .

with that person. So IT runs a .

reverse correlation, yes, elastic. And then you can just look at your report and then ask you questions to get more insights. And also importantly, we've embedded a lot of the strategies that have been talking about.

So like these distancing strategies or they're breathing exercise of the midlands exercises or gratitude exercises, which whether I was thinking in the back of my head as we were speaking about the envy reduction program, I think the number one thing is gratitude that like if where brains are just endlessly searching for what's Better of this out there than what I have, we're not experiencing any gratitude for what we have. And so I spend a lot of time helping people really understand, like take a look. Like, look, we're as a student.

Think about what you have the opportunity to learn. Think about the opportunity you have in life. And all the sudden, like, oh yeah, my life is pretty good, as opposed to everyone else, is life is bad of the mind.

So gratitude for me, and sometimes that feels cliche. Ate these days. You know, you heard so much about IT I know I can talk strong enough about both the practice in the science that supports them.

I am to that when I did an episode about gratitude now some years ago um I was positively shocked to see the data yeah the data on gratitude practices are so striking in terms of whether that one looks at no transmitter expression nor whether one looks at happiness rating scales and you were learning ability to learn so many things are improved by even short gratitude practices and IT was interesting for me to realized that not only do effective gratitude practices include thinking about what one has, but also in observing others expressing their own gratitude, either towards us or towards others.

So, you know, there's something about the human brain that that really thrives on gratitude. And the other thing that I think is worth mentioning, you said, uh these students um could throw a gratitude practice, realized the opportunity that they have. I think a lot of people default to the assumption that a gratitude practice will make them complacent yeah stop seeking to reach their goals.

But actually the opposite is true. There's a smaller research as far as I understand. Maybe it's expanded in in recent years where if people do a regular gratitude tracks even five minutes a day, their achievement actually increases as well. So a gratitude and complacency are um not on they're not in the same bin.

Ah exactly these are all evidence space strategies to help us have a Better life.

So clearly you're on a mission and it's a wonderful, in fact, admer wall want IT that to bring more emotional awareness. Um can we all IT that emotional awareness? Two kids and to adults to Better the world.

I I don't think I you overreaching there. I think that's the goal. I'd like to get back to your original story a bit to understand a little bit more about the motivation behind the goal you've written about in your book. And you've spoken a little bit today about the fact you were bullied pretty vacuously yeah and also um were the target of abuse. And when one things about bullying in particular um we I think all hopefully naturally default. Okay, how can we stop bullies? But i'm guessing this is a two sided issue and i'm i'm not trying to create empathy for bullies here, but i'm guessing that in order to really um to integrate the bullying problem down to zero, which would be the ultimate goal.

sounds great to .

me yeah that um we need to get into the minds of both the bullied and the bullies right and as uncomfortable that might be maybe um this is an opportunity to embrace some of the very practices that you've been talking about yeah so if you would, could you tell a little bit about how as a kid, how you perceive your bullies and very curious about that. I can say i've never been bullied, but i've also not been a bullied.

I can easily say I was thinking about this during our brief break there. Um I hate bullies like I like hate them like greater in the red pleasantness, like top top corner there like IT activites to me physically like that makes me angry, makes me want to do something about IT. But as somebody who was bullied, how did you perceive your bullies? Did you think they were like corrector the authority? And how have you embraced whatever understanding that was and more fit over time to be able to think about how to solve the bullying problem, both from the perspective of the bullied in the bully?

Yeah that's going have a couple days together for this. Um you know I think you know when I think about my eight year old self, ten year old self, seven year old self being bullied. Remember, bulling is about a power in baLance.

That's one of the court elements of IT. It's about the intent to harm um which is it's not conflict. It's not like sibling rivalry.

It's intention to harm what there's a power baLance and know how long. And in the repetition of IT doesn't a three key factors and bullying, it's repeated. It's intended to harm and is a power and baLance. And so that puts you in a really power less position. When you think about IT, when you have nobody to support you.

No upstander ds no one else around you to to help you get out of the situation what happens that you feel fear um and what I felt um and it's been the emotion that I ve struggled with my whole life. A shame because what happens when you're bully often is that you are made to feel like you are not worthy. It's diminish self worth because i've got power over you.

I wants to do whatever hell I want to you. I'm going to say whatever I want to say i'm going to spend on you want to throwing you into the locker and what you know do crazy stuff, which is what happened to me um and guess what is nothing you can do about IT? And when you're in an environment where nobody doesn't anything about IT IT create despair.

So you can see how there's a lot of emotions there. And I i'll tell you right now, one of my hardest memories of being a student in around, and I was around ten years old, is that remember being in a classroom in math and I was wearing like a vest, like a downtown st. As a protection, IT was like my thing to hold on to like, like my my little death was going to be protective of me.

And I promise I had two bully is sitting on either side of me. And what they did throughout the entire class was they used pen and they just w grow things about me on my jacket. And I can still remember, like your sitting across from me, you being my teacher, and I can still remember lucking eyes with my teacher and him just looking away, and that feeling that you have of complete despair like how is IT that i'm not being protected in by this adult in my community? And so that's the issue that we're trying to solve for now.

I could make all kinds of excuses about the teacher. Maybe, maybe I didn't really notice. I don't buy because I was repeated over time and IT was happening a lot.

I could also say that, you know, maybe he missed read my facial expression and not buying that either. I think IT was, either he had a mindset, you know, this is the right of passage. You're going to toughen up kito, or you gonna survive in your clifton in high school.

Or another point is that he just was like, I have no idea what to do about that, and i'm just going to let you go. None of those are an option for me anymore. This is not acceptable.

And so we need to teach people skills. People need to be emotionally perceptive, like emotions are signals. I mean, that's an important point of this conversation. My facial expression, which was probably one of depression, fear in shame, which is not one of a big smile in general, obviously, this variability.

But point is that it's pretty clear when you're wearing a jacket and sitting like this in your classroom with a hood, you on, you know, doing your work and people are writing on you, you're not a good place. How that perception of my experience, my emotion was not a signal to do something, blows my mind IT blows my mind. I'm just saying that is, I can't imagine an adult being in a situation with a child that is being treated, that we are not thinking action. But yet we see IT all the time. All the time we see IT even know that is .

all the time there's.

by the way, the research shows that bullying has not really decreased in the last thirty forty years. really. no. IT is not pretty much about a third of middle high school kids capable each day in school.

And so this is the point of my work, which is that a lot of the programs out there, like, let's create school rules. Who's gona follow these rules? Like what is? How are rules teaching people skills? It's not working.

My hell. Thinking about this is that we need to teach the things that we've been talking about, empathy, perspective, taking you are doing, role plays, having people understand what IT feels like to be in that situation. Like you said, you've never been bullied, right? And never had bullied, which is great for you, which means that might be harder for you to understand that because right at the empathy for you might be little tougher.

Yeah, it's poor. The reason I asked the question, I mean, I was debating to myself with that, I ask IT in that way because I didn't want to come across this insensitive I precisely because I have said on neither side um of the bullying equation that is kind of a foreign thing to me IT also makes me realized and especially now after what you just said that while I was in high school i'm guessin there was a lot of bullying .

witness and I missed .

IT yeah you know I had some friends that could definitely be classified as miss fits yeah and I think looking back they hung out with my group of friends because we were definitely we were into different things we weren't we know me meaning my pierce group in the john huz film era where you had like the jokes versus the hippies versus the cape water versus yeah exactly and I had my crowd and and was friends with a number of people outside that crowd but there were these kids that would hang around us that um went into the same things that we were. And I am looking back and realizing now that they did IT because they were definitely safe with us.

Yeah and but that's to be low.

Scary if we wanted to be, but we wanted the types to go out and be scary. So I think they must have sent some safety with us. And I actually very fun memories of those kids and know some of them still now. So yeah, I asked that way, in part because I realized I missed a lot, or know I missed a lot of what was going on in high school for other reasons, but I just missed a lot of this um and I think in even an academic culture as an adult, I not now but I certainly witness bullying at meetings more that was more demonstrative where people would make fun of um people in general in a way that I felt suppressed the likelihood people would ask questions, which is a kind of different form of postering and bullying right then make make students afraid to raise their hand in and ask questions at meetings, for instance.

It's intimidation, intimidation and I experience that to remember when I when I was Younger in my career, was giving a speech and people were like, oh, he does the field research you like in school that soft science. And I was very, very fortunate. And I was hurt by IT because I like, by the way, like doing you, you know, experiment the labatt with your software. And college is a lot easier than trying to rantin ze sixty schools in brooklin in queens, new york, and try to find effects of your program. Is hard research really difficult?

Even just working on humans is hard. Those of us have worked, done, both the animal models, which I no longer do, and humans, which I ve done and do. Working on humans is that much harder for all sorts of reasons.

Yes, they're not on the same genetic background. Just put them in their cage, taking out the same different like dark cycles. Some slept well, some didn't sleep well.

I mean, their issues with the animal work as well. But yeah, just even embracing human research at all is an immense chAllenge. So the idea that that would be viewed as soft is um I mean that that's just like laughter .

hable to me but exactly um but I was very fortunate that there was a professor, very senior professor that was ez glass. He was one of the coal founder of head start and he was like my he became my adult onon.

Marvin e, and i'm giving this speech and that all these people, like trina, like, really like demolish, you know, the presentation in my research, and he was reveal because he was like, this famous developmental psychologist, and he just stood up and he's like, he slams as he was like, I like this research and I love you because, like, I needed to you to stay up for me because I like to do not stupid. I like a little post stock here, right? Like, I need support and h, so, you know, my argument is that it's a human right to be protected right now.

I could protect myself now, right? Of course I can. But i'll have to give you another example of this.

Gosh, this is a really tough one for me. I would say eight years ago. I was giving a speech, and our university to a bunch of founders and IT was me.

And another professor who I will not name, who is bigger than I am and bigger personality than I am and has a kind of rough reputation of being kind of a bully. I want on first, now, granted, on a pretty good person. And he was going on after, and I just, thank you.

I went to the site, he gets on now, I actually did a presentation on body, as that's what i'm talking about IT. I get off stage and sitting everybody else. He gets on stage and changes the presentation and shows a video of a kid being horrifically bullied, which has nothing to do with his research.

And I think what he has gone on here, and he plays a video, he's like doing that, like laughing to himself and he's like, you know, I just wanted to let let people know that was mark before he got his black built and not like, what a dick yeah I was not cool. And I felt like firstly was really interested to me as a psychologist, is that in that moment I regret to ten years old I was psychologically, all the memories of all the feelings and the bodily reactions I was like, and then know, luckily I do have a fifty black bet. Luckily have A P.

H. D. In syria. Gy, luckily have a ten years of therapy, and i've been teaching emotional intelligence for twenty five years. Like mark, fifty, got a pack. Like IT took me a lot to recover and I had to make a choice because, like i'm still intimidated by that. And IT makes me sad to even admit IT, because I not like that.

I'm at this place in my life where I still can be intimated by the bullies, but it's how I feel, and I have to just accept that. And I decided though, in that presentation was like, mark, like, you gotta say something you going to prove yourself that you can do IT. And so after he was over, you know, I wait a little while, and I just went up to him and I said, you know, I have no idea what motivates you to show that video.

But number one, IT was not cool. And number two, IT can never happen again. never.

And I can cry now thinking about IT because I was very difficult for me, even as an adult. And of course, I am right away. I don't run a away. But I, you know, I took my breath. I felt proud, you know, that I was able to handle myself, which, you know, make some strange to some people, you know, being an an adult of the psychologist, you know, who has a fifty three black.

But I have to reinforce that now to make myself feel strong but IT was such a power IT was a IT was a great moment for me one of like having the courage to face the buying um and interestingly enough, uh the guy never that he was he turned his he treated me like I was like the present of the university after that and so my point of telling that story is that like I was fifty like that old to only to attention to cultivate the skills that I needed right to be a deal with that very difficult situation. And my dream is that you know, I always, I you, I say, I tell people i'm so envious of that kind, gardiner, because i've been luck enough to be the developer of the curriculum, but I didn't live IT. And so IT talking about neuroscience, like i'm not wired.

Like that five year old is going to be wired because they are growing up in in an environment or every day they're checking in on their feelings. That reminds me of just another story was in a school in brooklin. And I mean, kids say this one schools been using our program for a decade and they wanted the kids wanted to meet me and the principle of school who's my former student um he said you can ask mark anything and it's like why do you do this and what motivate you and and I was telling these kids the story of my childhood and this one girl SHE must have been in six grade.

She's that mean it's really hard for me to understand your experience I said why she's like, i've been going to the school since i'm in kindness and I can think of a day that someone didn't ask me how I was feeling. It's powerful. You know, when you think about like her neural development, right, all the pathway is that are being built for this person or these children and thousands of schools to be learning their feelings, understanding whether you know why they're feeling the way they're feeling, to interact with all the kids and see how they are feeling and how they express their feelings and how they do with their feelings and learning strategies together in a corporately environment to cultivate and how that gets more complex with development, right? As in kindergartner, you're learning about sadness and disappointment, but then you're learning about despair and alienation and exclusion.

And that's what makes this work so interesting, is that these concepts evolve throughout our lives. Think about IT. I mean, what anger meant to me when I was five is not what I meant to me when I was ten or fifteen, or twenty five, or not fifty five.

Your description of confronting this bully, I don't even want to call them your colleague, because there's nothing I think .

is an embarrassment for the university.

More importantly, the fact that you were able to confront them is to me and I think to anybody that here's that story, the definition of courage yeah you know because it's in the moments where we feel like this big and we're collapsed on ourselves and we don't know where the resources are and we don't have somebody sitting there like coding our shoulder are saying, listen, i'm going to go talk to them or let's go talk to them that you did that for yourself you internalized the the lessons you've learned initially from your uncle yeah um I brought that forward and I think anyone hearing that story it's it's obvious to them that um that is the a great active courage and it's an inspirational one too and a reminder that for people that are being bullied as adults as well that is important to calmly but directly and firmly express like you basically gave him but no, like a really strong like, no like you would do a puppy that was like putting itself in danger or something, except in this case, it's a human being who had agency. And so he he needed a sharp. He need, he need be punished slightly.

Yeah, he needed to be educated about boundaries and about how this game of being a colleague is played.

Well, certainly not rewarded. You're write, punish. Ed is in the right word. He certainly whatever dopamine hit he got from that. I think part of the and was just did that needed be retracted, that needed to be taken away from .

yeah and I think that we should spend a minute on punishment because IT never works you know, unless is consistent, harsh and nobody wants to be punished because IT doesn't feel good and IT doesn't teach people anything right? Go to your room. What does that teach me? Teach me to go to my room and romney and get, i've been in schools that are not using our model.

You know, i'll never forget this one moment where I was in a principles office, a kid had given the teacher the finger and got thrown to the office and IT was a tuesday and um IT was tuesday before the next day was going to be a holiday break and the you IT was a today's suspension you for giving the teacher the finger but that was going to be till thursday and then friday after that they would be a weak break in the i'd litter heard the principles that let just make IT three days so enough to see this kid for ten days and i'm thinking, what is this person learning about empathy, about self regulation, about emotional awareness? They're learning nothing. They're going to be thrown out with no skills in an environment that's probably supportive.

And so I just think this has to change and IT still does happen, not as often. Think goods um i'm a prevention scientist so I I don't want to wait until everyone has an anxiety disorder and everyone's been bullied. I want to cultivate a society where people have the skills they need to navigate their emotions and you have to build healthy relationships and make sound decisions and have .

good mental help and achieve their dreams and IT access to me just now that you are effectively doing what your uncle did for you, but for millions and millions of people.

you know, I have, you know, as you know, now be the story teller. But one of the most profit moments of my career was just after I had read my book, and I was on my book tour, I mean, west, western new york and am be having a speech. And I had never spoken about my uncle in that level detail, nor my abuse, by the way, talking about courage.

I was not to forty writing this book that decided, like, people asked me, like, why you so passionate and I would say, I hate at school I was bullied, but I believe I was robbed my emotional life as a child because of the abuse and in my circumstances. And I felt I need to to share that a little bit, not the focus, but I needed to be, I need to be real, some sharing about ongoing urban e, the six great teacher from monocle on new york state. And this guy has this like, like that woman in the audience.

He had an epic. He's like, are you talking about Marvin more, the six greets or the teacher monos on new york? And like, yes, he's like, mark, you're not going to believe this, but your welcome.

Marvin n was my outcome. Marvin n like, are you kidding me? He's like, your uncle was my sixth grade teacher forty five years ago, and he's the reason why I teach.

I was born away. I was like, I was like, I was shaking so excited that I never met one of my as actual students because we worked when I was older. He was older, and so I I sensitive to, I got to finish my speech.

But can I interview you afterwards? Here's a kid. I, so I interview this guy.

I haven't untag forty five minutes. Or he remembered about a six, three social cities class. I mean, I have no memories of my social studies class.

This carve membered details of my uncles, facial expression, body language, that where he taught feelings, where he taught history, IT was on and on. But here's the kicker. So were down at this conversation, and he looks at me like, no markets.

It's really clear that your uncle had a profound influence in your life. And so I just have one question for you. For whom where you are not come arman. And that just like like i'm the professor here on the one who does the teaching, right? I do the research.

You don't ask me questions like that and IT was so I opening for me about just, you know, my life in terms of how I spend my time with my own family. And am I giving that non judgment? Am I giving that active listening? Am I showing my empathy, compassion? I am a work at all.

Know I write papers. I'm not living IT. And IT really has made a profound difference for me. You I really try hard uh, to be on morbo e and it's tough because time, right, all the factors that we talked about earlier. But gosh, you know if we only had more those in our world.

well, it's absolutely clear to me that you're extremely passionate about this mission of teaching people what emotions are and how to work with them, giving them really clear systems to do that, tools that they can do that and think it's fair to say that you answered your own question, in my opinion, if I may, that you you through your uncle Marvin to you and through the work that you do and through your public education effort, which includes your graciousness ness and coming here and sharing with us what you know, what you believe people can benefit from.

And I it's absolutely clear to me that people can so benefit from these tools. And what you put in to your book, which does include some very personal things that I must say are entirely couch tored the reader understanding and learning how they can make themselves and others in the world a Better place. It's it's really .

extraordinary sea the .

the rippling out effect um is not a sufficient way to describe IT. It's really an enormous amlie ation of the hard work you've done. And i'm just really, really in all of the fact that you ve taken hard experiences and transmuted those into so much good. And so on behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching, just want to extended enormous dead gratitude. This is truly important work, and I don't say that lightly.

I really appreciate that. Thank you.

Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with doctor mark bracket to learn more about his work and to find links to his book permission to feel which, by the way, I highly recommend, as well as other links to his laboratory and other resources, please see the links in the show. Note captions if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribed our youtube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us.

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